According to attorney Shan Wu, the swift E. Jean Carroll jury decision to award her $83.3 million in damages after being defamed by Donald Trump is both good news and bad news for the former president.
In his column for the Daily Beast, Wu contends that by rushing the awarding of damages out on Friday, the former president was given a break because it could easily have been much more if they had waited until after the weekend.
On the other hand, he asserted that the $65 million punitive damages award, by virtue of it being a lesser amount, makes it virtually impossible to appeal.
As he wrote, "In assessing whether punitive damages are excessive, the rough rule of thumb is that they need to be between four times the compensatory and no more than ten times based on a line of United States Supreme Court cases. Here the $65 million falls safely within that ratio being roughly four times the amount of the compensatory damages. The test is really one of 'reasonableness '—meaning the punitive damages must be reasonably related to the amount of compensatory damages and these easily meet that requirement."
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Adding that punitive damages of $100 million would still have been reasonable, he wrote, "One factor that may have caused the damages to be lower was having the jury start deliberations Friday afternoon. As a prosecutor, I never liked juries to start deliberations on a Friday afternoon because they might be motivated to reach a hasty decision in order to start their weekend and avoid having to come back on Monday. That’s nothing against the jury. It’s just human nature. Starting them deliberating on Monday morning could have allowed them more time to have a healthy debate over a larger damages figure."
As for why the jury came down so hard on Trump, Wu said it all came down to the lawyers.
'There was little doubt as to which side had the more effective lawyering with Trump’s lead attorney Alina Habba consistently making basic evidentiary mistakes worthy of comparison to the lawyering in My Cousin Vinny during the trial and being admonished by the judge even in the midst of her closing argument," he added.
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