A jury hammered Oberlin College with a $44 million verdict in a libel case. New documents show why it should be overturned.
Getty
As many people know, an Ohio jury hit Oberlin College with an astonishing $44 million verdict stemming from student protests accusing Gibson’s Bakery of racism. Three African American students were caught attempting a petty crime at Gibson’s and pled guilty. Despite the guilty plea, some Oberlin students believe that Gibson’s treats African American customers differently and even racially profiles them. Gibson’s sued Oberlin and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo for libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress as a result of the student protests.
The media has piled on Oberlin and painted the school as an out of control, politically correct, bully. There is certainly reason to be sympathetic to Gibson’s but the legal basis for holding the college itself liable is thin. The media hasn’t helped. It’s been widely reported that the Dean was at the protests on a bull horn, but it isn’t clear what she was saying. It’s also been widely reported that she was handing out flyers but it isn’t clear that she was. It’s been widely reported the college excused students from class for the protests but there is a lack of clarity about that.
Meanwhile, too much of the reporting has skipped over the fact that the verdict violated the law in various ways. Even if the protests could be attributed to Oberlin itself, rather than to the students who actually participated in them, the jury repeatedly flouted the law in hitting the college with a $44 million verdict.
Ohio law has strict caps on damages. There are three kinds of damages that Gibson’s can receive. The first kind is economic damages. That means loss of profits and various out of pocket costs. The second kind is called non-economic damages. That means things like emotional pain caused by the protests. Both of these kinds of damages are referred to as compensatory damages because they are meant to compensate the plaintiffs for bad things that happened to them. The third kind of damages is punitive damages, which are meant to punish the defendant rather than compensate the plaintiff. $33 million of the award to Gibson’s is punitive damages.
Oberlin has filed a motion to reduce the damages, so the public can now see how the jury calculated the amount of the award. (The details of the award weren’t available to the public, but they can be found in the documents filed by Oberlin.) The jury found that the various plaintiffs (the bakery and two members of the Gibson’s family) were economically damaged by a bit over $4 million. The jury awarded another $7 million in non-economic damages—the emotional pain that goes with being wronged. The $4 million for economic loss plus the $7 million for emotional harm comes to a total of $11 million in compensatory damages. The jury multiplied that amount by three to come up with $33 million in punitive damages. So the whole $ 44 million dollar verdict represents the $11 million in compensatory damages plus the $33 million in punitive damages.
There a lot of problems with this. The amount of damages awarded for emotional pain far exceeds what Ohio law allows. Libel and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress are called “torts” and Ohio strictly limits non-economic damage for tort actions. The most the jury was allowed to award is between $250,000 and $350,000.
The punitive damages awarded by the jury were also wildly out of control. First of all, in Ohio punitive damages are capped at twice compensatory damages, but the jury decided to award punitive damages that are three times compensatory damages. Even more importantly, the jury awarded punitive damages that are based on uncapped compensatory damages. In other words, the jury decided that, regardless of Ohio law, the plaintiffs were entitled to millions of dollars for emotional damage and then, on top of that, multiplied all those damages (the ones for economic damages plus the ones for emotional damages) by three to get that huge punitive damages award.
The plaintiffs now argue that even if the court drastically reduces the award for emotional damages (as the law requires it to) the punitive damages should stay untouched. That makes no sense. The punitive damages are supposed to be no higher than twice compensatory damages. If the compensatory damages are too high, then obviously the punitive damages are too high as well.
In short, the jury decided that Oberlin was responsible for the student protests, which is dicey to begin with. Then, in violation of Ohio law, they gave the plaintiffs millions in damages for emotional harm. Then they multiplied all of that by three, instead of by two, which also violates Ohio state law.
This out of control verdict is a threat to colleges all over the country. There are a lot of schools with “town/gown” tensions and plenty of juries willing to sock it to colleges that are perceived as politically correct, smug, privileged, etc. (And some of Oberlin’s administrators did the college no favors by using middle school level language in various texts and emails.) Courts are supposed to temper these tensions by judicious application of the law.
There is a very good chance that this verdict will be greatly reduced or even overturned altogether. The best result would be that the Gibson family and the college to come to a fair settlement. ($5 million, for example, would cover all of the Gibson’s economic loss plus another million for their troubles.) Too many people have piled on Oberlin, seeing this as a simple morality tale about left-wing politics run amok. Ironically, good old-fashioned Ohio conservatism ushered in laws that mean the verdict is illegal. Overturning this verdict would bring us a step closer to the days when conservatives and liberals could agree on things such as the virtues of moderation.
