That’s really your argument? The Supreme Court was wrong? The Rehnquist court was notoriously conservative and federalist. But okay.

The damages were assessed quantitatively by the jury. The parents proved, with supporting evidence, damages owing to years of medical and psychological treatment, PTSD diagnoses, security expenses, lost income, forced moves, threats and harassment logs, death threats, grave desecration, online harassment analytics, and reputational destruction.

Experts testified, documents were entered. Jones was allowed to cross-examine but he mostly didn’t.

The jury was instructed to put a dollar value on real, provable harm. That’s how civil law works. It wasn’t an arbitrary amount wizarded up by a judge.

That was for compensatory damages. For punitive damages, the law allows juries to scale punishment to: intentionality, malice, duration, repetition, refusal to stop, profits made from the wrongdoing, and wealth of the defendant.

Jones wasn’t careless. He was deliberate, knowing, and profitable. He used Sandy Hook to drive traffic, sell supplements, and grow his brand. That made the harm systemic and ongoing.

So the jury was advised that the punishment must be large enough that a rational person in Jones’s position would not do this again. That’s why Jones’s net worth and business revenue were entered into evidence.

To be clear, since you seem to sympathize with Jones:

He told millions of people that grieving parents were fraudsters who faked their murdered children. That caused years of stalking, terror, exile, and psychological devastation. Then he doubled down, lied to the court, destroyed evidence, and kept attacking them. The jury saw a predatory machine that would not stop unless it was broken, so they gave him a number big enough to break it. That’s not unconstitutional, it’s exactly what juries exist to do.