How Ahmed Mohamed The Clock Boy Conned America

[paulpablo]

(2)  I've never said a white atheist is heroic for sueing a school,  and just to clarify I think it would be horrible if an atheist sued any tax funded organization for as much as 15 milion dollars over a school prayer. I don't think myself or anyone else on this forum has said it is heroic.

Forget the figure, it's seriously the most unimportant thing here. Neither Ahmed, his lawyers, the school district, the police, etc. have anything to do with the compensation amount. That is *entirely* up to the judge. I'm serious, the lawyers could ask for $15 billion, and the judge could decide to give Ahmed nothing, or conversely, the lawyers could ask for a tiny amount of money, and the judge could instead demand the school pay $15 million. It's entirely up to the judge, and probably a few pieces of legislation which define limits of compensation, etc.

The reason they ask for $15 million is to try and convince the judge to award the highest amount of compensation possible; that is what lawyers are paid to do. It's also because the process of suing anyone is often long and drawn out. Let's say that the judge agrees that compensation is necessary, and awards $5 million instead of the full $15 million. Neither the school district or the police will settle for that, and will likely appeal, at which point maybe another judge decides that it should be $1 million. Maybe then Ahmed's lawyers appeal that ruling, but it doesn't go in their favor and the amount is reduced again. The point is, after the legal process is exhausted, the amount of compensation actually paid out (minus the lawyers fees) is probably a fraction of the amount asked for.

(3)  I'm not saying Muhammad is stealing by suing anyone, I'm just stating a fact that the money he takes will be funded by money taken from the community, indirectly, none of the people who were responsible for his supposed trauma will be punished by the taking of 15 million dollars and if he is truely traumatized maybe the most he could ask for is the cost of therapy, not 15 million dollars.

So you are saying that if an organization violates your rights, you aren't owed any kind of compensation other than what it might cost to recover from any trauma? So effectively, the organization isn't actually punished for the original violation, just the outcome of it? That's setting a dangerous precedent right there. Rights are rights; violating them has to be punished, or they are just meaningless words.

I don't have a definite answer to that because I think it's complicated.

But I'm not saying they should just be punished just only for the outcome of the situation, even if Ahmed said he was very happy with the police actions that took place and was sorry for wasting their time there obviously should be some punishment for the police officers who made mistakes when handling this incident.  They could be fired or at least they should be forced to be retrained to do their job better.

In an organization like a police force, I don't see how taking money from the organization is a punishment, they aren't a business in competition with other businesses.  The government will ensure the money for the police is always there by forcibly taking it off the people within the population via taxes or by taking property, speeding fines and things like that.

It would seem more logical, if Ahmed's family were really concerned with the actual events that happened as opposed to being concerned with just opportunistically making money, they would ask for the individual police officers and teachers involved in the event to be fired or have disciplinary action put against them.