How crazy is the legal system?:Sleepwalker gets 10m & Drum sues Anglo.

2 recent examples just baffle me:

1) Sleepwalker accused of entering a colleagues room three times in the buff gets €10million.

2) David Drumm is actually able to sue Anglo Irish Bank.

In the case of (2), if we lived a couple of hundred years back, he would have been hung from the nearest tower. And rightly so.

with the first one your ire should be directed at the morons on the jury who decided that €10m was a fair amount for someone who we would never have heard of until he decided to take the action himself! the legal system itself is not to blame.

It was a press release, not an article, that was the subject of the libel case, how can a reputation be maligned when the article didn't appear in public?

How come the jury decided the payout ?
Juries decide on guilt or innocence, and the judge decides the sentence(or compensation) ?

Or has something changed ?

Never mind, the appeal will reduce the payout to a million at most. probably more like 250k + costs.

From the Irish Times report:

"THE HIGHEST libel award in the history of the State has been made to Donal Kinsella, who sued his former employer Kenmare Resources, claiming he was defamed by a press release it sent out.
Following just over three hours of deliberation yesterday, the jury of seven men and four women awarded him €9 million in compensatory damages and €1 million in aggravated damages. The press release concerned an incident in Mozambique, where they were attending a board meeting, when Mr Kinsella sleep-walked naked into the bedroom of the company secretary, Deirdre Corcoran. The release said he was being asked to resign from the company’s audit committee and referred to an “incident”.

The fact that the Judge only safeguarded €500k of the award tells it's own tale.

The Indo describes John Kierans, editor of the Irish Daily Mail where the offending press release was issued, as a "lifelong friend of Mr Kinsella"

The jury do decide on the award. I sat on a jury of 2 ladies and the rest man.
The lady making the claim had small scars on her shoulder and a few on her legs following a road accident.
She was awarded €15,000 for her suffering and expenses. The jury started off with one man saying she needed €100,000, a majority agreed. When I and two other men asked how they arrived at that figure they said that the papers had information about similar amounts every day.
We then started to access how we might decide on the award and following some sensible discussions we arrived at the figure awarded. We learned after the court that the insurance company had offered €25,000.
We as a jury were ignorant of the law and its workings. We were given no guidelines as to how to arrive at a figure.
One thing that swayed the decision was that the lady made much of her marks on her shoulder and legs and insisted in court that the jury see them. We saw little evidence of marks.
I feel strongly some guidance should be given to juries. I felt totally inadequate to decide on a figure.