"Damages were awarded for the hospital’s decision to place the then 10-year-old girl in a room equipped with video surveillance for 48 hours and to strip her down to her shorts and training bra and photograph her without permission from her parents or a court.

There was also an award for the conduct of a hospital social worker who conducted the photography of the girl and who sometimes kissed and hugged the girl and sat her on her lap."

WTF

The people who planned all of this should be sent to jail.

Terrible case but how is $261 million dollars a valid amount for anything. How do you even get to an astronomical figure like that when even the people that caused the financial crises of 2008 got charged a fraction of that.

> Terrible case but how is $261 million dollars a valid amount for anything.

You determine how much money the defendant has and devise an amount that will actually matter to them.

>How do you even get to an astronomical figure like that when even the people that caused the financial crises of 2008 got charged a fraction of that.

Completely irrelevant.

Hmm.. this is not a company. A non profit hospital. Taking $261M from them is not hurting hospital management it is going to affect a lot of children who need the hospital and it's infrastructure

Taking money proportionally from the government, city or hospital is not incentive to change . There are no shareholders who will hold management accountable . Voters or donors cannot influence administration easily .

Punitive damages: $10M false imprisonment, $25M false imprisonment and battery, $15M to her dad

Rest of damage calculation is between five and thirty million for each charge of either false imprisonment, battery or the sexual battery (unwanted hugging and kissing), medical negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress separately for Maya, her mother and family members, and for costing the family financially.

I agree that large damages could have been calculated for some perpetrators of the financial crisis.

It's a pity that the article never mentions why they thought imprisoning the girl was a lifesaving and necessary treatment.

It sounds like it was CPS: "After a child protection investigation, a judge ordered that Maya be removed from her family and sheltered at the hospital."

The problem with CPS is that the kinds of people who want to work for them are the petty tyrants who can’t get any better job. So they have a large false positive rate because they want to feel powerful.

It's a reay high-stakes responsibility. Erring in either direction is terrible.

Now ask people to sign up for that stress and heartache, but only offer a barely liveable salary.

I've pondered a few times, what would be the correct way to configure a salary? There are of course horrific jobs with shit pay and lazy ones paid way to much but I believe even supply and demand market mechanisms aren't doing what we want them to.

Perhaps to ensure they are all real to put a $500 tax on each job offer and charge $20 for seeking a job, count them, sort by occupation, increase minimum salary where demand is much larger than supply, lower it where supply exceeds demand. Perhaps compensate randomly chosen people to review what a job is like and rate if they think it should be paid more or less.

Something quite similar could be done for the length of the work day and the number of days per week/year. Max 11 hours of driving could be insufficient if there are many job offers. If there are few hours it can be adjusted to say 10 hours and 30 min along with a 5% raise.

So is jury duty on a criminal trial. Yet there is a broad consensus in western society as to which way the system should err in this case.

If a child really is in danger and they miss it, it tends to make national news. I do understand why it is the way it is, even if parents get screwed occasionally.

Read this case, this was not a false positive. This kid did need to be removed from the mom

Because they thought that her series of previous medical treatments were her parents committing medical abuse which put her life in danger (Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy); that this was not merely a reasonable conclusion at the time but the correct conclusion in retrospect appears to have been the hospital's argument at trial, even.

(Sibling comment says it was CPS, which is procedurally true, but the CPS action was grounded in the hospital's judgement and report.)