St. Louis judge awards $32.4 million in Mike Huckabee-voiced robocall lawsuit

By Robert Patrick St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sep 7, 2017

ST. LOUIS • A federal judge here Thursday awarded $32.4 million to a St. Louis County couple and 3.2 million others who improperly received robocalls in 2012.

U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber could have awarded $1.6 billion, or $500 per call, under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, but wrote “the amount of damages prescribed by the statute are so severe and oppressive as to be wholly disproportionate to the offense and obviously unreasonable.”

Webber wrote in his ruling that the $32 million penalty, or $10 per call, “reflects the severity of the offense” and one of the purposes of the TCPA — to have a “deterrent effect and to account for unquantifiable losses including the invasions of privacy, unwanted interruptions and disruptions at home, and the wasted time spent answering unwanted solicitation calls or unwanted voice messages.”

The calls went out to promote the “Last Ounce of Courage,” a movie about “faith, family and freedom” that opened Sept. 14, 2012. More than 3.2 million of the calls violated the act by going to people who had not consented to the calls, Webber has ruled.

Ron and Dorit Golan, of St. Louis County, received two calls that went to voicemail. They are on the Do Not Call registry. They sued in 2012 and came to represent the class of call recipients.

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