My friend downloaded 1400 songs from limewire, wants to know if he can still be fined if he deletes them?

Well to begin, your friend wont be fined, he'd be sued. Secondly tell your friend to disable uploads on limewire. It's virtually impossible to be caught if you're just downloading, it's the uploaders they catch, they want to stop the uploads because without uploaders there are no downloaders. Also, lets say you did receive a court summons over this, the prosecution will just have a cookie cutter argument against you since they use the same reasons against everyone else they prosecute, it's simply a scare tactic, if you have a half descent lawyer you'll get off free and clear. So tell your friend to go into his limewire settings and close all his upload slots and bring the allowed upload bandwidth to the minimum.