By Dietrich Knauth
NEW YORK, Aug 21 (Reuters) – Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones won an appeal in one family’s defamation lawsuit over his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting was a hoax, reducing the judgment against him from $50 million to about $5.5 million.
Jones, who filed for bankruptcy after being sued by parents of children slain in the shooting, must still pay $1.4 billion in related judgments from a Connecticut court.
In the Texas case, a jury awarded over $50 million to plaintiffs Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis. Heslin and Lewis said they suffered years of harassment and abuse at the hands of Jones’ followers, who falsely believed they lied about their 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis’ death.
Texas law typically caps punitive damages, which made up $45.2 million of the verdict, at $750,000 per plaintiff. A three-judge panel of the Texas Court of Appeals ruled Friday that the trial court erred by exceeding the cap, and it ordered the punitive damages reduced to $1.5 million.
The trial court had allowed Heslin and Lewis’ lawyers to amend their claims after they won a judgment on Jones’ liability but before the ruling on damages. The change allowed the parents to successfully argue that the trauma over their son’s death counted as a disability that would exempt them from the punitive damages cap.
The appeals court ruled Friday that the parents should not have been allowed to amend their claims to include the disability argument, because that argument required factual findings that the jury did not make in the case.
Jones’ attorney Andino Reynal said he was not surprised by the ruling and that Texas law on punitive damages is very clear.
“Punitive damages are capped at $750,000 per person,” Reynal said. “That was the law then and it remains the law now.”
Attorneys for Heslin and Lewis did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Jones claimed for years that the 2012 killing of 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged with actors as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. He has since acknowledged the shooting occurred.
Jones has also tried to challenge the punitive damages in the Connecticut case, but the state’s court upheld most of those damages, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take Jones’ appeal.
Some of Jones’ assets were liquidated during his personal bankruptcy, but a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled that Jones remains liable for most of the defamation verdicts.
The parody news site the Onion has sought to acquire some of Jones’ intellectual property in bankruptcy, and it began posting parody Infowars-branded videos in July after an earlier failed attempt to acquire the Infowars name in a disputed bankruptcy sale.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Blake Brittain and Lisa Shumaker)
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