A Texas appeals court on Friday sharply reduced the $49 million award that a jury ordered the broadcaster Alex Jones to pay the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim after he spread false conspiracy theories about the attack.
The Third Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas, set the amount instead at about $6 million, leaving in place the compensatory damages but slashing the punitive damages in line with the state’s cap on such awards. The court said that the parents’ claims did not warrant lifting the cap, and that the trial judge improperly allowed lawyers for the parents to submit an amended petition supporting the larger judgment after the verdict.
Mr. Jones hailed the ruling as a victory in the deluge of cases over the mass shooting that aim to dismantle his Austin-based Infowars broadcast and supplements empire. But it does not affect more than $1 billion he owes the families of other victims who sued in Connecticut and received a verdict that has withstood multiple appeals.
None of the families have collected on the judgments, as they wrangle with Mr. Jones in bankruptcy court, and their chances of collecting anything near what juries have awarded them are negligible.
The ruling comes four years after a jury in Austin ordered Mr. Jones to pay Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin $4 million in compensatory damages and $45 million in punitive damages. Their 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, died in the attack.
Mr. Jones for years peddled lies on his Infowars broadcast that the Dec. 14, 2012, mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax perpetrated by the government and the victims’ families. Jesse Lewis was one of 20 first graders killed in the shooting, along with six educators. During the 2022 damages trial, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin testified that Mr. Jones’s conspiracy theories had subjected them to years of online and in-person abuse, and that they feared daily for their safety.
Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin, along with Lenny Pozner and Veronique de la Rosa, the parents of the Sandy Hook victim Noah Pozner, were the first to sue Mr. Jones for defamation, filing their cases in Texas in early 2018. They were followed several weeks later by the families of eight other victims, who sued Mr. Jones in Connecticut. A jury awarded those families a total of $1.4 billion.
Mr. Jones celebrated the ruling on Friday, saying he intended to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court to further reduce the award. “This is a MASSIVE VICTORY for the 1st Amendment!” he said on social media.
But Mark Bankston, a lawyer for Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin, dismissed the ruling’s significance.
“The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share,” Mr. Bankston said in a statement on social media. “Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law.”
Texas law caps punitive damages at two times economic damages plus $750,000 per plaintiff. At a hearing in late 2022, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the District Court in Travis County, Texas, questioned the constitutionality of the state cap, and called the nearly $50 million verdict “a rare case” in which the emotional damage inflicted on Ms. Lewis and Mr. Heslin was so severe that “I believe they have no recourse.”
During that hearing, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, Chris Martin, argued that while the Texas punitive damages cap had been exceeded in a handful of cases, those suits involved more severe emotional injury than Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis had proved in court. On Friday, the appeals court said that the Texas trial court improperly allowed lawyers for the parents to submit amended filings after the jury’s verdict, to strengthen the case for a “cap-busting” judgment.
“We conclude that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing the post-verdict amendment of the petition and, consequently, allowing the judgment to exceed the statutory cap on exemplary damages on grounds not pleaded or found by the jury,” the appeals ruling said.
The jury’s $50 million award in 2022 came after emotional testimony by Ms. Lewis, the only Sandy Hook family member to confront Mr. Jones directly in court.
“Truth — truth is so vital to our world,” Ms. Lewis told Mr. Jones from the witness stand. “Truth is what we base our reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society.”
Despite Mr. Jones’s questioning of the events at Sandy Hook, “you know that’s not true,” she said, staring at him while he fidgeted at the defense table. “When you say those things, there’s a fringe of society that believe you that are actually dangerous.”
