Texas judge rules Alex Jones must pay Sandy Hook parents full $49 million in defamation case

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A Texas district courtroom decide has dominated that Infowars host Alex Jones should pay the mother and father of a 6-year-old killed within the Sandy Hook capturing the total $49 million in damages in a defamation lawsuit, regardless of a state regulation that limits the quantity of punitive damages that may be awarded in civil fits.

In August, a jury awarded Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin $4.1 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages in opposition to Jones for spreading a conspiracy principle that the capturing was a hoax. Jones’ attorneys had been making an attempt to invoke the state’s cap to slash the quantity he owed by greater than $40 million. However in a listening to Tuesday, Travis County District Courtroom Choose Maya Guerra Gamble questioned the constitutionality of the regulation, which might restrict the quantity of punitive damages on this case to $750,000, The New York Instances reported.

“This particular person and this firm have finished one thing horrible,” Guerra Gamble mentioned within the listening to.

The regulation limiting punitive damages was handed by one of many final Democratic majorities of the Texas Legislature, in 1995, and was the results of a broader shifting sentiment in opposition to excessive jury awards in civil circumstances. A 2003 regulation required that punitive damages solely be awarded in circumstances the place the jury unanimously agrees.

“The issue that existed on the time was that there have been loads of lawsuits of questionable advantage being introduced the place large punitive damages had been being threatened,” former state Rep. Joe Nixon, who authored the 2003 regulation, informed The Texas Tribune in August, when the jury’s award within the Jones case was introduced.

Jones has misplaced a number of high-dollar lawsuits — totaling almost $1.5 billion thus far — for selling a conspiracy principle that the 2012 mass capturing in a Connecticut elementary college was staged by disaster actors with a view to justify the federal government taking away folks’s weapons. Dad and mom have mentioned these lies led to a barrage of harassment and threats within the wake of the capturing, which left 20 youngsters and 6 adults lifeless.

Jury hearings to determine damages in one other Texas case in opposition to Jones, which he misplaced, will start in March. His Austin-based media firm, Infowars, started chapter proceedings this summer season.

Legal professionals for Jones informed Reuters that the ruling went in opposition to “many years of precedent” and that they are going to enchantment it. An legal professional for Lewis and Heslin, Mark Bankston, mentioned after the listening to that the choice confirmed that Jones “can not run from accountability.”

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