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

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A Texas district court docket judge has dominated that Infowars host Alex Jones must pay the parents of a 6-year-old killed within the Sandy Hook taking pictures the full $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 towards Jones for spreading a conspiracy principle that the taking pictures was a hoax. Jones’ attorneys had been trying to invoke the state’s cap to slash the quantity he owed by greater than $40 million. But in a listening to Tuesday, Travis County District Court Judge 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 Times reported.

“This person and this company have done something horrible,” Guerra Gamble mentioned within the listening to.

The law limiting punitive damages was handed by one of many final Democratic majorities of the Texas Legislature, in 1995, and was the result of a broader shifting sentiment towards 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 problem that existed at the time was that there were a lot of lawsuits of questionable merit being brought where huge punitive damages were 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 multiple high-dollar lawsuits — totaling almost $1.5 billion to this point — for selling a conspiracy principle that the 2012 mass taking pictures in a Connecticut elementary college was staged by disaster actors with a purpose to justify the federal government taking away folks’s weapons. Parents have mentioned these lies led to a barrage of harassment and threats within the wake of the taking pictures, which left 20 kids and 6 adults useless.

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

Lawyers for Jones told Reuters that the ruling went towards “decades of precedent” and that they’ll enchantment it. An lawyer for Lewis and Heslin, Mark Bankston, mentioned after the listening to that the choice confirmed that Jones “cannot run from accountability.”

Disclosure: The New York Times has been a monetary supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Financial supporters play no function within the Tribune’s journalism. Find a whole list of them here.