A Texas appeals court reduced the defamation judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to approximately $5.5 million from $50 million, citing state punitive damages caps.
The three-judge panel of the Texas Court of Appeals issued the ruling Friday, lowering punitive damages from $45.2 million to $1.5 million total for plaintiffs Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis, who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Texas law limits punitive damages to $750,000 per plaintiff, and the court found the original award exceeded that cap.
The appeals court also ruled that Heslin and Lewis should not have been permitted to amend their claims to argue that trauma over their son’s death qualified as a disability exempting them from the punitive damages cap. The court determined the jury had not made the necessary factual findings to support that amendment.
Jones still faces a $1.4 billion judgment from a Connecticut court in a related defamation case, which remains unaffected by the Texas ruling. His attorney, Andino Reynal, stated that punitive damages are capped at $750,000 per person under Texas law, a limit that applied at the time of the verdict and remains in effect.
Jones previously filed for personal bankruptcy after the lawsuits, though a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled he remains liable for most of the defamation verdicts. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Jones’ appeal regarding punitive damages in the Connecticut case earlier this year.
The Sandy Hook shooting occurred in 2012, and Jones had falsely claimed it was a staged event involving actors. Heslin and Lewis testified that they endured years of harassment from Jones’ followers who believed their claims about their son’s death were fabricated.
