A Texas appeals court dramatically reduced the amount conspiracy theorist Alex Jones owes the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, cutting a nearly $50 million judgment to about $5.6 million.
The ruling Friday upheld $4.1 million in compensatory damages awarded to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse Lewis was among the 20 first graders and six educators murdered at the Connecticut school in 2012.
But the court reduced the $45.2 million in punitive damages awarded by a jury to $1.5 million, citing limits under Texas law.
Jones spent years falsely claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the grieving families were actors participating in a government plot to restrict gun rights. The parents testified that Jones’ lies resulted in years of harassment and threats from his followers.
The Texas case is only one part of the massive financial judgments against Jones stemming from his Sandy Hook lies.
A Connecticut jury separately ordered Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to families of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting. A judge later added hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages, bringing that judgment to roughly $1.4 billion.
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Jones has fought the judgments for years through appeals and bankruptcy proceedings while continuing to operate Infowars.
The Texas appeals court said state law required it to substantially reduce the punitive portion of the Heslin-Lewis award, despite rejecting other arguments Jones made challenging the verdict.
The decision means the parents who spent years fighting Jones in court will receive a fraction of what the Texas jury believed his conduct warranted.
The children killed at Sandy Hook would now largely be young adults.
Jesse Lewis would have turned 20 in June.
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