A Texas appeals court on Friday delivered a significant victory to Infowars founder Alex Jones, drastically reducing the massive $50 million judgment against him in one of the Sandy Hook defamation cases.
The Texas Third Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis to exceed the state’s strict statutory cap on punitive (exemplary) damages.
The court ordered the punitive damages reduced from roughly $45.2 million down to $1.5 million, $750,000 for each parent, in line with Texas law, according to Reuters.
Jones still faces the roughly $4.1 million in compensatory damages the jury awarded, plus interest and fees, bringing the total Texas judgment to around $5.5–6 million.
More than $43 million was wiped from the judgment. That is a massive cut from the original figure.
In the 2022 trial, a jury found Jones liable and awarded the parents more than $50 million. Texas law generally caps non-economic punitive damages at $750,000 per plaintiff.
The trial judge allowed the parents’ lawyers to amend their claims after the liability verdict but before the final damages ruling, arguing that the trauma somehow counted as a “disability” that would let them blow past the cap.
Hellbound and Down 