Alex Jones Wants to Take Sandy Hook Fight to SCOTUS

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has asked the US Supreme Court to hear his appeal of the $1.4 billion judgment a Connecticut jury and judge issued against him for calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax staged by crisis actors. The Infowars host is arguing that the judge was wrong to find him liable for defamation and infliction of emotional distress without holding a trial on the merits of allegations lodged by relatives of victims of the shooting, which killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, per the AP.

Judge Barbara Bellis, frustrated at what she called Jones' repeated failure to abide by court rulings and to turn over certain evidence to the Sandy Hook families, issued a rare default ruling against Jones and his company in late 2021 as a penalty. That meant she found him liable without a trial on the facts and convened a jury to only determine what damages he owed. A six-person jury in Waterbury issued a $964 million verdict in October 2022 in favor of the plaintiffs—an FBI agent who responded to the shooting and relatives of eight children and adults who were killed.

Bellis later tacked on another $473 million in punitive damages against Jones and Free Speech Systems, Infowars' parent company based in Austin, Texas. During the trial to determine damages, relatives of the shooting victims testified that people whom they called followers of Jones subjected them to death and rape threats, in-person harassment, and abusive comments on social media. Jones argues there was never any proof presented that linked him to those actions.

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Jones filed his request to the Supreme Court on Friday, and it was released by the court on Tuesday. His lawyers insist in the petition that state courts can't determine liability based only on sanctions such as default rulings. They say that constitutional law and Supreme Court precedent require public figures such as the Sandy Hook families to prove their defamation claims against journalists such as Jones. They also say that the Connecticut judge imposed the default ruling on Jones based on "trivial" reasons, and that Jones had substantially complied with the court's orders—an assertion the Sandy Hook families' lawyers deny. More here.