Trial set to begin on Jones’ liability
Damages will go to Sandy Hook parents
A trial to determine how much right-wing media personality Alex Jones will pay in defamation damages to the parents of a boy killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre begins in Austin this week, with opening arguments set for Tuesday.
It’s the first of three such trials for families who won defamation lawsuits against Jones last year after he called the murders of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax” and “completely fake with actors.”
There will be no rearguing of the case against Jones, which was decided last year when state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Travis County issued default judgments against him for abusing the pretrial process and found him liable for damages.
Instead, the jury will hear evidence about the emotional distress suffered by Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis and will determine how much Jones should pay in compensatory and punitive damages.
Jones, who lives in Austin, is one of the most influential antigovernment conspiracy theorists in the nation, best known for his radio show and website Infowars. He has been sued in Texas and Connecticut by families of the children who were killed.
Late last week, Jones posted a rebuttal in which he complained about the limits placed on evidence at his jury trial in Texas, calling it “an unprecedented assault on due process and the rule of law.”
It is not clear whether Jones himself will take the witness stand. The parents’ attorneys are not saying whether they will ask him to testify in person or whether they’ll show the jury excerpts from Jones’ deposition. If the past is any indication, Jones may provide his
own commentary about the trial on his Infowars platform.
At stake in the trial for the parents is hope that a damages verdict will flood light into dark corners where fiction persists that the worst crime in Connecticut history never happened.
During jury selection Monday in Austin, scores of prospective jurors said they could not be fair and unbiased if they were tasked with calculating how much money Jones should pay the Lewis family after he defamed them.
The family’s attorney, Wesley Ball, weeded out some jurors by asking if they were philosophically opposed to jury awards as high as $100 million and by asking if they would require a standard of proof higher than “the preponderance of evidence” in reaching a conclusion.
Bankruptcies dismissed
Jones was gifted over $2 million worth of bitcoin from an anonymous donor in April as he faced financial difficulty because of the lawsuits filed by the Sandy Hook families.
Guerra Gamble postponed an April trial for Heslin and Lewis, whose son Jesse was a first-grader at the school, because three entities owned by Jones filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy about a week before the trial would have begun. The bankruptcy filings also held up a Connecticut lawsuit filed by Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent.
The Sandy Hook families in Texas, and later in Connecticut, requested a federal judge dismiss the filings, arguing they were in “bad faith.”
Although Jones’ representatives say he has suffered financially because of the Sandy Hook lawsuits, spending $10 million on legal fees and losing $20 million in sales, Jones himself did not file for bankruptcy, nor did his parent company, Free Speech Systems.
After about a month, the three entities owned by Jones agreed to dismiss their bankruptcy case, clearing the way for the Texas trial to resume. The Sandy Hook families in Connecticut also agreed to drop the three entities from the defamation lawsuit, allowing the Connecticut trial to go ahead.
Plaintiffs in Texas
In Texas, there are two sets of plaintiffs. The Lewis family is the first to go to trial. The second set is the parents of slain Sandy Hook first-grader Noah Pozner.
In Connecticut, the plaintiffs are an FBI agent who responded to the 2012 massacre of the 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook and eight families who lost loved ones in the massacre.
At each of the three trials, a jury will determine how much money Jones owes the plaintiffs. Judges in Texas and Connecticut already ruled in default judgments that Jones defamed the families.
The Texas trial is expected to last two weeks.
The Connecticut trial is scheduled to start with jury selection next Tuesday, during the second week of the Texas trial.
In the Sandy Hook massacre, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother at their home in Newtown, then went to the school and killed 26 more people. Twenty were children ages 6 and 7, and the other six were adult staff members. The shooting was the deadliest at an elementary school in U.S. history.