New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Alex Jones wants new trial in Connecticut
NEWTOWN — Alex Jones wants a new trial in Connecticut where a jury ordered him to pay $965 million in damages to eight families who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook School shooting and an FBI agent who responded to the scene.
“In short, (Jones and his parent company Free Speech Systems) contend that verdict is exorbitant and a result of passion and prejudice,” wrote Jones’ New Haven attorney Norm Pattis in a motion to the court on Friday. “Additionally, the (families’) failure to offer any evidentiary standard by which the jury could calculate damages rendered the verdict a species of wild speculation unsupported by law and resulted in a verdict that denies (Jones and FSS) due process of law.”
The $965 million jury verdict, which made international headlines and surprised legal observers by its size, capped a four-week trial in Waterbury’s state Superior Court where jurors saw family members moved to tears on the stand and Jones himself engaged with the families’ lead attorney in a ‘vicious’ outburst, saying, “I legitimately thought (the Sandy Hook shooting) might have been staged and I stand by that, and I don’t apologize for it.”
“And don’t apologize, Mr. Jones,” the families’ attorney Chris Mattei responded in a raised voice, as the argument with Jones escalated.
Concerning that exchange, Pattis faulted Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis in his motion for a new trial for not intervening as he was yelling, “Objection, judge. Objection!”
“[T]he court wholly lost control of the proceedings, to the detriment of Mr. Jones, who was accused of targeting the plaintiffs, excoriated for not apologizing to them, and otherwise abused in a manner that, had this been a criminal trial, would certainly have resulted in a mistrial,” Pattis wrote.
Attorneys for the Sandy Hook families on Friday said they had no comment about Jones’ push for a retrial. The families’ attorneys had yet to reply to Jones’ motion by the end of the business day on Friday. Pattis’ retrial motion is 30 pages.
“Mr. Jones, Free Speech Systems, and the world, which watched this trial by way of livestream, had every reason to expect something more than a memorial service for sympathetic victims of a horrible crime and its aftermath,” Pattis wrote to Bellis in
his motion to order a new trial. “The cumulative weight of the errors by the trial court transformed these proceedings into something far less than a fair trial.”
Jones, who called the shooting of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors,” was defaulted for abusing the pretrial process and found liable for defamation in Connecticut and in two other unrelated but similar cases involving Sandy Hook parents in Texas.
The Jones verdict in Connecticut followed an August verdict in Texas where a jury ordered Jones to pay $49.2 million to parents of a slain Sandy Hook boy he defamed. A third trial in Texas is expected to decide how much Jones has to pay parents of a second slain Sandy Hook boy.
Pattis argued on Friday that Jones was limited in the defense he could present stemming from the default ruling, resulting in a jury verdict that was “exorbitant,” “unjust,” “against the weight of evidence,” “exceeding any rational relationship to the evidence,” and “a substantial miscarriage of justice.”
“The cumulative weight of the court’s ruling on pre-trial motions and its evidentiary rulings resulted in a complete abdication of the trial court’s role in assuring a fair trial,” Pattis argued. “Jurors were presented with half-truths and led to believe that facts had been established where no such thing had occurred; a disciplinary default for discovery non-compliance permitted the plaintiffs’ counsel to mislead the jury.”