Judge suspends Alex Jones lawyer Norm Pattis for six months over disclosure of confidential medical, psychiatric records

In a sharply critical decision, a Superior Court judge has suspended Infowars broadcaster Alex Jones’ lawyer Norm Pattis from practicing law for six months for the “inexcusable” disclosure of thousands of protected medical and psychiatric records obtained from relatives of Sandy Hook shooting victims.

Judge Barbara Bellis, who presided over the contentious Connecticut case that ended last year in a $1.4 billion verdict, said Pattis’ failure to protect highly sensitive records entrusted to his office caused them to be “carelessly passed around from one unauthorized person to another” in violation of multiple court orders.

Bellis said that Pattis’ “abject failure to safeguard the plaintiff’s sensitive records” violated a half dozen rules of professional conduct, including those having to do with misconduct and competence.

What’s more, she said his misconduct in general was worsened by his decision to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and refuse to answer questions about the improper disclosure during a hearing she convened in court last year.

“We cannot expect our system of justice or our attorneys to be perfect but we can expect fundamental fairness and decency,” Bellis wrote in her 49-page decision filed late Thursday. “There was no fairness or decency in the treatment of the plaintiff’s most sensitive and personal information, and no excuse for (Pattis’) conduct.”

Pattis was not immediately available for comment.

The records in question, about 4,000 pages of medical and mental health records that were among about 390,000 pages of other records provided to Pattis’ office by relatives of Sandy Hook victims, were never disclosed publicly. Rather, Pattis set in motion a series of exchanges last summer that distributed the records between his law office in Connecticut and four others in Texas — all of which were involved in some fashion in lawsuits by Sandy Hook relatives against Jones.

The sharing of the records among the law firms, which should have been subject to a succession of protective orders issued by Bellis beginning in 2019, was revealed in Texas last summer when a lawyer representing Sandy Hook parents suing Jones there made the dramatic announcement in court that he had improperly been provided with protected records. The Texas lawyer said he destroyed the records.

Inquiries following the dramatic announcement revealed that the transfer of the records began in Pattis’ office at the request of a Texas lawyer and continued — apparently without regard to a concern raised by one lawyer that such sharing of the records could be in violation of Bellis protective orders.