Alex Jones seeks recent trial after $1 billion Sandy Hook verdict

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has asked a Connecticut judge to throw out an almost $1 billion verdict against him and order a recent trial in a lawsuit by Sandy Hook families, who say they were subjected to harassment and threats from Jones’ lies concerning the 2012 Newtown school shooting.

Jones filed the requests Friday, saying Judge Barbara Bellis’ pretrial rulings resulted in an unfair trial and “a considerable miscarriage of justice.”

“Moreover, the quantity of the compensatory damages award exceeds any rational relationship to the evidence offered at trial,” Jones’ lawyers, Norm Pattis and Kevin Smith, wrote within the motion.

Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the 15 plaintiffs within the lawsuit against Jones, declined to comment on the filing Saturday, but said he and other attorneys for the Sandy Hook families can be filing a transient opposing Jones’ request.

Twenty first graders and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School died within the attack on Dec. 14, 2012.

An FBI agent who responded to the shooting and relatives of eight children and adults killed within the massacre sued Jones for defamation and infliction of emotional distress over his pushing the bogus narrative that the shooting was a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to impose more gun control.

Six jurors in Waterbury, Connecticut, ordered Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, on Oct. 12 to pay $965 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiffs and said punitive damages also ought to be awarded. Bellis has scheduled hearings for early next month to find out the quantity of the punitive damages.

In the course of the trial, victims’ relatives said in often-emotional testimony that they were threatened and harassed for years by individuals who believed the lies told on Jones’ show. Strangers showed up on the families’ homes to record them and confronted them in public. People hurled abusive comments on social media. Relatives said they received death and rape threats.

The verdicts got here after one other jury in Texas in August ordered Jones and his company to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the parents of one other slain Sandy Hook child. A 3rd trial over the hoax claims, involving two more Sandy Hook parents, is anticipated to be held near the tip of the yr in Texas.

Jones, who has acknowledged in recent times that the shooting did occur, has blasted the lawsuits and trials on his Austin, Texas-based Infowars show, calling them unfair and a violation of his free speech rights.

But he lost his right to present those defenses when the judges in Connecticut and Texas found him accountable for damages by default without trials, for what they called Jones’ repeated failures to show over some evidence including financial documents and website analytics to the Sandy Hook lawyers.

With liability already established, the trials in each states focused only on how much Jones should pay in damages.

Pattis, Jones’ lawyer, wrote within the motions filed Friday that there was a scarcity of evidence directly connecting Jones with the individuals who harassed and threatened the Sandy Hook families. Pattis said the trial resembled a “memorial service, not a trial.”

“Yes, the families on this case suffered horribly in consequence of the murder of their children,” Pattis wrote, adding that Jones didn’t send people to harass and threaten the families.

“There was no competent evidence offered at this trial that he ever did,” he wrote. “As an alternative, there was a shocking abuse of a disciplinary default and its transformation right into a series of half-truths that misled a jury and resulted in substantial injustice.”