A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut a hoax.

The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.

The unanimous opinion issued by the Texas third court of appeals found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show sufficient evidence that harassment enflamed by Jones’s hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages.

पिछले साल, अमेरिकी सर्वोच्च न्यायालय ने बड़े पुरस्कार को लेकर जोन्स की अपील पर सुनवाई करने से इनकार कर दिया था, लेकिन अपने फैसले का कोई कारण नहीं बताया था।

पुरस्कारों को पूरा करने के जोन्स के प्रयास कानूनी दांव-पेंच के अधीन रहे हैं। 2024 में, जोन्स ने एक याचिका दायर की और खुद को और अपनी कंपनी को दिवालियापन में डाल दिया, यह स्वीकार करते हुए कि उसे सैंडी हुक परिवारों को भुगतान करना होगा। दिवालियेपन की कानूनी कार्यवाही जारी है।

Jones has fought to retain control of Infowars, the influential rightwing business and platform he founded in the late 1990s that he used to broadcast conspiracy theories – and enrich himself with millions of dollars by marketing herbal supplements in the process.

Earlier this year, the satirical website the Onion announced plans to take control of Infowars and turn it into a parody of itself under a leasing agreement provisionally approved by a Texas court. हालाँकि, कानूनी अपीलों के कारण पूरा हुआ सौदा अधर में लटका हुआ है।

Under a proposed deal with court administrators, Infowars would be leased by Global Tetrahedron, a Chicago-based company that owns the Onion, for $81,000 a month – money that would go toward paying the judgments against Jones.

Comedian Tim Heidecker, Infowars’s creative director, said “it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity.”

Heslin and Lewis’s six-year-old son, Jesse, was among 20 young children and six educators killed in the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time Jones was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.

ब्रेकिंग न्यूज यूएस के लिए साइन अप करें

सबसे महत्वपूर्ण समाचार मिलते ही प्राप्त करें

न्यूज़लेटर प्रमोशन के बाद

Jones, who portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his first amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was “100% real” and that he was wrong to have lied about it. But Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology wouldn’t suffice and called on them to make Jones pay for the years of suffering he had put them and other Sandy Hook families through.

Jones’s trial attorney, Andino Reynal, had said immediately after the verdict that Jones would appeal against the damages amount, and predicted it would be reduced to $1.5m.

एसोसिएटेड प्रेस ने रिपोर्टिंग में योगदान दिया