Texas Appeals Court Slashes Alex Jones’ $50 Million Sandy Hook Judgment by More Than $43 Million

A Texas appeals court on Friday delivered a significant victory to Infowars founder Alex Jones, drastically reducing the massive $50 million judgment against him in one of the Sandy Hook defamation cases.

The Texas Third Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis to exceed the state’s strict statutory cap on punitive (exemplary) damages.

The court ordered the punitive damages reduced from roughly $45.2 million down to $1.5 million, $750,000 for each parent, in line with Texas law, according to Reuters.

Jones still faces the roughly $4.1 million in compensatory damages the jury awarded, plus interest and fees, bringing the total Texas judgment to around $5.5–6 million.

More than $43 million was wiped from the judgment. That is a massive cut from the original figure.

In the 2022 trial, a jury found Jones liable and awarded the parents more than $50 million. Texas law generally caps non-economic punitive damages at $750,000 per plaintiff.

The trial judge allowed the parents’ lawyers to amend their claims after the liability verdict but before the final damages ruling, arguing that the trauma somehow counted as a “disability” that would let them blow past the cap.

The appeals court rejected that maneuver. The judges found the trial court improperly permitted a post-verdict amendment on grounds that were never pleaded or decided by the jury.

Jones wasted no time celebrating the ruling on his show Friday, calling it a “gigantic victory for the First Amendment.” He vowed to keep fighting and take the remaining damages to the Texas Supreme Court.

“I got lawyers who are good constitutional lawyers and they are not backing down,” Jones said.

For years Jones argued these lawsuits were pure lawfare designed to bankrupt him and silence a major independent voice. The left and its media allies cheered the original crushing judgments as justice. Now a Texas court has confirmed the original punitive award ignored the state’s own damage caps.

This ruling does not touch the separate Connecticut judgment that still hangs over Jones at roughly $1.4 billion. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Jones’ appeal of that case last year. Jones and Free Speech Systems remain in bankruptcy proceedings, and efforts to liquidate Infowars assets continue.

In May, The Gateway Pundit reported that Jones was forced to shut down Infowars’ longtime Austin studio after 27 years amid a court-ordered receivership and an attempted takeover of the platform by The Onion’s parent company.

Jones has repeatedly described the litigation as an assault on independent media and his First Amendment rights.

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