Michmutters

Jones was not in court as the jury read the unanimous verdict.

The damages phase of the trial that ended Friday marks the first time Jones, an influential purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, has faced financial repercussions in court for the outlandish lies he told via his Infowars broadcast about the shooting. Since the early days that followed the 2012 shooting that killed 26 people, including 20 young children, Jones said on his program that “no one died” at Sandy Hook and that the attack was a ruse “staged” by gun-control advocates to manufacture anti-gun sentiment.

Alex Jones must pay $4.1 million to Sandy Hook parents, jury rules

In the case brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, the damages hint at what Jones could face in the months ahead in his additional Sandy Hook defamation cases in Texas and Connecticut.

It remains to be seen how much of the punitive damages the parents will ultimately receive as Texas laws cap such awards per plaintiff at twice the compensatory award plus $750,000, according to Carl Tobias, a tort law expert at the University of Richmond School of Law.

That calculation means the plaintiffs could see less than a quarter of the total award determined by the jury, and that amount could be even further reduced if the compensatory damages are for non-economic reasons, such as emotional distress rather than lost wages, Tobias said .

Punitive damages are meant to sting, Tobias said, so juries tend to award sums proportionate to the defendant’s finances despite many states contradictorily having caps on such awards.

“The theory is that the damages are supposed to be significant enough to determine the person who did this — and other members of society,” he said.

Jurors on Friday heard additional testimony about Jones’s finances before they began deliberations on what sum would both punish Jones for his falsehoods and determine him from making them again.

In court Friday, Bernard Pettingill, Jr., a forensic economist and former economics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, testified he estimated the combined net worth of Jones and his business entities to be between $135 million and $270 million.

“You cannot separate Alex Jones from the companies. He is the companies,” Pettingill said.

The testimony is in stark contrast to Jones’s public statements that he is financially bereft; his defense team originally asked the jury to award the plaintiffs $1 for each claim after contending Jones lost millions of dollars and followers when he was kicked off social media platforms like YouTube and Spotify.

Free Speech Systems, the parent company for the Infowars website, filed for bankruptcy during the trial, though Pettingill and other witnesses said it was impossible to fully scrutinize Jones’s finances since he failed to provide documents to the court.

Jones’s refusal to comply with court orders around documents and other evidence resulted in District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Tex., issuing default judgments against Jones last September, which made him liable for all damages.

But in a dramatic courtroom moment Wednesday, it was revealed that Jones’s legal team inadvertently sent the contents of his cellphone to a lawyer representing the parents. The apparent blunder led the plaintiff’s attorney Mark Bankston to accuse Jones of lying under oath when he testified that he did not have any text messages related to the Sandy Hook massacre.

During the jury’s deliberations, Jones’s lawyers requested a mistrial and demanded that Bankston delete the phone data they had handed over, which the judge denied.

Jones’s lawyers have said the legal battle against him is an attack on First Amendment rights, while the parents’ legal team argued that his rhetoric was defamatory and not protected.

Sandy Hook lawyers say Alex Jones’s attorneys accidentally gave them his phone contents

Heslin and Lewis testified during the nearly two-week defamation phase of the case that Jones’s relentless false claims that their son never died and that they were “crisis actors” created a “living hell” for them.

While on the stand Tuesday, Heslin said as he grieved his son, he also contended with death threats and abuse from those who embraced Jones’s rhetoric.

“I can’t even describe the last nine and a half years, the living hell that I and others have had to endure because of the recklessness and negligence of Alex Jones,” Heslin told the jury.

In his closing arguments Friday, Bankston said jurors are tasked with punishing and deterring Jones with their verdict and implored them to use their vote to “stop Alex Jones.”

“Truly, you have the ability today to stop this man from ever doing this again: from continuing to tear the fabric of our society apart for the great monetary gain that he has received thus far,” Bankston said.

“Speech is free,” he added. “Lies, you pay for.”

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.

Analysts were quick to frame the result as a setback for the anti-abortion movement, but activists and experts say it also amounts to a rejection of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which had shelled out massive sums of money in support of the amendment’s passage. The vote may hint, too, at a mounting backlash against the church’s involvement in the nation’s abortion debate — not least among Catholics themselves.

Kansans resoundingly reject amendment aimed at restricting abortion rights

In the wake of the vote, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, who publicly supported the amendment’s passage, issued a statement Wednesday lamenting its failure.

“We were not able to overcome the millions spent by the abortion industry to mislead Kansans about the amendment, nor the overwhelming bias of the secular press whose failure to report clearly on the true nature of the amendment served to advance the cause of the abortion industry. ,” Naumann wrote.

Naumann’s archdiocese and other Catholic organizations also spent millions, however, representing the single largest donor base for the pro-amendment umbrella group known as the “Value Them Both” campaign.

According to financial disclosures and media reports, the Kansas City Archdiocese spent roughly $2.45 million on the effort this year, with the Catholic dioceses of Wichita and Salina together spending an additional $600,000 or more. Some individual Catholic parishes across the state chipped in, as did the Kansas Catholic Conference, an advocacy group tied to the state’s bishops, which reportedly spent $100,000. Separately, the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote raised around $500,000 for the pro-amendment Do Right PAC, according to the news outlet Flatland.

Kansas nuns oppose state abortion amendment, challenging archbishop

It remains to be seen which side raised or spent more money, although opponents of the amendment also enjoyed major donations from liberal groups such as NARAL Pro-Choice America and the American Civil Liberties Union. But these mostly secular groups didn’t shy away from faith: In one advertisement broadcast to Kansans, a woman spoke about her opposition to the amendment from the perspective of a cradle Catholic.

“Growing up Catholic, we didn’t talk about abortion,” the woman says. “But now it’s on the ballot, and we can no longer ignore it.”

According to Natalia Imperatori-Lee, chair of the religious studies department at Manhattan College, the ad probably better represents the average Catholic’s views than the campaigns funded by bishops. The church officially decries abortion, but US Catholics, generally supportive of legal abortion, have grown more liberal on the issue over time: According to a recent PRRI poll, the percentage of White Catholics who believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases jumped from 53 percent in October 2010 to 64 percent by June of this year. The shift among Hispanic Catholics was even more dramatic, from 51 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in June.

“The bishops have been so focused on the idol of abortion legislation that they have failed to step back and see the complication of criminalizing abortion and what that means — especially for vulnerable, non-White, non-wealthy communities,” Imperatori-Lee said . “If this is what the bishops are going to do, if this was their plan for a ‘post-gnaws‘ world, then Catholics are going to be very disappointed.”

Chuck Weber, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference, defended his group’s involvement with the Value Them Both campaign.

“I do not apologize one bit for our advocacy,” he said in an interview.

Pope Francis says ‘door is open’ to eventual retirement as he slows pace

Weber lamented the heightened tensions triggered by the state’s abortion debate — abortion rights demonstrators were threatened with arrest, and a Catholic church in Overland Park was defaced — but pointed out that bishops have lobbied for issues other than abortion in the past. The conference, he said, was among those who pushed state lawmakers this year to expand Medicaid coverage for new moms from two months to 12 months. Weber also suggested that bishops would fund campaigns around similar issues if they were put up for a vote, as in the amendment referendum.

Even so, Weber acknowledged that efforts to convey his group’s broader agenda to everyday Catholics have fallen short.

“I need to do a better job of letting people know that the abortion question is not really the primary point of our advocacy at the state capitol or in Washington, DC,” he said.

One organization that financially skipped the Kansas amendment battle was Catholics for Choice, which advocates for abortion access. The group did not spend money in Kansas in part because, according to leader Jamie Manson, it didn’t need to.

“The vote in Kansas yesterday shows us the power of pro-choice people of faith when up against the power, money, and influence of the Catholic hierarchy,” Manson said in a statement.

She added, “I am looking forward to more David vs. Goliath victories ahead.”

Misleading Kansas abortion texts linked to Republican-aligned firm

The underdog spirit in the Kansas fight was embodied by two Catholic nuns who penned an anti-amendment letter, published in the lead-up to the vote, that amounted to an act of defiance against local bishops.

“A church sign said, ‘Jesus trusted women. We do too,’” the nuns’ letter read. The sisters went on to bemoan the harm caused by restrictive abortion bans passed in other states and noted that supporters of the amendment primarily focused resources on banning abortion, rather than legislation that would assist mothers who bring children to term, such as “healthcare, parental leave, Medicaid and other support for poor women.”

Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and former Kansas governor who served as secretary of health and human services in the Obama administration, lauded the nuns’ letter, calling the sisters “courageous.” Whether or not it had a broad impact, Sebelius said, it reminded her of when nuns spoke out in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which countered the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to the bill and is credited with paving the way for its final passage.

With this week’s vote, “I have no doubt at all that the nuns’ statement in Kansas made a difference to women who follow what the church has been saying and what they had been promoting — and listened to the nuns instead,” Sebelius said.

The Kansas vote suggests that the bishops, having won a long-awaited victory at the Supreme Court in the overturning of Roe v. Wademay now be fighting uphill battles in many states, with uneven support from a rank-and-file who would rather see them invest church money in other places.

“That money could do a lot of good — diapers and formula,” Imperatori-Lee said.

— Religion News Service