Government

Alex Jones Gets The Death Penalty Sanctions

Because discovery orders are not a hoax.

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Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his media company Infowars suffered a massive setback in court yesterday as Texas Judge Maya Guerra Gamble issued default judgment against him in three cases brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.

Jones, who claimed in a deposition that “I talk four hours a day, and I can’t remember what I talked about sometimes a week ago,” accused the parents of being crisis actors who participated in a government-funded hoax to fake the death of their own children.

And if Jones’s memory is foggy, Media Matters is here to help jog it.

After hearing that “Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view manufactured” event, Jones’s deranged supporters harassed the parents for years, forcing some of them to live in hiding. Nine families of children killed in the massacre have filed defamation suits against Jones.

As first reported by HuffPost, the court imposed what’s known in Texas as “death penalty sanctions,” issuing a default judgment in favor of the parents and obviating the need for a trial after three years in which Jones and his legal team failed to comply with orders to produce discovery materials.

“We still don’t have the most basic information about this case,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Bankston argued last month.

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“Now we’re talking about having to find people three years out … to see who was involved in this case, who might still have documents. The quality of the evidence and of people’s memories all degrades.”

The Austin American Statesman described the contentious August 31 hearing, in which Jones’s latest lawyer Brad Reeves (he’s had seven in this case already) pointed to 6,000 pages of documents produced just days before the hearing as evidence of compliance with the court’s discovery orders.

“It’s 6,000 pages of mostly useless documents,” Bankston shot back, calling the doc dump an “11th-hour fig leaf over (their) naked contempt.”

And it appears that Judge Gamble agreed.

“An escalating series of judicial admonishments, monetary penalties, and non-dispositive sanctions have all been ineffective at deterring the abuse,” she wrote this week, adding, “Furthermore, in considering whether lesser remedies would be effective, this Court has also considered Defendants’ general bad faith approach to litigation, Mr. Jones’ public threats, and Mr. Jones’ professed belief that these proceedings are ‘show trials.’”

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Citing Jones’s “consistent pattern of discovery abuse throughout similar cases pending before this Court” and his “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules,” Judge Gamble will now allow the plaintiffs to proceed directly to a jury to compute how much they are owed in damages.

Jones and his counsel immediately denounced the decision — although not via social media, since Jones is banned from more or less every platform on earth, including Pinterest, LinkedIn, and MailChimp.

On his own site, Jones urged supporters to consider all the documents he did hand over, and not dwell on whatever was so damning that he was willing to defy a court order to cough it up.

The trial court’s entry of a default in these cases is stunning. It takes no account of the tens of thousands of documents produced by the defendants, the hours spent sitting for depositions and the various sworn statements filed in these cases.

What’s more, these cases are currently before the United States Supreme Court where we have asked for review of the Texas Supreme Court’s denial of motions to dismiss.

We are distressed by what we regard as a blatant abuse of discretion by the trial court. We are determined to see that these cases are heard on the merits.

Nothing less than the fundamental right to speak freely is at stake in these cases. It is not overstatement to say the first amendment was crucified today.”

Is there a First Amendment right to say that the parents of dead children are engaged in an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the government in order to gut the Second Amendment? Guess we’ll find out soon.

Alex Jones Just Lost 2 Sandy Hook Cases [HuffPo]
Alex Jones Loses 3rd Sandy Hook Lawsuit [HuffPo]
Alex Jones must pay damages to Sandy Hook families after calling shooting a ‘giant hoax,’ judge rules [WaPo]
Sandy Hook parents ask Texas judge to sanction InfoWars founder Alex Jones in defamation suits [Austin American Statesman]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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