The US Supreme Court has denied an appeal by radio host and conspiracy connoisseur Alex Jones to dismiss court sanctions levied in the defamation lawsuit brought by families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the Associated Press reports.
The Infowars host was fined and sanctioned by a Connecticut court for multiple outbursts in the courtroom during the trial, in which Jones was sued by an FBI agent and families of some of the 26 people, including 20 first graders, killed in the mass shooting at the Connecticut school after he claimed the incident was a fake and that the people involved were “crisis actors.”
Judge Barbara Bellis, a Connecticut judge, fined Jones for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents and for multiple outbursts in the courtroom. She also required Jones to pay some of the plaintiffs’ attorney fees. The US Supreme Court upheld the penalties without comment.
Jones later claimed that one of the plaintiff’s lawyers planted evidence in computer metadata turned over to the court showing evidence that someone had accessed child pornography on Jones’s computer.
“Judge Bellis, and the Connecticut Supreme Court, asserted frightening and standardless power over the extrajudicial statements of litigants,” Norman Pattis, Jones’ attorney, said in an email to The Associated Press. “Mr. Jones never threatened anyone; had he done so, he would have been charged with a crime. We are inching our way case-by-case toward a toothless, politically correct, First Amendment.”