(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the appeal from conservative commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been ordered to pay $1.4 billion in damages to the families of victims of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The court did not explain the denial.
A Connecticut jury in 2022 awarded $965 million in damages to 15 plaintiffs defamed by Jones when the Infowars host called the 2012 mass shooting, in which 20 young children and six adults were killed, a hoax. Later, a judge added an additional $473 million in punitive damages.
Attorneys for Jones contended the sum is an “amount that can never be paid.”
“The result is a financial death penalty by fiat imposed on a media defendant whose broadcasts reach millions,” their petition to the court read.
The Supreme Court also rejected several other hot-button cases in its order list released Tuesday.
The justices declined to hear an appeal from a group of Colorado parents seeking to sue their public school district over a policy that allegedly allows children to pursue gender transitions, and be supported by school staff, without any parental notification.
In a statement, Justice Samuel Alito concurred with the decision, saying the case was an imperfect “vehicle” for examining the core legal question; but he urged the court to look for other opportunities to take up the “troubling — and tragic — allegations in the case.”
In another case, the court rejected an appeal from a group of unnamed minors and their families who had sued the app Grindr for marketing to children, recommending them to nearby adults for sex and allegedly facilitating trafficking.
Plus, it declined to take up a closely-watched California case challenging Food and Drug Administration regulations governing the use of stem cells to promote healing through new forms of treatment as well as a conservative group’s challenge to Department of Homeland Security’s authority to issue temporary work permits to immigrants who entered the country unlawfully without express consent from Congress.
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