By Jack Queen
(Reuters) – A Connecticut jury began its third day of deliberations on Wednesday to decide how much conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting for falsely claiming that the massacre was a hoax.
Closing arguments concluded last Thursday in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where a gunman killed 20 schoolchildren and six staff members in the town of Newtown.
Jones claimed for years that the massacre was staged by the government as part of a plot to take away Americans’ guns.
In August, another jury found Jones and his company must pay $49.3 million to Sandy Hook parents in a similar case in Austin, Texas, where his Infowars website is based.
Lawyers for the families of eight Sandy Hook victims in the Connecticut case said Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems LLC, cashed in for years on lies about the shooting, which drove traffic to his Infowars website and sales of products there.
Jones, who has since acknowledged the shooting occurred, also testified, railed against his “liberal” critics and refused to apologize to the families.
Jones was not permitted to dispute his liability for damages in the case after Judge Barbara Bellis issued a default judgment last year because he repeatedly failed to comply with court orders.
(Reporting by Jack Queen; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Will Dunham)
