A Texas appeals court on Friday tore a hole in one of the biggest defamation verdicts ever levied against Infowars host Alex Jones, cutting a $50 million Sandy Hook judgment down to roughly $6 million after ruling a trial judge let the case blow past the state's legal ceiling on punitive damages.

The Texas Third Court of Appeals unanimously found that Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble abused her discretion when she allowed Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis to collect nearly $45.2 million in punitive damages, far above the $750,000-per-plaintiff cap Texas law imposes absent proof of intentional physical harm. The panel ordered that figure slashed to $1.5 million total — $750,000 apiece for Heslin and Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was among the 20 children killed in the 2012 massacre. Jones still owes the roughly $4.1 million in compensatory damages a jury awarded the couple in 2022 for the anguish caused by his years of insisting on his broadcasts that the shooting was staged, according to PBS NewsHour.

A fraction of what's owed

Even with the cut, Jones is nowhere close to off the hook. He is separately liable for roughly $1.25 billion awarded to a group of Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent in a Connecticut courtroom, a judgment untouched by Friday's ruling, and Free Speech Systems, Infowars' parent company, remains tangled in bankruptcy proceedings, according to CNN. Jones has made no payments toward any of the judgments while his lawyers continue to appeal.

"I got lawyers who are good constitutional lawyers and they are not backing down," Jones said of his plan to keep fighting the remaining judgments.

Mark Bankston, the attorney who represented Heslin and Lewis at trial, dismissed the reduction as beside the point given the scale of what Jones still owes across all the Sandy Hook cases, calling Friday's ruling "irrelevant" in remarks carried by The Associated Press. Jones, for his part, cast the outcome as a First Amendment victory and said he intends to keep pressing his case to the Texas Supreme Court.

The Texas verdict was one of several defamation judgments against Jones stemming from his years-long insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was a "hoax" staged by crisis actors. Juries in Texas and Connecticut found Jones liable by default after he repeatedly failed to comply with evidence-disclosure orders in the cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined last year to hear his appeal of the underlying defamation findings, according to Bloomberg Law.

What happens next depends largely on the Texas Supreme Court, where Jones' attorneys say they will ask justices to take up the punitive-damages question, and on the bankruptcy court overseeing Free Speech Systems, which is deciding how — and whether — Jones' remaining assets, including the Infowars brand itself, will be liquidated to pay the families.