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    Alex Jones lawyer’s license is suspended for releasing sensitive records

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    Alex Jones lawyer’s license is suspended for releasing sensitive recordsNorman Pattis cannot practice in Connecticut after releasing medical records of Sandy Hook families during Infowars host’s trial A judge has suspended the license of a lawyer who was representing Alex Jones when the attorney appeared to have accidentally released sensitive court records surrounding the defamation lawsuits after the Sandy Hook school killings that the notorious conspiracy theorist lost.Alex Jones owes $1.5bn and declared bankruptcy. So how is Infowars still running?Read moreIn a court order that she issued on Thursday, Connecticut judge Barbara Bellis suspended New Haven-based Norman Pattis from practicing law in the state for six months.Bellis, who decried Pattis’s actions as “inexcusable” and an “abject failure”, wrote: “We cannot expect our system of justice or our attorneys to be perfect, but we can expect fundamental fairness and decency.”Pattis had sent out medical records pertaining to some of the families of those killed during the Sandy Hook attack, along with other information that was considered confidential, Bellis’s ruling showed.Despite Pattis’s claim that the release of the records was an “inadvertent mistake”, Bellis “flatly rejects” the claim. In her court order, she wrote that “there was no fairness or decency” in how Pattis handled “sensitive and personal information” at the center of a lawsuit in which the families of Sandy Hook victims accused Jones of using the shooting that killed 26 at the school to build his audience and make millions of dollars through his false claims that the tragedy was a hoax aimed at forcing the US to accept gun reform.“At a basic level, attorneys must competently and appropriately handle the discovery of sensitive materials in civil cases. Otherwise, our civil system, in which discovery of sensitive information is customary and routine, would simply collapse,” Bellis continued.An assistant of another attorney for Jones, in a related case in Texas, mistakenly sent their legal adversaries’ Jones’s text messages that contradicted sworn statements from Jones claiming he had nothing on his phone related to the deadly school shooting.Rulings in the lawsuits against Jones in Texas, where he resides, and Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook attack occurred, have resulted in Jones being ordered to pay more than $1bn in damages after he was found to have unduly inflicted anguish on victims’ families, among other harm.In a statement to the Associated Press, Pattis said he plans to challenge the order with a higher court, writing: “We’re looking forward to appellate review.”Pattis is currently representing a member of the rightwing extremist group Proud Boys in Washington DC who has been criminally charged with seditious conspiracy surrounding the violent January 6 riots that took place at the US Capitol exactly two years ago Friday.TopicsNewtown shootingUS justice systemUS politicsLaw (US)Defamation lawnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden says US should have ‘societal guilt’ 10 years after Sandy Hook

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      Joe Biden says US should have ‘societal guilt’ 10 years after Sandy HookPresident commemorates 2012 shooting, in which 20 children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Connecticut Joe Biden said on Wednesday the US should have “societal guilt” over taking too long to address gun violence and the curse of school shootings.Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy on gun safety takes a new turn 10 years onRead moreThe president made the remark in a statement 10 years after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, in which 20 young children and six adults were killed in Newtown, Connecticut, on 14 December 2012.Biden was then vice-president to Barack Obama.On Wednesday, he said: “Our nation watched as the unthinkable happened. Twenty young children with their whole lives ahead of them. Six educators who gave their lives protecting their students. And countless survivors who still carry the wounds of that day.“We should have societal guilt for taking too long to deal with this problem. We have a moral obligation to pass and enforce laws that can prevent these things from happening again. We owe it to the courageous, young survivors and to the families who lost part of their soul 10 years ago to turn their pain into purpose.”Biden heralded progress made on gun policy reform this year – after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in May.In June, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the first major gun safety bill in nearly 30 years. Among other initiatives, the legislation expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and invested in mental health and violence intervention programs.But Biden acknowledged that more must be done, reiterating his commitment to signing an assault weapons ban, although that proposal has stalled in the Senate.“Enough is enough. Our obligation is clear,” Biden said. “We must eliminate these weapons that have no purpose other than to kill people in large numbers. It is within our power to do this – for the sake of not only the lives of the innocents lost, but for the survivors who still hope.”The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit, defines a mass shooting as any shooting in which four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter. On Tuesday, the same source said there had been 628 such shootings in the US this year. The FBI defines mass murder as an incident with four or more people killed. The Gun Violence Archive records 36 mass murders this year.In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, working with Democrats in Congress, Biden and Obama launched a push for meaningful gun reform. It failed.In his own statement on Wednesday, Obama said 14 December 2012 was “the single darkest day of my presidency. The news from Sandy Hook elementary was devastating, a visceral blow, and like so many others, I felt not just sorrow but anger at a world that could allow such things to happen.”Obama also said: “I’ve sensed that slowly, steadily, the tide is turning; that real change is possible. And I feel that way in no small part because of the families of Sandy Hook elementary.”At the Capitol in Washington, the House oversight committee staged a hearing on violence against LGBTQ+ Americans which included testimony from survivors of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs last month, in which five people were killed.In the Senate, the two Democrats from Connecticut, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, delivered remarks to mark a decade since Sandy Hook.Both senators recounted visceral memories from 10 years ago. Both were in the Newtown firehouse as parents learned their children would not come home.“I wish I could tell you that the memory of that day has dimmed,” Blumenthal said. “I wish I could tell you that the knife-like sorrow and pain have subsided, but the fact is it is still raw and real for so many of us in Connecticut.“My mind goes back to the horrors of this day, and I think that reliving it reminds us of the need to honor those 26 lives with action.”Blumenthal and Murphy praised gun safety activists who have spent 10 years working for reform, crediting them with helping make the BSCA a reality this year. Murphy said the law was already proving its impact, citing examples of blocked gun purchases to individuals considered to be at risk of committing violence.“What we have done isn’t enough,” Murphy said in his speech. “It doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to do more, but it is saving lives.”Murphy has become a champion of gun reform, telling the Guardian earlier this month the movement “is more powerful than the gun lobby” and adding: “I think we are now poised to rack up victory after victory for gun safety.”In a statement released before his speech on Wednesday, the senator said the US had become “a different place” in the decade since Sandy Hook.10 years since Sandy Hook – what’s changed? Politics Weekly America special – podcastRead more“Mostly today, I will think of all the greatness and beauty that was robbed from this world, when these promising lives were cut short.“Mostly, I will spend my day today sending every good thought I have to the family members who lost loved ones that day, to the survivors of the shooting, to the first responders, and to the community of Newtown that will never be the same.“But also today, I will be thankful. I will be thankful for all the good that has resulted from this horror. Those parents, and the community of Newtown, have chosen to rise from that tragedy and build dozens of efforts that have changed lives for the better all over our nation.“Many in Newtown have helped build the modern anti-gun violence movement, that finally this summer achieved the first federal gun safety bill in almost 30 years.”TopicsNewtown shootingJoe BidenUS gun controlUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Senator Chris Murphy: ‘victory after victory’ is coming for US gun control

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      Senator Chris Murphy: ‘victory after victory’ is coming for US gun controlA decade after the Sandy Hook shooting, the Democrat believes the US is ready to embrace change around firearms Senator Chris Murphy believes that the tide is finally turning in favor of the gun safety movement in America. 10 years since Sandy Hook – what’s changed? Politics Weekly America special – podcastRead moreEven as Murphy acknowledges that more work is needed to address gun violence, the prominent Connecticut Democrat maintains that a growing backlash to mass shootings has brought the country to the brink of a sea change – 10 years after the devastating Sandy Hook school shooting in his home state.“We’ve built a movement in this country in the last 10 years that today, I would argue, is more powerful than the gun lobby,” Murphy said in an interview for a special episode of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast.“I think we are now poised to rack up victory after victory for gun safety,” he said.That reinvigorated movement emerged in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting and grew as subsequent atrocities sparked new activist groups and campaigns. Murphy still vividly remembers where he was when he got the news on 14 December 2012, that a shooter had attacked Sandy Hook elementary school. He was on a train platform in Bridgeport, Connecticut, preparing to take his family to New York to see the holiday decorations, when his chief of staff gave him the first fragments of news.“At first I thought it was a workplace shooting,” Murphy said. “But then, shortly before the train arrived, [we] got the news that there were children involved.”Democrats issue fresh calls for assault weapons ban after shooting tragediesRead moreMurphy soon learned that 20 young children and six staff had been killed at the school.The tragedy stunned the country but spurred millions of Americans to demand changes to gun laws, with Murphy playing a central role in the efforts.Since Sandy Hook, each time another mass shooting occurred, Murphy has taken to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to act.“What are we doing? Why are you here if not to solve a problem as existential as this?” Murphy demanded just this May, after a gunman killed 19 children and two educators at a school in Uvalde, Texas, and a racism-driven mass shooting occurred in Buffalo, New York, the same month.“I‘m here on this floor to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues: find a path forward here,” Murphy said.Murphy’s pleas for action and growing public outrage and activism finally produced results, as the Senate this year passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). Joe Biden signed the bill in June, marking the first time in nearly 30 years that the US approved a new major federal gun law. The BSCA expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers and allocated funding for mental health and crisis intervention programs, among other initiatives.A number of policies demanded by gun safety advocates, including an assault weapons ban, did not make it into the BSCA. But Murphy and his allies point to the legislation, along with widespread public support for proposals like universal background checks, to argue that America is finally ready to make significant changes.The road ahead is still difficult. In just the few weeks since Murphy spoke to the Guardian, several more mass shootings occurred, from Colorado to Virginia.Murphy is the first to admit that it will take some time for the new federal law and other state policies to take effect, and more action is needed.“We haven’t seen the murder rates or the pace of mass shootings reduce. [But] once these laws start to get passed and put into place, I hope that we’re going to see some real returns,” Murphy said.Gun safety advocates insist that more regulations can result in fewer gun deaths. One study by the group Everytown for Gun Safety non-profit found a direct correlation between states with weaker gun laws and states with the highest levels of deaths caused by guns, including homicides, suicides and accidental killings.Divisions run deep in Uvalde after school shooting: ‘If you’re not trying you’re complicit’Read moreEven so, Republican lawmakers remain largely opposed to reforming federal gun policy. Fifteen Republican senators voted for the BSCA, ensuring enough support to overcome a filibuster. But more than two-thirds of Senate Republicans still opposed it. In the House, 193 Republicans voted against the BSCA, while just 14 of them joined Democrats in supporting it.Republicans’ broad opposition will make it extremely difficult to enact additional gun laws in the near future, especially after the party took control of the House in November’s midterm elections.Murphy concedes that Senate Democrats do not currently have the votes to pass an assault weapons ban.Still, he sees encouraging signs that more Republicans are willing to defy the National Rifle Association (NRA) on gun-related votes. For years, the NRA appeared to have an unshakable hold on the party, using its influence to block any gun bill. “Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a gun safety bill to pass the Senate with NRA opposition,” Murphy said. “Now, a whole bunch of Republican senators know that the NRA does not even represent gun owners any longer. And thus, they’re not paying as much attention.”But even as the NRA’s influence on the public and the GOP has waned, the anti-gun violence movement has encountered new hurdles. Earlier this year, the conservative-leaning US supreme Court struck down a New York law that strictly regulated carrying firearms outside the home, jeopardizing similar state policies across the country.The gun death rate also hit a 30-year high last year, as research suggests that a growing number of Americans are carrying firearms on a daily basis. And as more states allow residents to openly carry, guns are becoming a common fixture at rightwing political protests.Murphy is hopeful, however. If the 10 years between 2012 and 2022 were defined by many disappointing losses for the movement, Murphy predicts more positive change ahead.“I think you will see steady progress,” he said. “It won’t be everything that I want. We won’t get a ban on assault weapons overnight, but we’ll make regular progress. And that, I think, is what will define the next decade.”TopicsUS gun controlUS school shootingsNewtown shootingPodcastsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Second Sandy Hook defamation trial for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones begins

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      Second Sandy Hook defamation trial for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones beginsConnecticut jury hears arguments in trial to decide how much Jones should pay victims of school shooting he said was hoax A Connecticut jury began hearing arguments Tuesday in a trial to decide how much money the US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones should pay relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting for spreading a lie that the massacre was a hoax.The trial is being held in Waterbury, less than 20 miles from Newtown, where a man shot 26 children and teachers dead in 2012.More than a dozen family members, including parents of some victims, filed into the courtroom to listen to the opening statements and first day of evidence.It is the second such trial in just a few weeks for Jones, who was ordered by a Texas jury last month to pay nearly $50m to the parents of one of the children who was killed.A jury of three men and three women – along with several alternates – will decide how much the conspiracy theorist should pay relatives of eight victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school massacre. Judge Barbara Bellis found Jones liable without a trial last year after he failed to turn over documents to the families’ lawyers.Damaging Alex Jones texts mistakenly sent to Sandy Hook family’s lawyersRead moreOn Tuesday, she sanctioned Jones for failing to turn over analytic data related to his website and the popularity of his show. She told his lawyers that because of that failure, they will not be allowed to argue he didn’t profit from his Sandy Hook remarks.Jones did not attend the opening of the trial Tuesday. He said on his show Monday that he would be traveling to Connecticut next week.The trial is expected to last about a month and feature testimony from both Jones and the families.Bellis instructed the jury that Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems, have already been found liable for damages to the plaintiffs for calling the shooting a hoax on multiple media platforms and saying that no one died.The Sandy Hook families and former FBI agent William Aldenberg say they have been confronted and harassed for years by people who believed Jones’s false claim that the shooting was staged by crisis actors as part of a plot to empower the government to confiscate people’s guns.Some say strangers have videotaped them and their surviving children. They have also endured death threats and been subjected to abusive comments on social media. And some families have moved out of Newtown to avoid harassment. They accuse Jones of causing them emotional and psychological harm.Jones, whose Infowars web show and brand are based in Austin, Texas, has been banned from YouTube, Facebook and Spotify for violating hate-speech policies.He now says he believes the shooting was real. At the Texas trial, he testified that he realizes what he said was irresponsible and is now sorry for hurting people’s feelings.He continues, however, to insist that his comments were protected free speech. He views the lawsuits as efforts to silence him and put him out of business.Jones’s lawyers say he intends to pursue an appeal of the judgment against him in Texas. Jones also will face a third trial back in Texas involving the parents of another slain child.TopicsUS newsUS politicsConnecticutNewtown shootingReuse this content More

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      Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ordered to pay $4.1m over false Sandy Hook claims

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      Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones ordered to pay $4.1m over false Sandy Hook claimsFar-right Infowars owner faced defamation trial for repeatedly saying the school shooting was a hoax The jury in Alex Jones’s defamation trial on Thursday ordered the far-right conspiracy theorist to pay $4.1m in damages over his repeated claims that the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.Jurors in Austin, Texas, gave their verdict after deliberating about one hour Wednesday and seven hours Thursday at the end of a nine-days-long trial which saw Jones apologize and concede that the 2012 massacre at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was “100% real”. The verdict levied against Jones was far below the $150m or more that the plaintiffs have requested that jurors award them.In a separate phase Friday, jurors are to determine whether Jones owes any so-called punitive damages in addition to the penalty doled out Thursday.Thursday’s verdict follows a case set in motion by the parents of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old boy killed during the mass shooting. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis sued Jones for defamation and inflicting emotional stress, and Jones lost by default because he failed to provide any documents in response to the plaintiffs’ lawsuit.That set up a trial whose sole purpose was to determine how much money Jones owed Jesse Lewis’ parents in compensation.Heslin and Scarlett Lewis took the witness stand during the trial that started with jury selection on 25 July and detailed the mental suffering, death threats and harassment they weathered from fringe conservatives after Jones went on the rightwing conspiratorial outlet Infowars and his other media platforms to trumpet lies that the 20 children and six adults murdered in the 2012 Connecticut school massacre never actually died.Instead, Jones claimed for years, the victims and their loved ones were “crisis actors” carrying out an elaborate ruse to force gun control.Jesse Lewis’s parents said they would need much more than an apology to be made whole and pleaded for jurors to hold Jones to account after they argued that he made it impossible for the couple to heal from their child’s killing.Jones’ falsehoods about the Sandy Hook murders form part of a larger body of misinformation and theories for which he has had to apologize – including his touting of the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy that falsely claimed a Washington DC pizzeria was home to a child sex-abuse ring. That myth, consumed by Jones’ millions of followers, prompted a man to go there with a high-powered rifle and fire shots inside in 2016.Prior to the trial, Jones sought to financially shield his media company, Free Speech Systems, which houses Infowars. Free Speech Systems recently filed for federal bankruptcy protection, prompting Sandy Hook families to file a separate lawsuit alleging that the company is using shell entities to protect Jones’s and his family’s millions.Jones’s attorney, Andino Reynal, tried to persuade jurors that it was unreasonable for them to expect that his client could foresee the abuse that Heslin and Scarlett Lewis would ultimately endure.Reynal asked jurors to limit his client’s damages to a single dollar, despite evidence during the trial that Infowars earned more than $800,000 daily some days. Jones, meanwhile, portrayed the case as an assault on the free speech rights guaranteed to him under the US constitution’s first amendment.Nonetheless, in an exchange with Reynal while on the witness stand, Jones acknowledged his positions on the Sandy Hook killings were reckless lies.“I’ve met the parents,” Jones said during the trial. “It’s 100% real.”For their part, the plaintiffs’ legal team subjected Jones to a withering cross-examination. In one of the trial’s most memorable episodes, the plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Bankston revealed to Jones that his legal team had “messed up” and provided “every text message” Jones had written in the past two years.Those messages included texts that contradicted claims Jones had made under oath in a prior deposition that he had nothing on his phone pertaining to the Sandy Hook massacre. Bankston said he notified Jones’ attorneys of the apparent error, but the defense never took steps to label the communications as “privileged,” which could’ve kept them out of court.Jones grumbled that Bankston had gotten his “Perry Mason moment” at his expense, alluding to the TV attorney who would win his cases by getting those he was questioning to dramatically confess to wrongdoing on the witness stand. Bankston punctuated the back-and-forth in front of the presiding judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, by asking Jones if he knew the definition of perjury – the crime of lying under oath.Jones did, he said, but he maintained that he never tried to hide anything on his phone, which explained how his attorneys had anything to send over inadvertently in the first place.Bankston on Thursday said the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol had requested that he provide the panel with the texts from Jones, a prominent supporter of former president Donald Trump.A pro-Trump mob carried out the Capitol attack, and the panel apparently wants to see what communications the ousted president’s team may have had with Jones.Bankston said he intended to comply with the request unless a judge ordered he do otherwise.A similar trial to the one in Austin looms for Jones in Connecticut. Other Sandy Hook parents are pursuing that case, which they won by default last year after Jones refused to produce any documents they demanded.TopicsUS politicsNewtown shootingTexasnewsReuse this content More

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      House January 6 panel asks lawyer for Alex Jones’s accidentally leaked texts

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      House January 6 panel asks lawyer for Alex Jones’s accidentally leaked textsTwo years of messages were inadvertently sent by Infowars host’s attorney to lawyer for Sandy Hook victim’s family The House January 6 committee has asked the attorney for a family suing Alex Jones for defamation to turn over up to two years’ worth of text messages from the far-right conspiracy theorist’s phone that he inadvertently received from the defense ahead of the trial.The request from the select committee – and another from federal law enforcement – was confirmed in an Austin, Texas, courtroom on Thursday by Mark Bankston, the lawyer for the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which Jones has falsely claimed was a hoax.Damaging Alex Jones texts mistakenly sent to Sandy Hook family’s lawyersRead moreNotably, Bankston said he had identified texts between Jones and Roger Stone, a far-right political operative and adviser to former president Donald Trump thought to be connected to the Capitol attack. He also said he intended to comply with the requests unless a court order instructed him not to.The inadvertent transfer of the texts to Bankston, as well as his readiness to turn them over, could mark an extraordinary stroke of luck for the January 6 panel after Jones invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination in a deposition earlier in the committee’s investigation.Bankston has said in court that Jones’s texts cover a roughly two-year period dating back to 2019, which if true would include his communications from the weeks after the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden and leading up to the Capitol attack the defeated president’s supporters carried out in early 2021.But the Infowars host disputed that the texts to which Bankston has referred would contain anything of interest to the January 6 committee, saying on his show on Thursday that they actually covered a six-month period from 2019 to early 2020.The texts are potentially significant because Jones has claimed that on 3 January 2020 he was asked by the Trump White House and the Secret Service to lead a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol three days later. Just such an action by Trump supporters on 6 January disrupted the congressional certification of Biden’s presidential victory. The texts could shed light on the extent – if any – of that coordination.Jones’s claim that he was asked asked to lead that march is striking because the panel has heard that Trump later told an adviser he was unaware about such plans, according to a source familiar with the matter.Details about that supposed request from the Trump White House have been scarce. The committee has struggled to verify the Infowars host’s claims through records from the Secret Service after agents’ texts from January 6 were unlawfully erased.A committee spokesperson declined to comment on Jones’s texts.The confirmation from Bankston on Thursday that he was prepared to turn over the text messages was the latest twist in a bizarre saga that could have far-reaching consequences for Jones, particularly as the justice department steps up its criminal investigation into January 6.Bankston revealed he was in possession of the texts a day earlier, when he told Jones – while he was on the witness stand – that his legal team had “messed up” and provided “an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message” from the past two years.Those messages included texts that contradicted claims made under oath that Jones had nothing on his phone pertaining to the Sandy Hook shooting.Bankston said he immediately alerted Jones’s attorneys to the apparent error but they never took steps to keep the communications out of court by labeling them as privileged.Jones’s attorney, Andino Reynal, requested a mistrial on Thursday, over the purportedly accidental leak. The attorney argued that he feared the text message leak was introduced in court simply to create more press coverage, the Associated Press earlier reported.The emergency motion from Reynal sought the return and destruction of the documents, saying the defence had told Bankston to disregard the link to the files with the text messages, which also included messages from Robert Barnes, Jones’s other lawyer with ties to Stone.But the trial judge, Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis county, denied the motion.Reynal also asked Guerra Gamble to block the release of materials on Jones’s phone to anyone, including the January 6 committee. Guerra Gamble said she would let Reynal indicate what he wants to keep confidential, and then she would review that request, adding that she wasn’t sure she could block a subpoena, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper.Jurors in the defamation case brought against Jones by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis – the father and mother of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting – began deliberations late on Wednesday afternoon.They resumed on Thursday, the ninth day of a trial which saw Jones apologize and admit that the 2012 shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, was “100% real”.Jones previously spent years claiming that the 20 children and six adults murdered at Sandy Hook were not killed and instead – along with their grieving loved ones – were “crisis actors” carrying out an elaborate ruse to force gun control reform.Heslin and Lewis sued Jones for defamation and inflicting emotional stress, saying they suffered mental distress, death threats and harassment. They have demanded at least $150m, saying an apology would not be enough.Jones lost on the merits of the case by default, because he failed to provide any documents in response to the lawsuit. The jury is deciding how much he owes Lewis and Heslin in compensation. In a later phase, it will determine whether he should pay punitive damages.TopicsUS newsUS politicsUS Capitol attackNewtown shootingnewsReuse this content More

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      Sandy Hook defamation jury told of Alex Jones’s ‘massive campaign of lies’

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      Sandy Hook defamation jury told of Alex Jones’s ‘massive campaign of lies’Infowars founder ‘attacked the parents of murdered children’ by telling audience shooting in which 26 died was a hoax, court hears Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones repeatedly “lied and attacked the parents of murdered children” when he told his Infowars audience that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was a hoax, an attorney for one of the victim’s parents told a Texas jury on Tuesday at the outset of a trial to determine how much Jones must pay for defaming them.Jones created a “massive campaign of lies” and recruited “wild extremists from the fringes of the internet … who were as cruel as Mr Jones wanted them to be” to the families of the 20 first-graders and six educators who were killed in the 2012 attack on the school in Newtown, Connecticut, attorney Mark Bankston said during his opening statement as Jones looked on and occasionally shook his head.Jones tapped into the explosive popularity of Sandy Hook conspiracy stories that became an “obsession” for the website, even years after the shooting, said Bankston, who played video clips of Jones claiming on his program that the shooting was a hoax and “the whole thing was completely fake”.“It just didn’t happen,” Jones said in the clips.Anticipating what Jones’s defense would be, Bankston told the jury, “This has nothing to do with the constitution. Defamation is not protected by freedom of speech … Speech is free, but lies you have to pay for.”He said his clients, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose six-year-old son Jesse was killed in the attack, will ask for $150m for emotional distress and reputational damage, and more money in punitive damages.During his opening address, Jones’s lawyer Andino Reynal called Jones one of the “most polarizing figures in this nation”, who made statements about Sandy Hook “that we don’t dispute were wrong”.But he said Jones has already been punished for those statements when he was kicked off of Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and Twitter for violating their hate speech policies.Jones has “already been cancelled” and lost millions of dollars, said Reynal, who called on the jury to limit the damages to $1.Reynal painted a picture of a talkshow host who “tries to give an alternative view” but who was duped by some of his guests.“Alex Jones was wrong to believe these people, but he didn’t do it out of spite,” Reynal argued. “He did it because he believed it … He believed a citizen has a right to get on Infowars and talk about what their questions are.”He also called the case an important one for free speech.“I believe in his right to say it, and I believe in every American’s right to choose what they watch, and listen to, and believe,” Reynal said.Among those expected to testify on Tuesday are Daniel Jewiss, who was the Connecticut police lead investigator of Sandy Hook, and Daria Karpova, a producer at Infowars.The jury could deal Jones a major financial blow that would put his constellation of conspiracy-peddling businesses into deeper jeopardy. He has already been banned from YouTube, Facebook and Spotify for violating their hate-speech policies and he claims he is millions of dollars in debt – a claim the plaintiffs reject.Immediately after the plaintiffs’ lawyer’s opening remarks and before his own lawyer addressed the jury, Jones stepped outside the courtroom to rant to reporters, calling it a “kangaroo court” and “show trial” that was an assault on the first amendment of the constitution.The Texas court and another in Connecticut found Jones liable for defamation for his portrayal of the Sandy Hook massacre as a hoax involving actors aimed at increasing gun control. In both states, the judges issued default judgments against Jones without trials because he failed to respond to court orders and turn over documents.In total, the families of eight Sandy Hook victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school are suing Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting took place. During a deposition in April, Jones insisted he was not responsible for the suffering that Sandy Hook parents say they have endured because of the hoax conspiracy, including death threats and harassment by Jones’s followers.Jones claimed in court records last year that he had a negative net worth of $20m, but attorneys for Sandy Hook families have painted a different financial picture.Court records show that Jones’s Infowars store, which sells nutritional supplements and survival gear, made more than $165m between 2015 and 2018. Jones has also urged listeners on his Infowars program to donate money.The Texas trial begins about two months after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, about 145 miles south-west of Austin. It was the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook.TopicsNewtown shootingUS politicsUS gun controlnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Groundswells of change’: Black activists welcome evolution in gun violence debate

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      ‘Groundswells of change’: Black activists welcome evolution in gun violence debateThe Safer Communities Act finally addressed prevention efforts with $250m dedicated to funding violence interrupters In 2013, a month after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a group of Black pastors and other activists visited the Obama White House to press the administration to do more to prevent gun violence in communities of color.Obama had just released his post-Newtown gun violence prevention plan, which did not include any funding for community violence prevention efforts, and which made no mention of the disparate impact of gun violence on Black Americans.When the clergy members expressed their frustration at the White House’s lack of response, an Obama staffer told them that there was no support nationally to address urban gun violence, and that Americans’ political will was focused on “the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas – schools where white kids were killed”.Some of those same Black pastors who visited the White House in 2013 were invited back for a ceremony on the South Lawn earlier this week.Senate breakthrough clears way for toughening US gun lawsRead moreCongress had finally passed a modest set of gun violence prevention compromises in the wake of yet another school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. This time, community violence prevention efforts were fully on the agenda, with Congress endorsing $250m dedicated to funding violence interrupters and other community-based efforts.“This is a full circle moment,” said Pastor Michael McBride, the national director of the Live Free Campaign, which works to reduce gun violence and mass incarceration. McBride was one the clergy members who had spoken out publicly about his disappointment with the Obama administration, including then-vice-president Joe Biden, after Newtown.Both Democrats and some Republicans were now willing to dedicate federal dollars to “targeting interventions and resources at those at the highest risk of shooting and being shot”, McBride said.And the $250m in federal funding for community programs was desperately needed, he added: “Many violence interrupter programs in cities are usually funded seasonally, or unevenly, and certainly not to the scale of the problem.”Biden’s speech at the South Lawn ceremony touting the country’s progress in preventing gun violence was interrupted by an objection from Manuel Oliver, who lost his 17-year-old son Joaquin Oliver in the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018, and who insisted that more needs to be done.‘Partial victories’For many violence prevention activists, the struggles of the continuing gun violence crisis were balanced against the value of marking the fact that they had made progress. Some activists who have worked for decades on the issue said they saw changes worth noting in political rhetoric and action, from the White House.The Rev Jeff Brown, a Boston-based minister who was one of the collaborators in “the Boston miracle”, a successful effort to reduce gun homicides in the 1990s, was also at the event on Monday, and said it was good “feeling that hope, that you know, we’re being heard”.It had been an “abject disappointment” to Brown in 2013 that the country’s first African American president had, in his view, ignored the calls for more action and funding to prevent daily gun violence.The federal funding for community violence interventions in the post-Uvalde violence prevention compromise bill that Congress passed, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, was “just the start”, Brown said, and “the honest truth is that we really need more”.In his speeches on gun violence, Biden, a longtime booster of police departments, now sometimes highlights the importance of prevention work by violence interrupters, many of whom are formerly incarcerated or have other criminal justice system involvement in their past.To hear the president of the United States legitimize the contributions of violence interrupters is powerful, said Teny Gross, a longtime violence intervention advocate who runs the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago.Eddie Bocagnegra, who worked for years as an outreach worker in the streets of Chicago, has become a senior adviser to Biden’s justice department, an appointment that recognizes the expertise of on-the-ground violence prevention workers with deep ties in the community.“These are groundswells of change,” Gross said.Advocates say the shifts they have begun to see in the gun debate are bigger than the Biden administration. In the past decade, McBride said, organizers have pushed well-funded national gun control groups, which have often been led by wealthier white activists, to raise awareness about community intervention programs, not simply fight for new gun laws. They have also tried to win allies in law enforcement, and convince some police officials that civilian intervention programs can benefit public safety.McBride said there was some progress in reframing the debate, from a “crime and punishment framework”, to a “public health framework”, that is no longer as focused on defining violence as an issue of “personal moral ineptitude”.At the same time, advocates said, the past months have been heavy for anyone working in gun violence prevention. Gun sales spiked during the pandemic. In between brutal mass shootings, a conservative-dominated supreme court dramatically expanded the scope of gun rights, in a ruling that is expected to eviscerate existing gun control regulations.Gross, who runs a violence intervention organization in Chicago, says he feels like the sorcerer’s apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia: the small progress they make is overwhelmed by a situation that has spiraled out of control.Over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, the daughter of one of his staff members was shot, multiple staff members were shot on multiple days, and then, on 4 July itself, there was a mass shooting targeting a parade in Highland Park that left seven people dead and 30 others wounded.“We are drowning in guns,” Gross said.Still, Gross said, it was important to take a moment to acknowledge the progress that organizers had made, through years of meetings in church basements, knocking on doors, and flying from city to city across the country.“Organizing – the power of the people – it still works, even if there are partial victories,” McBride said.TopicsUS gun controlGuns and liesUS politicsTexas school shootingNewtown shootingJoe BidenBiden administrationObama administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media

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      Sandy Hook review: anatomy of an American tragedy – and the obscenity of social media Elizabeth Williamson’s book on the 2012 elementary school shooting is a near-unbearable, necessary indictment of Facebook, YouTube and the conspiracy theories they spreadEven in a country now completely inured to the horrors of mass shootings, the massacre at Sandy Hook remains lodged in the minds of everyone old enough to remember it. Ten years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle in less than five minutes. Twenty extremely young children and six adults were killed.Sandy Hook’s tragic legacy: seven years on, a loving father is the latest victimRead moreIt was the worst elementary school shooting in American history.Elizabeth Williamson’s new book is about that “American Tragedy”, but more importantly it is about “the Battle for Truth” that followed. In excruciating detail, Williamson describes the unimaginable double tragedy every Sandy Hook parent has had to endure: the murder of their child, followed by years and years of an army of online monsters accusing them of inventing this unimaginable horror.Alex Jones of Infowars is the best-known villain of this ghastly narrative. His Facebook pages and YouTube channels convinced millions of fools the massacre was either some kind of government plot to encourage a push for gun control or, even more obscenely, that it was all carried out by actors and no one was killed at all.While a single deranged shooter was responsible for the original tragedy, Williamson makes clear she believes Facebook and Google (the owner of YouTube) deserve most of the blame for the subsequent horror the relatives of victims have endured.As Congressman Ro Khanna reported in his new book, Dignity in a Digital Age, an internal Facebook document estimated that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”.Those recommendations are the result of the infernal algorithms which are at the heart of the business models of Facebook and YouTube and are probably more responsible for the breakdown in civil society in the US and the world than anything else invented.“We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information,” says Lenny Pozner, whose son Noah was one of the Sandy Hook victims. But “really, we’ve gone back to flat earth”.It horrified Pozner “to see the image of his son, smiling in his bomber jacket, passed round by an online mob attacking Noah as a fake, a body double, a boy who never lived”. Relentless algorithms pushed those “human lies to the top” on an internet which has become an “all-powerful booster of outrage and denial”.Noah’s mother, Veronique De la Rosa, was another victim of Jones’s persistent, outrageous lies.“It’s like you’ve entered the ninth circle of hell,” she tells Williamson. “Never even in your wildest, most fear-fueled fantasies would you have guessed you’d find yourself having to fight not only through your grief, which you know is at times paralyzing, but to even prove that your son existed.”Lenny Pozner regularly saw his dead son described as an “alleged victim”, but it took years before Facebook and YouTube and Twitter took substantial action to quiet the insane conspiracies their own algorithms had done so much to reinforce.Facebook allowed a Sandy Hook Hoax group and dozens of others to operate virtually uninterrupted for two years. Hundreds of videos on YouTube, owned by Google, wallowed in the hoax, drawing thousands who made threats against the families.“Facebook and Twitter are monsters,” says Pozner. “Out-of-control beasts run like mom-and-pop shops.”Facebook “focuses on growth, to the exclusion of most everything else”, Williamson writes. The algorithms are designed to keep all of us on the platform as long as possible, and they operate “with relentless, sometimes murderous neutrality, rewarding whatever horrible behavior and false or inflammatory content captures and retains users”.In 2018, an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg by Pozner and De La Rosa, published in the Guardian, accused the Facebook chief of “allowing your platform to continue to be used as an instrument to disseminate hate”.Two days later, Facebook finally suspended Jones’s personal page but “took no action against Infowars’ account, which had 1.7 million followers”. YouTube removed four videos from Infowars’ channel and banned Jones from live-streaming for all of 90 days.An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg from the parents of a Sandy Hook victimRead moreHarry Farid heads the school of Information at the University of California Berkeley. He describes the perfect storm which is threatening democracy and civility everywhere: “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things … you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public.”Williamson makes the important and usually forgotten point that nothing in the first amendment gives anyone the right to use a social media platform. All it says on this subject is that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”As Farid points out, platforms have an absolute right to ban all forms of content “without running afoul of the constitution” – which is why Donald Trump had no judicial recourse when he was banned from Facebook and Twitter after the Capitol riot.But most of the time, Farid says, the platforms just look the other way: “Because they’re making so much goddamned money.”Last fall, the California Democrat Adam Schiff told the Guardian the blockbuster testimony of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would finally be enough to spur Congress to regulate the worst excesses of the big platforms. So far, their lobbyists have prevented such action. On Saturday, the Guardian asked Schiff if he still believed Congress might act in this session. “There is still a chance,” he wrote in an e-mail, adding that “the degree of Russian propaganda on social media attempting to justify their bloody invasion of Ukraine” might finally provide the “impetus” needed for change.
      Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for the Truth is published in the US by Dutton Books
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