A Dane County jury on Tuesday decided
a village of Oregon conspiracy theorist must pay the father of a boy
killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings $450,000 for falsely claiming
that the father circulated fabricated copies of his son’s death
certificate.
It took the
jury nearly four hours to decide on the amount James Fetzer must pay
Leonard Pozner, whose son, Noah, 6, was the youngest victim of the Dec.
14, 2012, massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The award follows Circuit
Judge Frank Remington’s ruling in June that Fetzer defamed Pozner with
four false statements about the death certificate. The statements
appeared in a book Fetzer co-authored and edited, and in his blog.
In
his own statement after the jury delivered its decision, Pozner thanked
the jury “for recognizing the pain and terror that Mr. Fetzer has
purposefully inflicted on me and on other victims of these horrific mass
casualty events, like the Sandy Hook shooting,” and emphasized that his
case was not about First Amendment protections.
“Mr.
Fetzer has the right to believe that Sandy Hook never happened,” he
said. “He has the right to express his ignorance. This award, however,
further illustrates the difference between the right of people like Mr.
Fetzer to be wrong and the right of victims like myself and my child to
be free from defamation, free from harassment and free from the
intentional infliction of terror.”
Fetzer called the damages amount “absurd” and said he would appeal.
Fetzer
— a professor emeritus of philosophy from the University of
Minnesota-Duluth and prolific conspiracy theorist on a range of events —
claims the Sandy Hook massacre never happened but was instead an event
staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as part of an Obama
administration effort to enact tighter gun restrictions.
