State District Judge Scott Jenkins said Thursday that he will impose monetary sanctions on Alex Jones' legal team for failing to deliver court-ordered documents in a defamation lawsuit by Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old son Jesse Lewis was one of the victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Heslin's lawsuit contends that a June 2017 report by Owen Shroyer, a reporter and host on Jones' InfoWars, contending that Heslin could not have held his dead son in his arms as he maintained, was based on a deceptively edited interview with a medical examiner and was intended to buttress the InfoWars narrative that the mass shooting was a hoax.

The report, according to Mark Bankston, the Houston attorney representing Heslin and other Sandy Hook parents in two other cases, was made with a reckless disregard for the truth.

Michael Burnett, an Austin family law attorney, brand new to the case, argued before Jenkins Thursday that Shroyer was a reporter offering his opinion and protected by the First Amendment.

Jenkins had held a hearing on Heslin's case in August 2018 and ordered discovery, which, among other things, would have allowed Bankston access to InfoWars documents and to interrogate Jones and Shroyer. Mark Enoch, the Dallas attorney representing Jones in the case at the time, did not respond to the discovery order and appealed the case to the 3rd Court of Appeals. The court ruled that the appeal was improper and sent it back to Jenkins' court.

Bankston asked Jenkins to hold Jones' lawyers in contempt for failing to meet his discovery order, and Jenkins said that while he doesn't like the word "contempt," as too "incendiary," he would issue a sanction that would require Jones' legal team to pay Heslin's lawyers to compensate them for time they spent preparing for the discovery that never occurred. He did not offer a number.

Jenkins can also be expected to let the case proceed, rebuffing a motion by Jones' lawyers to dismiss it under the Texas Citizen Participation Act. That would be consistent with his ruling in the other Sandy Hook cases.

The parties will be back in Jenkins' courtroom on Oct. 17 for a hearing on a separate lawsuit by Heslin alleging intentional infliction of emotional distress. Eventually, the emotional distress and defamation lawsuits will be consolidated as one. Scarlett Lewis, Jesse's mother, also has filed an emotional distress suit against Jones, but not a defamation suit, because, unlike Heslin, she was not identified by name on InfoWars.

In his lawsuit, Heslin said the anguish of losing his son, who acted heroically in his final moments, rushing the gunman and shouting for classmates to run, was compounded by the InfoWars report impugning his public assertion that, “I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.”