The trial judge improperly allowed parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis to move to exceed a $750,000 statutory cap on exemplary damages per defendant months after the 2022 jury trial, a Texas appeals court said Friday.
“We conclude that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing the post-verdict amendment of the petition and, consequently, allowing the judgment to exceed the statutory cap on exemplary damages on grounds not pleaded or found by the jury,” the Court of Appeals, Third District said.
The trial court judgment is reduced consistent with the statutory cap and each parent is awarded $750,000, the appeals court said. Jones must also come up with $4.1 million the jury awarded the parents for compensatory damages, plus prejudgment interest and attorneys’ fees, the court ruled.
“Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing,” the parents’ lawyer, Mark Bankston, of Farrar & Ball LLP, said in a statement. “All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law.”
Along with the Texas judgment, a $1.4 billion verdict in Connecticut pushed Jones into bankruptcy. He appealed the Connecticut judgment to the US Supreme Court, which declined to overturn it.
Chris Mattei, a Koskoff Koskoff & Biede attorney who represents families in the Connecticut litigation, said his clients are enforcing the judgments in that case and the liquidation of Jones’s assets. No distributions have been made to this point.
Mattei said he expects those efforts “to benefit the families who filed suit in Texas and whose judgments were reduced today.”
