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A Texas appeals court cut the roughly $50 million that Alex Jones was ordered to pay two Sandy Hook parents down to about $6 million, leaving the defamation finding against him untouched but capping what he actually owes.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: Back in December of 2012, 20 first graders and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One of them was 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, whose parents, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, spent years listening to Jones tell his Infowars audience that the massacre was a government hoax and that the grieving families were crisis actors. They sued him and his company, Free Speech Systems, in 2018, and a 2022 Austin jury delivered the first verdict that made Jones pay for it. Heslin testified that Jones’s followers harassed him for years and that his home and car were shot at. Jones conceded on the stand that the shooting was “100% real” and that he had been wrong to lie about it. Since the judgment against him, Jones has lost his outlet “Infowars,” been forced to file for bankruptcy, and watched some of his personal property go to auction.

What’s going on now: The Texas Third Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Friday that Heslin and Lewis never cleared the bar the statute sets for breaking through the state’s punitive damages cap, which sits at $750,000 per plaintiff plus twice the economic damages. The panel left the $4.1 million or so in compensatory damages alone and knocked the $45 million punitive award down to $1.5 million. It also found the trial judge should not have let the parents amend their petition after the verdict to strengthen the case for a bigger number.

Jones called it “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment” and said he will keep appealing to the Texas Supreme Court to get the rest thrown out. Mark Bankston, an attorney for Heslin and Lewis, dismissed the whole thing. “The families care not at all about this irrelevant ruling which affects only two of the 19 claims they all share,” Bankston said. “Jones still faces over a billion dollars of liability, so this changes absolutely nothing. All it does is highlight the absurdity of Texas law.”

The ruling does nothing to the separate Connecticut judgment, where a jury awarded eight other victims’ families more than a billion dollars, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear Jones’s appeal in that case last year.