The Alex Jones Verdict Is Just—But It Should Be the Exception | Opinion

James Madison never met Alex Jones. This side of heaven, we'll never know whether the author of the First Amendment would've listened to Jones' outlandish radio show. But Jones now knows that James Madison's hand-crafted First Amendment umbrella protects most—though not all—speech. On Wednesday, a jury awarded the parents of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting $1 billion in damages; Jones had called the shooting a hoax and the parents crisis actors. The verdict followed a smaller but just as significant Texas jury verdict against Jones' lies about Sandy Hook.

Jones repeatedly defended himself on First Amendment grounds, arguing that he had a free speech right to his opinion, though he was not allowed to make this defense during the trial. One day he even arrived at court with "Save the 1st" written on a piece of tape he'd used to cover his mouth, and he referred to the trial as a "constitutional-destroying, absolute and total, complete travesty."

Yet for centuries—stretching back to British law, the parentage of American jurisprudence—defamation that causes damages were subject to redress. The jury was convinced that Jones' heartless lies piled grief upon the most unimaginable anguish the families of the Sandy Hook elementary students, when Jones' followers took to harassing them in the most brutal fashion on the internet.

But Alex Jones isn't the only one who's been cut up by the First Amendment and found its protection of free speech turn from a shield into a sword. It's been quite a year for stretching the First Amendment, as the actress Amber Heard discovered in June. Heard, too, frequently referenced the First Amendment during her own much-ballyhooed trial, in which her ex-husband Johnny Depp sued her for defaming him as a wife beater. Heard outlined her understanding of the First Amendment, parroting a line no doubt assembled by one of the lieutenants in her army of publicists, claiming the Constitution gives her "the freedom to speak truth to power."

But there's about as much legal substance in that remark as there are vitamins in potato chips. As in Jones' case, there is a threshold beyond which even the First Amendment does not offer protection. Appreciating our freedom—the highest level ever reached in the history of this globe—means respecting the limits of free speech.

The free speech absolutists will push back on this, but the American tradition has always had limits to free speech. And that's what these trials focus on: specifically, defamation.

The U.S. Supreme Court placed the strongest of girders under this key constitutional precept. In 1964, the high court handed down N.Y. Times vs. Sullivan, which looked at alleged defamation surrounding encounters between Black protestors and the police. The big takeaway from the case was that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." But cruelly lying about innocent victims is not a lawful subject of public debate.

Hence these verdicts.

Of course, a Hollywood melodrama isn't even in the same hemisphere as mocking the murder of children. The Sandy Hook families deserve our sympathy and prayers. The deaths of their children were real. And Alex Jones' big mouth and small character caused real damage.

Still, Wednesday's giant verdicts will be significantly reduced on appeals. Jurors get angry and their hands grow weary adding zeroes at the end of the monetary award—then appellate judges, using state statues that limit recovery amounts, more soberly scratch out a few of the digits. And if Jones doesn't have the money to pay, he won't go away in handcuffs. Refusal to pay might lead to criminal contempt and jail (not prison) but inability to pay will probably lead to more of a shrug.

The Sandy Hook families deserve real compensation, but James Madison would be the first to warn us that these must be the rarest of cases. Free speech, after all, empowers a free nation.

Mr. Weaver is a communications consultant and First Amendment litigator in Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of the book "A Wordsmith's Work." Twitter: @MarkRWeaver.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.