Families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in the US have asked a Connecticut judge to order Alex Jones to pay heavy punitive damages on top of nearly $1 billion a jury said Jones owes them for calling the massacre a hoax.

The families said in the filing on Friday that the "historic" scale of Jones' wrongdoing in the case, his "utter lack of repentance" and clear intention to continue spreading lies about them deserve the highest punishment in the court's power, Reuters reported.

Jones’s lawyer said that he is confident the verdict will be reversed on appeal.

"There is little question that this trial was a farce," Norm Pattis said.

A jury ordered Jones, known for his provocative political commentaries and theories, to pay $965 million in damages to the people suffered over his claims that the 2012 shooting was a hoax.

Jones, the founder of the Infowars website and talk show, argued for years that the massacre was a "staged" government plot to take guns from Americans and that "no one died".

The trial was marked by weeks of grief-stricken testimony from the families who took turns telling how Jones’ claims about Sandy Hook worsen their grief. An FBI agent who responded to the shooting was also a plaintiff in the case.

In their filing Friday, the families offered various methods of calculating punitive damages in similar cases.

The Sandy Hook school shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, before killing himself. Prior to driving to the school, Lanza shot and killed his mother at their home.

US jury orders Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to Sandy Hook families

A jury in the United States has ordered Alex Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the people suffered over his claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.   

Although the Sandy Hook massacre was the third-deadliest mass shooting in US history, Congress has consistently failed to pass federal gun control legislation due to the influence of the powerful gun lobby.

No major national legislation to increase gun control has succeeded in the decade since, despite numerous Democratic politicians, including Biden, calling for bans on sales of assault-style weapons and other measures.

More than 3,000 children and teens have been shot and killed and 15,000 more have been shot and injured since Sandy Hook, according to data from Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks gun violence and other shootings on school grounds.