HARTFORD, Conn. — An appeals court has upheld a two-week disciplinary suspension of Alex Jones’ lawyer for mishandling confidential medical records in the run-up to the 2022 trial at which families of Sandy Hook victims won a $1.4 billion defamation verdict against Jones and his companies.

The decision by the state Appellate Court Friday went against Jones lawyer Norm Pattis, whose firm sent sealed medical and mental health records belonging to the family members to a co-counsel in Texas involved in related litigation. Pattis has said the transmittal of the records was inadvertent and there is no indication that the material was reviewed.

Pattis defended Jones when he and his broadcasting and retail sales business, Free Speech Systems, were sued by 15 people in Connecticut — parents, spouses and siblings of the 20 first graders and six educators murdered when a gunman shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown with an assault rifle, and an FBI agent who was part of the law enforcement response almost precisely 13 years ago on Dec. 14, 2012.

They claimed their lives were shattered by threats and harassment from complete strangers who believed a decade of false and inflammatory broadcasts by Jones that claimed the shooting was staged and that they, along with the murdered children, were actors in a hoax perpetrated to win support for a ban on gun ownership.

The families presented evidence that Jones had audience and sales data that showed his profits and listenership rose dramatically when he used his Infowars program to promote the phony conspiracy theory.

Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis, the trial judge, initially ordered Pattis suspended from the practice of law for six months. Last year, the Appellate Court reversed Bellis, resulting in the two-week suspension. In its decision Friday, the Appellate Court rejected Pattis’ claims the two-week suspension was wrongly calculated and contrary to American Bar Association guidance.

“We’ll likely ask the state Supreme Court to take a look,” Pattis said Friday.

The Jones litigation is continuing in federal bankruptcy court. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a request by Jones to pause payment of the $1.4 billion verdict pending appeal of lower court proceedings.

The state litigation in Connecticut was particularly bitter, marked by sharp exchanges between Bellis and Pattis. The judge twice accused Pattis of violating rules of conduct and he repeatedly called on her to disqualify herself.

A rare pretrial default ruling by Bellis turned the trial into a hearing on damages, which meant the jury would deliberate only on what Jones owed the families and not on his responsibility for their harassment.

The default punished Jones for failing to comply with court orders to disclose business records and found in favor of the families on the central point of their suit — that Jones’ hoax broadcasts were outrageous lies and were responsible for a decade of harassment and anguish.

The improperly disclosed records were 4,000 pages of confidential medical and psychiatric records, part of 390,000 pages of materials the families were ordered to turn over to Jones, as part of the pretrial exchange of information between parties in civil suits.

Bellis imposed an unusually rigid confidentiality order to protect the records in part because of concern by lawyers for the victim families that the material would be misused by Jones. Also, at one point during pretrial proceedings, Pattis had previously included protected information in a motion.

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