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Disgusted appeals court reluctantly says it has no choice but to toss verdicts against FBI for role in two Bulger murders
By adamg on Thu, 02/10/2011 - 9:12pm
A federal appeals court ruled today the families of two men gunned down by Whitey Bulger filed their lawsuits against the FBI three weeks too late.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said its hands were tied by the law regulating lawsuits against the federal government. Right at the beginning of its ruling, the court emphasized it was overturning the verdicts "without endorsing the FBI's conduct, which we regard as reprehensible." It then detailed the FBI/Bulger cooperation under the heading "The Axis of Evil."
A federal judge had earlier awarded the family of Brian Halloran, a small-time drug dealer turned informant, $2 million and the family of Michael Donahue, who was giving Halloran a ride home, $6.4 million.
But the appeals court ruled the lawsuits were filed past the two-year statute of limitations. Halloran's family filed its suit on Sept. 25, 2000, but the court said the time period ran out on Sept. 2, two years after news came out that Bulger associate Steve Flemmi had testified in a closed-door hearing that the gang had been tipped off by Connolly that Halloran had supplied information to other FBI agents.
Halloran and Donahue were gunned down on May 11, 1982:
As they drove, Bulger's car pulled alongside and a fusillade of shots followed. Donahue died immediately; Halloran tried to flee, sustained a myriad of gunshot wounds, survived for a short period of time, dentified James "Jimmy" Flynn (a Winter Hill associate) as his assailant during the ambulance ride, and was pronounced dead upon arrival at a local hospital.
The court concluded:
We are not without sympathy for the plaintiffs' plight. The murders robbed both the Donahue and Halloran families of loved ones, and their losses were exacerbated by years of government evasion. But statutes of limitation are designed to operate mechanically. They aspire to bring a sense of finality to events that occurred in the distant past and to afford defendants the comfort of knowing that stale claims cannot be pursued. ...
We add, moreover, that courts must apply legal rules even-handedly. The fiasco brought about by Bulger's and Flemmi's seduction of the FBI has produced an endless stream of civil litigation, and this court, in a series of opinions, has carefully crafted a paradigm for dealing with the legal problems caused by the prolonged delay in the disclosure of that corrupt relationship.... We must apply the same paradigm here - and doing so requires us to draw a temporal line that bars the maintenance of these actions.
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Comments
Same Jimmy Flynn that played,
Same Jimmy Flynn that played, ironically, a judge in "Good Will Hunting" I think.
They did . . .
. . . good work in Egypt as well. Trained Mubarak's guys in "techniques". Lovely organization. So glad they are building a two Home Depot sized HQ in Chelsea.
Denied Appeals
You gotta be sh@#%ing me! PS-That is the same Mr. Flynn in the film.
Statute of limitations
Not being a legal scholar I've always had a sort of head scratching moment when it comes to the statute of limitations. In the cases where someone within an institution can use that institution to really do some serious harm and then use the same institution to drag out processes so that the statute kicks in and they and the institution can't be charged with anything...it ain't right. And I am thinking of both the FBI's actions in Boston during this time frame as well as the Catholic Church's.
Setting some arbitrary date when you can say "Oh, did I get your father shot/son raped on a weekly basis...oops, too late -- too bad we didn't get something to the court a couple years earlier, not that I didn't do everything in my considerable power to prevent that from happening" seems really sadistic, unfair and prone to abuse by powerful and long-lived institutions. And then it takes a Globe Spotlight special to get anyone to even mention that something needs to change (it's questionable whether the institutions involved really change the mode of operations that lead to the abuses in the first place).
Can someone give me an upside to this limitations thing?
Court seemed to be trying to find a way to find for the families
One of the key issues in this case was when exactly to start the clock ticking on the two-year period. And it seems like the law says (I'm no lawyer, somebody correct me) it begins the day potential plaintiffs should be reasonably expected to know about something (even if, in fact, they didn't).
Based on what they wrote, it seems the judges tried their darnedest to find for the families. They note reporters were writing about the Bulger/FBI link to the murders well before Flemmi made his admission in a private court hearing, let alone when the judge in the case issued a ruling that made the admission public. And they noted repeated government efforts to stall the case.
And yet ...
And yet, in the end, they ruled the families missed the cutoff. By three weeks. Thanks probably go to Congress, which set the two-year statute of limitations on suits against the government.
Statutes of Limitation
The purpose of SOLs is to ensure that defendants facing lawsuits don't get hit with "stale" claims - i.e. that have reached an age where the physical evidence and witnesses are not fresh and thus muddy the truth of what really happened. You have to keep in mind when thinking about statutes of limitation that the justice system is designed, by and large, to protect defendants and the burden is always on the plaintiff to prove their claim. As such, it is also incumbent upon the plaintiff to bring their claim in a timely manner. If you think that the "bright line" of SOLs is unjust, try to weigh it against the injustice of someone coming out of the woodwork claiming that you robbed them 15 years ago. You wouldn't be able to mount an effective defense against that claim, as the physical evidence and witnesses would be long forgotten. But this was only two years, right? That is true, but that just becomes a question of how long is enough. A date has to be chosen. Some may say that claims against the government should last longer, but consider how many people would like to try to claim that they were somehow wronged by the government (and owed money! hooray!) and how difficult it would be for an entity as large as the government to defend itself against accusations that happened more than a few years ago.
Nope, it's bullshit
SOL don't apply if you leave the state, and I don't see why they should apply in the case where the government games its own system to cheat plaintiffs. If you give a defendant the power to deny the filing of a lawsuit, then there's nothing stopping them from abusing it every time.
Between "state secrets privilege" and "statute-of-limitations stalling" there's no real way to pursue accountability of unelected government officials.
Judges don't have their jobs to be mechanical computers, if we wanted that, we could program computers to do their jobs. We have human judges in order for them to use human judgement.
What the judge also has to
What the judge also has to contend with is that if he makes a judgment against an SOL, this finding goes on the books and he is possibly setting a legal precedence that can be used in future cases to argue other SOLs. That's what happens when you make an exception to a rule of law - you open up the floodgates for some attorney to bring a case forth and cite your ruling. Then if others bring cases and expect to get heard even though the SOL has run out, you are just opening up the floodgates and your original SOL becomes pointless. It may seem heartless to us as humans but from a legal standpoint it's necessary in order for the law to be upheld. The plaintiff's attorneys are the ones at fault here - they should have easily known about the SOL and filed in time. Plaintiffs could have a legal mal claim against them if they were aware of it.
Wrong way round example?
Wouldn't the presumption of innocence make that lack of evidence and witness work to the advantage of the defendant?
me vs. da govmint
Yeah, I definitely think what you describe is true. In this litigious world we live in, no doubt there would be a whole lot more abuse of the legal system in pursuit of a cheap buck. Just the same the thing that doesn't sit well here is the fact that as someone else here mentioned, the arbitrator of this system can also be the party that is accused of doing wrong, -- ya cahn't fight City Hawl boyo.
So if someone comes out of the woodwork and accuses me of theft 15 years ago, yeah that blows. But it's exponentially worse for me than it is for an institution. Especially if that institution runs the system that we use to redress its actions. We give rights and privileges to non-human entities that in some ways doesn't seem right. I guess it's a separate issue from the statute of limitations, but it's related. I just think our legal system should put humans above the legal avatars of governmental bodies, corporations, churches and the like. The policies and actions of one of these things can cause my death and the worse I can do is pick off one of those things' human representatives or pry some money out of them, the critter goes on, near immortally and free of the same responsibilities of humans but possessing all the rights.
Chuck Turner . . .
. . . should have incorporated himself. No one at Tyson Foods will be going to jail for bribing Mexican officials.
blame...
Blame Congress for such a short SoL for federal claims, or blame the plaintiff-estates' attorneys for delaying so long in bringing the claims. The Court of Appeals here was just applying the rules. Sucks, but them's the breaks.