Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Department of Justice Emails Description An account of the resource The Department of Justice received more than 11,000 e-mails in response to the agency's public solicitation for comments upon its plans to distribute the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 established by Congress to benefit the victims of September 11 and their families. These e-mails have been organized here by date. September 11 Email September 11 Email: Body The basic content, as unstructured text; sometimes containing a signature block at the end. Thursday, January 03, 2002 10:52 AM Sept 11 Victims Compensation Fund Interim Final Rules The public needs to understand first and foremost that the main purpose of the legislation was to protect the most obvious culpable parties from the effects of legitimate lawsuits. Protecting culpable parties legislatively, after they committed a negligent act, is nearly unprecedented. However, challenges to this legislation on constitutional grounds could take years, which is advantageous to the government and to the entities it is protecting. The element of time is just one more weapon in the government's arsenal for coercing families into accepting an award that is not equitable. The public also needs to be aware that the 'compensation fund' part of the legislation was created as an afterthought, in recognition that the legislation had an adverse effect on victims' families' rights as potential litigants. The legislation is also an attempt to reduce the Federal government's exposure to litigation costs, at the expense of its citizens. Special Master Kenneth Feinberg now mentions a sum of $250K as a 'minimum' award, in reaction to the 'news' that many families would receive nothing under his formula. He has used this benchmark before. It is an amount that bears no relationship to the true value of these claims in the tort system. There are statistics available showing that just a single component of non-economic damages (loss of consortium to a wife in a wrongful death claim) has a median value of $800K. Adding in the values for the other components, such as conscious pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, etc,. elevates the value of each claim into the millions. Mr. Feinberg has attempted to equate the value of these wrongful death claims to those killed in the line of duty ($250K). Most of the victims of September 11 were office workers who were in no stretch of the imagination 'killed in the line of duty', a status which requires voluntary exposure to risk of injury or death. Citing that as a benchmark is a bald attempt to confuse the public. In order to be a fair alternative to litigation, the compensation must have a relation to the tort system which it is supposed to replace. The families want the truth about culpable behavior to emerge so that changes in evacuation procedures, building design, airport security measures, etc., can be implemented in order to prevent future losses of a similar kind. Not only errors but safer alternatives are often revealed through the discovery phase of litigation, but the incentive families had to pursue this goal has been drastically curtailed by the legislation. The American public, not just the families, suffers from the consequences of curtailed litigation. The legislation, in the words of Kenneth Feinberg himself, "stacks the deck" against those who might chose to litigate. What has been taken away from us and the America public is momentous in its scope and extremely troubling in the precedent it sets. That negligence acts occurred by a number of entities is fairly obvious. The fact that the legislation imposed a cap on liability can be viewed as an admission that families' lawsuits would have been highly successful. There are ways to balance the injustice created by the legislation. There should be independent, fact-finding committees appointed, whose goal is prevention and/or mitigation of future similar catastrophes. Although the government has tort immunity, committee fact-finding should extend beyond the obvious targets such as the Port Authority and airlines to include an expose` of government failures in intelligence-gathering. Along with this, families should be awarded an equitable sum for their wrongful death claims. The question then arises: How should that amount be determined? Wrongful death claims are evaluated by juries, plaintiff and defense attorneys and insurance companies every day. Statistics such as the one mentioned above are readily available and are highly pertinent to the situation, unlike Kenneth Feinberg's 'killed in the line of duty' analogy. Another, simpler way to correct the injustice is to simply amend the legislation to eliminate the offsets. These specific types of offsets (life insurance, 401Ks, pensions) not only penalized many families, they have no counterpart in the tort system for which the Fund is supposed to be an equitable alternative. The reason such offsets do not exist in the tort system as such is because they would inure to the benefit of the culpable party at the expense of the injured party, an illogical and inequitable result. The legislation and Kenneth Feinberg's rules and formulas as they currently exist are unacceptable not only intellectually but also on an emotional level. After "stacking the deck" against us, the message that the members of the House and Senate, the DOJ and Mr. Feinberg continue to deliver is that the lives of our loved ones are worth little or nothing, thus exacerbating the immeasurable pain that began on September 11. The families want to begin to heal, but instead we have been forced to become embroiled in this and other controversies. We desperately hope the day is near when justice will prevail and we can return to the privacy of our individual loss and grief. Individual Comment Stamford, CT September 11 Email: Date The local time and date when the message was written. 2002-01-03 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource dojN001259.xml 911DA Item Elements describing a September 11 Digital Archive item. Status The process status of this item. approved Consent Whether September 11 Digital Archive has permission to possess this item. full Posting Whether the contributor gave permission to post this item. yes Copyright Whether the contributor holds copyright to this item. yes Source The source of this item. born-digital Media Type The media type of this item. email Created by Author Whether the author created this item. yes Described by Author Whether the description of this item was submitted by the author. no Date Entered The date this item was entered into the archive. 2002-01-03