The Shield of Achilles: NY Supreme Court: 1993 WTC terrorists only 32% responsible for their actions

Saturday, May 03, 2008

NY Supreme Court: 1993 WTC terrorists only 32% responsible for their actions

For one of the most blatant travesties of justice, look no further. An appelate of the NY state supreme court in Manhattan isn't even trying to hide it.

In February 1993, terrorists affiliated with Al-Qaeda detonated a 1500lb homemade truck bomb in a lower garage in the World Trade Center. the blast killed six people and injured over 1000. So who was responsible? Well, according to federal prosecutors, it was Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Ahmad Ajaj, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Yousef, Abouhalima, Salameh, Ayyad, and Ajaj were all sentenced to life imprisonment. Yasin fled the country and hid in Iraq. His current whereabouts are unknown. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is currently held at Guantanomo Bay.

But I suppose we can let them all go now, because according to the NY State Court, the real terrorist responsible for the attack is... The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey!!

A jury found the Port Authority responsible for not properly securing the garage, and for some bizarre reason, assigned to them 68% of the blame for the attack. This means that the terrorists could not have been more than 32% to blame. And according to NY law, any fault greater than 50% means that the defendant must bear the full burden of financial compensation to the victims. The incarcerated terrorists don't have much money, but the Port Authority does. Funny how trial lawyers always manage to steer the blame to those with the deepest pockets...

Ted Frank wrote a brilliant op-ed on this in the NY Sun:

The injustice is the culmination of decades of increasingly ludicrous — and expensive — litigation. The judges can, and did, say they just were being consistent with previous bizarre precedents of New York courts, such as one holding the New York City Transit Authority liable for failing to stop a train in time to avoid hitting a victim intentionally pushed into the train’s path.

The Alice-in-Wonderland logic, complete with a farcically precise adjudication of apples and oranges that the Port Authority was not 42%, not 67%, but 68% responsible for the consequences of an intentional terrorist bombing, indicts the civil justice system as a whole. It has become less a search for the truth than a search for the money.

Contingent-fee attorneys rarely have the incentive to go after the most culpable party, who all too often does not have the financial assets to account for the damage he has done. It is far more profitable to manufacture a storyline that makes the deep-pocketed bystander look responsible.

In the pending litigation over the September 11, 2001, attack, attorneys didn’t sue the kitchen sink, but managed to name just about everyone else as defendants: airlines (including 11 airlines other than the two who lost planes), airports, architects, banks, Boeing, Motorola, and New York City, among others.
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This saga has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with enriching trial lawyers. The Port Authority has every incentive to keep car bombs out of their buildings. If discretionary decisions over detailed safety reports can result in liability because of second-guessing by lawyers, that deters detailed safety reports more than anything else.

One of the great achievements of the feminist movement is that society no longer faults the victim of a rape and callously says, “She was asking for it” because of provocative dress. Yet even as we’ve become more enlightened over the decades in our approach to victims in the criminal justice system, the opposite trend has taken place in the civil sphere.

OK, I admit it, I'm not a lawyer. But shouldn't the terrorists who actually built the bomb and deliberately detonated it for the express purpose of killing as many people as possible, also be the ones who are primarily blamed for the attack? Is that too much to ask?