N002136
Sunday, January 20, 2002 6:34 PM
To Mr. Ken Feinberg Interim Final Regulations
January 20, 2002
My husband, was murdered, in the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. was a bond trader working at . I always worried about when he would fly for business,
because I believed that the airlines were more concerned with profitability
then the safety of their employees and passengers - they played the odds with
the lives of others and we lost. Because of their negligence and poor FAA
regulation and over site, four planes were hijacked in succession and were
used as missiles to murder innocent people while they were at work. To
protect big business legislation was but in place to bailout the airlines -
the accomplices, while leaving families of 9/11 with a proposed settlement
which is an insult and unconstitutional.
The airline bailout act gave the airlines $15 billion in cash and loan
guarantees and
capped the airlines' liability for the September 11 crashes at the limits of
their insurance coverage. Because of this cap, the damage caused by the
crashes greatly exceeds the private fund available to compensate victims and
their families. Thus for the vast majority of us, the cap has the effect of
eliminating the right that we would otherwise have to sue the airlines.
Congress set up the fund to ensure that the airline bailout would not come at
the expense of the victims' families, but it now seems that it does, which is
an indication to me that our government is more concerned with big business
then American families. Have the airlines contributed any of the $1.5billion
of insurance coverage on each plane to the fund to be used to compensate
families? Will they get off completely; without so much as an apology to
families, let alone any admission of guild or wrongdoing?
The act mandates full and fair compensation to victims and their families for
their actual economic and non-economic damages. The DOJ has ignored this
mandate and instead has written arbitrary regulations that will result in
compensation levels far below the losses actual suffered by my family. The
DOJ's formula allows for non-economic awards at only one-tenth the level paid
in comparable cases, even though Congress explicitly enumerated a broader
range of non-economic damages than could be recovered in any single
jurisdiction. DOJ's formula for non-economic damages is $250,000 for the
person killed and $50,000 for the spouse and each dependent. In a wide
variety of air crash and terrorism cases, however, judges, juries, and
mediators commonly have provided non-economic damage awards well into the
seven-figure range. Independent economists have found serious flaws in DOJ's
method of calculating economic damages, including use of outdated and
inapplicable work life and life-cycle earnings data. This greatly
underestimates promotions and other increases in earnings that my husband
would have enjoyed. It relies on civil service and military retirement system
actuarial data that track federal worker incomes and pension requirements, my
husband was not in the military nor was he a civil servant, he worked in the private sector and compensation should be based on what would have been had he not been murdered.
Under DOJ's rules, I am entitled to a hearing to receive an increase above
the "presumptive"award, but I understand that I must show "extraordinary
circumstances" -- beyond those suffered by other victims or victims'
families. This high burden of proof makes a charade of the right to a hearing
provided by the statute. DOJ should fulfill the act's intent by revising the
rules to compensate victims and their families for the types of damages
specified by Congress, at levels comparable to those provided in the tort
system the fund was designed to replace. While DOJ has shown flexibility on
some aspects of the rules, it is resisting the victims' and families'
requests for significant changes.
Please do not victimize us further.
Respectfully,
Individual Comment
Croton-On-Hudson, NY