Emphasis mine... I think people know what I think of these "victims" families...

 

Still, the grief of the survivors is powerful. Mr. Low, the
self-made owner of a small limestone mining company in Batesville,
Ark., sometimes wears a silver and lapis lazuli ring he gave to his
daughter that was found in the wreckage.

While waiting for his case to get to court, he has learned from F.B.I.
records that his daughter gave her childhood home phone number to
another flight attendant to make a hasty call to a friend to report the
hijacking.

Sara Low had just moved to a new apartment, and her
father imagines that in the stress of the hijacking, she gave the
flight attendant, Amy Sweeney, the only number she could remember, one
that reached back to her childhood in Arkansas.

The plaintiffs
point to box-cutters carried by the hijackers as evidence of lapses in
airport security. To further support their contention that the airlines
could have been more vigilant, they cite, in their master liability
complaint, a 1999 Federal Aviation Administration report saying Osama bin Laden had “implied” that he could use a shoulder-fired missile to shoot down a military passenger aircraft.

Lawyers
for the defendants in the coming damages trials — United and American
Airlines; airport security companies; Boeing, the aircraft
manufacturer; and others — say the lawsuits are misguided, that the
aviation industry played by the government rules at the time, and that
the terrorists knew what they could get away with.

“We strongly
believe the aviation defendants are not to be blamed for terrorist
attacks on the country,” Joseph F. Wayland, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher
& Bartlett, said for the defense group as whole.

Still, they
recognize this is not an ordinary product liability case, filled with
obscure technical details, but one of the most studied episodes in
history, recorded in the voluminous and exhaustive 9/11 Commission
report, news media accounts and even the Central Intelligence Agency’s report released last month, detailing the agency’s missteps before the attacks.

Those
reports, very much in the public domain, will be the elephant in the
room, as Donald A. Migliori, a lawyer with Motley Rice, said. “If you
put every actor who in part or in whole allowed the events of 9/11 to
happen in this courtroom, and take each of their respective shares of
responsibility and aggregate it, you have 100 percent liability,” he
said. “What is the number that you come up with?”

The defendants say they trust that the judge will keep those ghosts out of the courtroom.

Most
of the families are represented by Motley Rice, an aggressive law firm
based in South Carolina. Motley Rice, known for its tobacco, lead paint
and asbestos litigation, initially represented 53 cases, and still has
30 after settlements.

Ms. Schiavo, who is a frequent television
commentator on aviation disasters and terrorism, now works for Motley
Rice and brought 44 of the 9/11 cases with her. In addition, Motley
Rice had signed up nine on its own.

The plaintiffs acknowledge
that the biggest difference between the two sides is over the value of
pain and suffering. Economic losses are calculated by a mathematical
model, and the margin for dispute is relatively small.

If there
is anything that characterizes many of the remaining holdouts in the
lawsuits, their lawyers acknowledge, it is that they tend to be people
who would not have received high awards from the federal government’s
September 11th Victim Compensation Fund — children, retirees, single
people without dependents.

Pain and suffering is another matter,
more ineffable. The Sept. 11th fund awarded a flat rate of $250,000 for
pain and suffering for each person who died in the attacks, and another
$100,000 each to surviving spouses and children.

Congress
created the Victim Compensation Fund within days of the attacks, to
protect the airlines from financial ruin by discouraging lawsuits.
People who filed by Dec. 22, 2003, had to relinquish their right to sue.

The
fund paid $6 billion to survivors of 2,880 of those killed in the
attacks, representing 97 percent of the families of the dead, according
to its final report.

But in the mathematical model of the fund, despite the discretion exercised by its special master, Kenneth R. Feinberg,
the economic losses of a child like Asia Cottom, whose dream of being a
doctor was harshly interrupted before anyone could know whether she
would realize it, could not compare with those of a stockbroker leaving
behind a spouse and children.

Mrs. Cottom, a branch chief for
civil rights at the Department of Agriculture, and her husband, on the
staff at Choice Academy, an alternative school in Washington, had taken
out life insurance on their daughter, because they thought it was the
responsible thing to do. The compensation fund deducted death benefits
like life insurance from any award.

The Cottoms’ lawyers would
not say how much Asia might have received from the fund. Mrs. Cottom
said she believed they would have received little more than the minimum
$250,000 — an amount she found “insulting.”

She lost a
daughter, she said, who had her first menstrual period just before the
fatal flight, a school trip to Los Angeles. “I took her to Wal-Mart to
buy sanitary napkins,” Mrs. Cottom said. “So she was growing up one day
and the next day she’s gone.”

Her decision to reject the fund was
not hard, she said. “To me, it just smelled of dishonesty. How do you
justify, O.K., an 11-year-old is worth $2, but because you’re the pilot
of that plane, that’s worth $2 million?”