Share and Follow
Clarence Thomas during a 2018 legal discussion (YouTube/Library of Congress).
On Monday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas expressed strong disapproval towards his peers for their refusal to review a case involving a military widow. The case centers on her inability to sue the federal government after her husband was fatally injured in a crash with a civilian government employee, who later admitted full responsibility for the accident.
In an eight-page dissent issued the same day, Thomas urged the court to reconsider a precedent set 75 years ago, which grants the U.S. government immunity from a wide array of civil liability cases not explicitly covered by the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). The FTCA permits citizens to pursue claims against the government for damages due to negligent or wrongful actions by federal employees acting within their official capacity.
However, the FTCA includes a military exception preventing lawsuits related to “combatant activities” during wartime. Additionally, the Feres Doctrine, a judicially established rule, has broadened this exception to include “injuries incident to military service,” a stance that Thomas has consistently criticized.
The case in question involves the tragic death of Air Force Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck, who was off-duty when he perished in a motorcycle accident at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on April 15, 2021. Beck was en route home for lunch with his family when a government-employed civilian, driving a government-issued van, became “distracted on her phone” and turned directly into Beck’s path. Beck succumbed to his injuries at the scene, and the driver later confessed to criminal negligence, acknowledging her complete fault in the incident, according to court documents.
Following the accident, Beck’s widow filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government, which employed the driver. Thomas noted that this should have been a straightforward wrongful death case. However, the Feres Doctrine led the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case, effectively leaving Beck’s widow and their child without any legal remedy.
“Today, the Court denies her petition, so Mrs. Beck will recover nothing in tort for her husband’s wrongful death,” Thomas wrote.
The Feres Doctrine holds that the FTCA’s waiver of federal immunity does not apply in cases “where the injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to military service.”
Thomas asserts that even under existing precedent, which has been “almost universally condemned by judges and scholars,” the court should have taken Beck’s case, as his death “did not arise out of …activities incident to his military service.”
“The Court of Appeals acknowledged that Staff Sergeant Beck was ‘killed during off-duty hours’ and that his death ‘arose out of nonmilitary activities,’” Thomas wrote. “Feres itself distinguished cases in which the injured serviceman was ‘under compulsion of no orders or duty’ and was ‘on no military mission.’ Beck was not ordered on a military mission to go home for lunch with his family. So Mrs. Beck should have prevailed under Feres.”
Thomas also emphasized that the doctrine has been problematic among the lower courts, calling application of the Feres Doctrine “irreconcilable.”
“They have told us that the Feres doctrine is now ‘an extremely confused and confusing area of law,’” Thomas wrote, referring to the lower courts. “As I have explained, it is unsurprising that, with its atextual roots and vague rationales, ‘[t]he Feres doctrine cannot be reduced to a few bright-line rules’ and has thus left courts in disarray.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch did not join Thomas’ dissent, but said he too would have granted review of the case.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed in principle that Feres’s “atextual expansion” of the FTCA had garnered “near-universal criticism” and caused “significant confusion.” However, she voted to deny review “out of respect” for the court’s precedent, reasoning that it was on the legislature to make the necessary changes.