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. 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 September 11 Email: Date The local time and date when the message was written. 2002-01-20 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 dojN002136.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. 2002-01-20