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. Dear Mr. Kenneth L. Zwick The following are my objections to the Victims' Compensation Fund: The airline bailout act gave the airlines $15 billion of taxpayers' money and capped the airlines' liabili- ty for the 9/11 crashes at the limits of their insurance coverage. It set up the Fund so the airlines' bailout would not come at the expense of the victims' families. DOJ has ignored the fundamental mandate of the act to provide full and fair compensation to victims and their families, and instead created a formulaic federal program based on irrelevant concepts more familiar to the bureaucracy. . The DOJ's proposed awards for non-economic damages ($250,000 per victims plus $50,000 for a spouse and each dependent) are only-tenth the level pain in comparable cases. For example, a spouse was awarded $5 million in non-economic damages in a lawsuit arising out of Lockerbie. . Congress explicitly enumerated a broad range of non-economic damages for which victims and their families shall be compensated. . DOJ ignored this, and based its presumed awards on a military group life insurance program (SGLI) with a maximum policy of $250,000, and federal statute providing $250,000 to families of fallen public safe- ty officers-on top of other amounts they may receive. . DOJ's approach assumes that Congress intended the non-economic damages to be illusory, because a $250,000 SGLI payment for a serviceman killed at the Pentagon would wipe out those damages under the col- lateral offset requirement. . DOJ's proposed awards for economic damages grossly underestimate actual losses, because DOJ relied on outdated, inapplicable work-life and life-cycle earnings data. Forensic economists have discovered other serious flaws in DOJ's methodology. . DOJ underestimates promotions and other increases in earnings for victims. It relied on federal civil service and military retirement system boards that track federal worker incomes and pension requirements, not the higher-paying private sector career paths. . DOJ's reliance on past 3 years of income (which the Special Master "may average") looks suspiciously like a federal pension approach, rather than considering the likely income-earning potential of the decedent, as is routinely done in wrongful death cases. . The regulations arbitrarily cap a victim's income at $225,000 a year, cutting some families' compensa- tion by over 50%. As a result, many widows will have to sell their homes, deplete their children's college funds, and give up their plans of being full-time parents while their children are young. . A family's award may be increased above the "presumptive" award only by a showing of "extraordi- nary circumstances" - beyond those suffered by other victims or victims' families. This makes the hearing or appeal to the Special Master a mere charade. . The low levels of the presumptive awards will result in many family members receiving little or noth- ing from the Fund, once the collateral source deductions (which are not required in a court case) are made. . DOJ should fulfill, rather than flout, the act's intent by revising its 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. Respectfully yours, Individual Comment Fair Haven, NJ September 11 Email: Date The local time and date when the message was written. 2002-01-31 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 dojN002482.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. 2002-01-31