The United States Supreme Court has declined to hear the case of a suburban Chicago woman and numerous other Americans who had sued the Palestine Liberation Authority for the organization’s support of terror acts in the Middle East.
Shayna Gould was a teenager when she was one of more than 40 people shot by a gunman on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in January of 2002. Clinically dead when she arrived in an Israeli hospital, she was saved by doctors and joined with 10 other families in a lawsuit filed against the PLO under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Gould and her fellow plaintiffs were actually victorious in the first round, winning a $655.5 million dollar judgment in federal court. But that award was overturned on appeal, the judges ruling the lower court lacked jurisdiction and that the PLO had not been offered adequate due process.
“We did it the right way---we went through the court system,” Gould said. “I was shot in 2002. This has been going on over a decade---that was 16 years ago.”
The Trump administration had asked the court not to hear the case, a stand which had outraged the plaintiff families.
“It doesn’t make much sense to me how they are OK with just ignoring their own citizens,” Gould told NBC5. “It’s pretty much the unthinkable.”
Trump had vocally campaigned on promises to take a tougher line on terrorism around the world. But after Gould and the others appealed to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration’s Solicitor General filed a brief in February, noting the lower court’s rulings, and asking them not to take the case.
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“We don’t understand it,” her father Ron Gould said. “They should stay out of it, or they should let the Supreme Court make the decision.”
The high court did not elaborate on its reasons for declining to hear the case, merely including it on a list of denied cases released today.
“This decision is extremely sad for the families who depended on our courts to administer justice fairly,” said Kent Yalowitz, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “They relied on a statute passed unanimously by Congress and signed by President George H.W. Bush. For the Department of Justice to have betrayed them after all these years, after they had come so far, is a grave insult to these families, and to Congress.”
“They take solace, however, in the knowledge that the moral arc of the universe is long, and that it bends toward justice.”
The Obama administration had also previously opposed pursuing the case. But while that opposition was based largely on fears of instability in an already volatile region should the Palestinian Authority be hit with a big judgment, the current administration’s filing rested largely on the appellate court’s technical readings of the law.
