Trump Administration

Suburban Woman Says Trump Administration is Opposing Her Efforts to Win Terror Judgment

A suburban woman who came close to death following a terror attack in Jerusalem in 2002, faces an uphill legal battle after the United States Justice Department asked the Supreme Court not to hear her case against the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“It doesn’t make much sense to me how they are OK with just ignoring their own citizens,” Shayna Gould told NBC 5. “It’s pretty much the unthinkable.”

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.

“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!”

Gould and her fellow plaintiffs were 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.

After Gould and the others appealed to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration’s Solicitor General filed a brief noting the lower court’s rulings, and asking them not to take the case.

“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 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 latest filing rests largely on the appellate court’s technical readings of the law.

While great heft is often given to a Solicitor General’s position, the high court is known to overrule the office, and recently did so when they sent the Trump administration’s DACA case back to the lower courts. Gould and her father say they understand that even if the Supreme Court hears their case, they could lose.

They say they just want that chance.

“We’ll see where the chips fall, but give us this opportunity,” she said. “I absolutely feel the government is letting me down.”

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