Recently there has been great consternation in the media over rulings by the Supreme Court and lower courts which seem to have overtly political ramifications. There is an appearance of unethical behavior and conflict of interest among some members of the Supreme Court and no apparent mechanism for enforcing behavioral standards within that judicial body. Granting sweeping immunity to a former president makes a mockery of the judicial process. There have also been other concerns about conflicts in lower courts arising from the fact that certain judges in those trials have been appointed by the defendants in those proceedings, so that was another potential for court bias. However, such conflicts by Supreme Courts justices are not new; anytime the courts become involved in politics, injustice occurs. I am reminded of a similar situation that occurred in the 1970s concerning the Downwinders. In the 1950s thousands of sheep died after trailing in the area West of Cedar City and East of the NTS. The sheepmen (Bulloch, et.al.) sued the government for their losses blaming the deaths on fallout from the nuclear tests. The Government attorneys argued that poor range conditions had killed the sheep while at the same time knowing that actual evidence existed which would have proved that the symptoms experienced by those sheep were indeed caused by fallout. At Hanford, experiments had been performed on sheep using “artificial fallout.” made in nuclear reactors; and those reports showed that the resulting injuries were exactly the same as those seen in the range sheep near the NTS. The government attorneys keep those reports classified and they were not available to the plaintiffs’ attorneys. This was a clear conflict of interest and an obstruction of justice. Judge Christensen later commented that a fraud had been perpetrated on his court by those Government attorneys. The sheepmen lost their case and did not receive any compensation.
A decade later (1980s) there was a class-action lawsuit (Allen, et.al.) wherein 21 plaintiffs sued the Government for compensation alleging cancers and deaths, in people, were caused by nuclear bomb testing in Nevada. This time the court (Judge Jenkins) found in favor of the plaintiffs and awarded damages for 13 different types of cancer and ruled that those cancers had indeed been caused by the fallout. The government attorneys appealed the court decision to the Appellate Court in Denver where it was overturned on the basis of the Discretionary Function Provision of the Federal Torts Claims Act which says that the Government cannot be held responsible for actions taken deliberately as official acts at their sole discretion; i.e., an act which gives the Government full immunity for actions it does deliberately, even when it harms its own people. In other words, they are saying that “The King Can Do No Wrong.” Once again these plaintiffs also received no compensation at all.
After the Jenkins decision was overturned, the class-action attorney (Udall) appealed the Appellate Court’s decision to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ultimately declined to grant certiorari and thereby let the Appellate Court’s ruling stand, which gave the plaintiffs nothing. But there was a twist. Just before the appeal arrived at the Supreme Court Richard Nixon was elected President. One of his first official acts as President was to fill the seat vacated by Earl Warren, by appointing his buddy Warren Burger (a former Justice Department Attorney in the Civil Division) as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. When the Jenkins appeal arrived at SCOTUS Burger recused himself from the decision to hear on the basis of prior involvement; but the rest of the Court followed his lead and refused to hear the case; letting the Appellate Court decision (not to compensate) stand. It turns out that Burger was one of the Government attorneys on the Bulloch sheep case who had committed fraud on Christensen’s court and obstructed justice by withholding the Hanford “synthetic fallout” reports on sheep. And there is one more twist. During that sheep trial Burger had been receiving directions from the very highest Government level. Richard Nixon, the then Vice President under Eisenhower, had been his one time co-conspirator during that trial. It is clear that it was a deliberate intention by the Vice-President of the US to keep the dangers of nuclear fallout concealed from the American people and that intention went all the way to the White House.
In the 1990s Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act which provided a one time payment of $50,000 to people who lived in 7 counties downwind of the NTS during the bomb test years and who also contracted one of the 13 cancers that were originally compensated by Judge Jenkins in the (Allen class-action lawsuit). This Act was amended in 2000 to add additional cancers and counties but the payment remained the same. This provided a partial relief for the failure of the Judicial Remedy, but the shadiness of the courts’ and Vice-President’s involvement in the fallout health coverup remains a taint on the courts to this day. The disappointing performance of the courts is nothing new.