Ashton v. Al Qaeda Islamic

Background

Plaintiffs sued the Taliban and its former leader, Muhammad Omar, for injuries arising from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The defendants were served by publication, did not respond or appear, and were found in default in 2006. Plaintiffs later moved for partial final default judgments for different groups, including U.S. citizens, noncitizens, estates, people with personal-injury claims, and immediate family members.

Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn recommended granting default judgment and damages for certain claims and denying the remaining motions with leave to refile. One group of plaintiffs filed objections, so Judge Daniels independently reviewed the challenged portions of the recommendation and reviewed the remaining portions for clear error.

Rulings concerning Muhammad Omar

The court adopted the earlier recommendation to dismiss all claims against Omar because he was dead and the plaintiffs’ executive committees did not intend to substitute another party. The court therefore dismissed Omar from all actions in the multidistrict litigation and denied all motions for default judgment against him as moot.

Noncitizen plaintiffs

The court denied without prejudice the noncitizen plaintiffs’ motions for default judgment against the Taliban and allowed them to refile. The court explained that the Anti-Terrorism Act permits claims by U.S. nationals and specified related persons, while the Torture Victim Protection Act permits claims only against individuals; neither statute authorized these noncitizen plaintiffs’ claims against the Taliban, which the opinion describes as an unincorporated association. The court also found that the noncitizen plaintiffs had not identified their specific state-law causes of action clearly enough to determine the appropriate damages.

Any renewed motions were required to address jurisdiction, identify the law authorizing each claim, connect the complaint’s allegations to liability, identify the cause of action supporting each damages request, and explain the damages available under the applicable law.

U.S.-citizen plaintiffs and the Taliban

The court held that immediate family members, including parents and siblings and their functional equivalents, may qualify as “survivors” able to sue under section 2333 of the Anti-Terrorism Act; the court did not limit that right to legal heirs. It also declined to raise the statute of limitations on its own because the Taliban had forfeited that affirmative defense and the other plaintiffs could not assert it on the Taliban’s behalf.

The court found that it had jurisdiction over the U.S.-citizen plaintiffs’ default-judgment motions and that the allegations established the Taliban’s primary and aiding-and-abetting liability. It entered partial final default judgment for the listed U.S.-citizen plaintiffs and awarded treble damages for the specified pain-and-suffering, economic-loss, and solatium claims, subject to the corrections and qualifications in the order and the magistrate judge’s appendix. The awards also included prejudgment interest at 4.96 percent per year, compounded annually, from September 11, 2001, until the date of judgment. The plaintiffs could later apply for punitive, economic, or other damages not sought in the motions.

The motion filed in docket No. 18-cv-03353 was denied without prejudice and with leave to refile because the U.S.-citizen plaintiffs had not shown that they appeared in the operative complaint or provided sufficient evidence for economic and solatium damages. The court also denied a separate request to stay the effect of the new default judgments.