Friends for All Children, Inc. v. Lockheed Aircraft Corp.

87 F.R.D. 560, 1980 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12306
CourtDistrict Court, District of Columbia
DecidedMay 30, 1980
DocketCiv. A. No. 76-0544
StatusPublished
Cited by3 cases

This text of 87 F.R.D. 560 (Friends for All Children, Inc. v. Lockheed Aircraft Corp.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, District of Columbia primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Friends for All Children, Inc. v. Lockheed Aircraft Corp., 87 F.R.D. 560, 1980 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12306 (D.D.C. 1980).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

OBERDORFER, District Judge.

I.

A.

Trials of three of the 150 damage claims of surviving infant plaintiffs establish that some better procedure for scheduling these cases for trial and providing interim relief is urgently required. The medical evidence adduced thus far suggests that some of the 147 remaining eases should have a priority for trial while others should be deferred until the medical condition of the plaintiffs has developed with greater clarity than is now available. Moreover, in view of the extraordinary amount of time the trial of these remaining cases will consume, the plaintiffs may be entitled to interim relief (1) to determine objective criteria for establishing the priority of these cases for trial; [562]*562(2) to provide medical diagnostic care necessitated by the risks inherent in their exposure to the conditions of the crash; and (3) to provide medical treatment to obviate or mitigate the effects of injuries likely to have been caused by the crash. These remedies may be required by the inability or refusal of plaintiffs and defendant to make a realistic appraisal of the claims and defenses.

B.

These 150 cases grow out of the April, 1975, crash near Saigon of a Lockheed-built United States Air Force C5-A transport plane carrying United States military and civilian personnel and 226 Vietnamese orphans. The claims by and on behalf of the orphans now before the Court and the estates of the 76 deceased ones were filed in this Court in 1975 and 1976 by Friends For All Children (FFAC), the Colorado charitable corporation which had cared for the children in Vietnam and arranged for their adoption and transportation out of that country as the war was ending. Plaintiffs have demanded jury trials.

One FFAC complaint, No. 76-0544, sought damages for injuries allegedly suffered by 150 surviving orphans. The other FFAC complaint, No. 75-0874, sought damages for the estates of the 76 deceased orphans. The Court appointed a guardian ad litem to represent the surviving orphans. In addition, the adoptive parents of 67 orphans have intervened to represent their wards and some parents have intervened on their own account. The persons serving as guardians have applied for and received letters of administration in two decedent cases.

After protracted pretrial litigation, including an interlocutory appeal, Lockheed and the United States agreed on September 14, 1979, not to contest Lockheed’s liability to the surviving orphans for compensatory damages. In late 1979, the Court scheduled March 17 jury trials of damage actions brought on behalf of three infant survivors of the crash, and reserved time on its calendar for May, June, and July trials of other damage claims which the parties could not settle amicably. The parties and the Court anticipated that trial of the first cases would set a standard for measuring damages suffered by all the infant plaintiffs, who in most cases complain of quite similar injuries. Thus, these trials were expected to obviate the necessity of trying the bulk of the claims of the remaining infant survivors. The Court further anticipated that as a result of the stipulation of liability, these first cases would be decided on the medical testimony of each side’s experts who had examined the infants and formed opinions about the nature and extent of their injuries. The trial time set aside after the first three trials Was expected to have been utilized for cases that varied from the norm.

In fact, trial of the first case, Schneider v. Lockheed, lasted nearly one month, much of which was consumed by a protracted contest over the circumstances of the crash itself. The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff Schneider of $500,000. Trial of the second case, Zimmerly v. Lockheed, commenced immediately before the same jury. Despite the fact that much of the evidence in Schneider was incorporated into the record in Zimmerly, that trial lasted more than two weeks. Prior to submission of the case to the jury, the parties settled one element of plaintiff’s claim for $30,000; thereafter, the jury returned a verdict for the defendant. After a week’s recess, a trial of the third case, Marchetti v. Lockheed, began before the same jury (with two former alternates replacing two withdrawing jurors). That trial continued for nearly three weeks before the case was submitted to the jury.

C.

On the basis of this substantial experience, I have come to four conclusions: first, early settlement of these claims is now unlikely.

Second, it will take a single judge six or more years to try all of these cases; even if the untried cases are now distributed among all the judges of the District Court, it would still be years before each of these actions is brought to trial.

[563]*563Third, the three trials have made clear that all plaintiffs aboard the C-5A shared a traumatic experience involving explosive decompression at a high altitude, hypoxia, and crash. This shared experience corresponds to an unusually large number of symptoms of minimal brain dysfunction (MBD) in the 34 plaintiffs who have already been examined by specialists. The children were about one year of age at the time of the crash; they are now entering kindergarten or the first grade. MBD manifests fewer objective symptoms in children who are the age of plaintiffs than will be the case when they are eight-to-ten years old and confront the more formidible challenges of the third and fourth grades in school.

Experts for both parties agree that in three or four years most of those with permanent disability will be more easily diagnosed; those who have suffered no permanent disability can be identified more confidently. Thus, even defendant’s experts who now find no objective signs of injury in particular children concede that these children may later manifest these symptoms; and even plaintiffs’ experts, who are certain that particular plaintiffs suffered these latent injuries and now show initial signs of incapacity, cannot testify as confidently now as they will later about the degree to which these injuries will cause permanent disability. Even at the stage when these injuries “ripen,” a plaintiff’s needs for medical treatment and special educational services as a result of the crash may vary from month-to-month or year-to-year.

Fourth, the medical testimony has made it possible to decide now whether as a group plaintiffs presently require systematic diagnosis and observation to alert doctors to incipient manifestations of brain injury, and whether those who show signs of injury should have prompt medical and rehabilitative treatment to minimize or obviate the effects of the injury.

D.

Unless some alternative procedure is developed promptly for the remaining 147 cases, some plaintiffs may win large verdicts and yet never develop the serious needs forecast for them by the jury. Where this happens, Lockheed stockholders and United States taxpayers will assume a burden which is essentially a wind-fall to the infant plaintiff, its family, and its counsel. Other plaintiffs who ultimately win verdicts may nevertheless have suffered irreparable injury before trial judgment makes funds available for medical treatment and special services; this may be too late to reverse or even moderate their conditions.

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87 F.R.D. 560, 1980 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12306, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/friends-for-all-children-inc-v-lockheed-aircraft-corp-dcd-1980.