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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas voiced disagreement Monday with his colleagues’ decision to reject a widow’s request that the high court consider whether the federal government owes her for her husband’s death.
Thomas said that if the justices had taken up the case, it would have been an opportunity to rein in a decades-old precedent that says servicemembers’ families cannot file wrongful death lawsuits against the government if the victim was killed while performing his or her job duties.
“We should have granted certiorari. Doing so would have provided clarity about [Feres v. United States] to lower courts that have long asked for it,” Thomas wrote.
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The case centered on Air Force Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck, who was killed in 2021. Beck had been leaving a military base in Missouri on his motorcycle to meet his wife and then seven-year-old for lunch when a civilian government employee, distracted by her cell phone, struck Beck. He died on the scene, and the woman later admitted in a plea deal to causing the accident.
When Beck’s widow tried to sue the government for her husband’s death, a federal court rejected the claim, as did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Both cited the Feres case, finding that the United States was immunized from such lawsuits because Beck was in the military.
Thomas said Feres should be overturned and that, in any case, the lower courts took a far too expansive view of it in Beck’s widow’s lawsuit. Beck was not performing any military service and was completely off duty at the time, Thomas said. Normally, that would be an “open and shut” wrongful death case, he said.
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“If the Court does not want to overrule its precedents in this area, it should at least be willing to enforce them,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas said Beck “was not ordered on a military mission to go home for lunch with his family. So Mrs. Beck should have prevailed under Feres.”
Four justices must support taking up a petition for the Supreme Court to do so. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a statement she supported rejecting the application, but she explained that she felt Congress needed to adjust the laws to override current precedents.
“I write … to underscore that this important issue deserves further congressional attention, without which Feres will continue to produce deeply unfair results like the one in this case and the others discussed in Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion,” Sotomayor wrote.
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