In 1921, there were massive race riots which led to the destruction of the black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma and the murder of dozens or hundreds of blacks. (See Wikipedia for one account.) At the time, the official story exonerated local whites, blaming the riot on blacks; eventually, the whole incident was forgotten. In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature set up a commission, which issued a report four years later which found that in fact white residents, aided and abetted by the local government, were at fault.
Enter the lawyers. Eighty-two years after the incident, Johnnie Cochran, Charles Ogletree and other prominent attorneys filed a federal civil rights suit against the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma on behalf of the survivors, seeking monetary damages and injunctive relief. As you might expect, courts don’t look too kindly on eight-decade old lawsuits, and so the federal district and appellate courts dismissed the suit, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had long since passed. (The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.)
So now the lawyers (well, not Johnnie Cochran) are in Washington, trying to get Congress to retroactively extend the statute of limitations so they can sue. Ogletree is a driving force behind the slavery reparations movement, which so far has also foundered on statute of limitations issues; if he succeeds here, be assured that he won’t be resting on his laurels.
(To be clear, unlike many of the suits we chronicle on Overlawyered, the Tulsa suit is not inherently frivolous, and it may well be legitimate to assign blame to the city and state, for actions that (unlike slavery) were illegal even at the time. But, to reiterate: eighty years.)
6 Comments
What about the issue of standing to sue?
While 80 years does seem excesive, the fact that there was a massive cover-up has to be taken into account, I feel. Maybe the statute of limitations ought to start when the fraud/tort was discovered, not committed.
retroactively extend the statute of limitations
Aren’t ex post facto laws unconstitutional as per Article 1 sections 9 and 10 of the US Constitution?
Ray — no trouble there. These are the actual people who were injured.
Joh — the courts have addressed that issue in this case. Statutes of limitations often do toll for coverups — but they start when the plaintiff was on notice of the injury, not when he had every bit of information about it. There’s no question here that the survivors knew about the injuries. (And, indeed, they filed lawsuits about it at the time.)
The courts further addressed the issue of the fact that 1920s Oklahoma was not a hospitable place for blacks to sue over rights violations; the courts were willing to give the plaintiffs more time because of that. But they ruled that sometime between the 1960s and the present, that changed, and waiting until 2000 was too long.
So what’s the problem? Whose fault is it that it took 80 years to file suit? The plaintiffs, or the scum who killed or injured their predecessors?
If you don’t like lawsuits brought 80 years after the fact, here’s a solution: DON’T LIE TO THE PLAINTIFFS FOR 80 YEARS.
It shouldn’t have happened, and that it wasn’t properly prosecuted back then is a stain on this nation’s history, but after 82 years, it’s impossible to hold a fair trial, or to punish the guilty or compensate the majority of the victims.
What evidence would be presented at trial? Nearly all the witnesses are dead, and the survivors were small children. There may be documentary evidence, but (1) most documentary evidence won’t stand on it’s own without witnesses involved in it’s production, and (2) if there was an effective coverup at the time, then there aren’t any contemporaneous documents to prove what the plaintiffs want it to prove.
If you could hold a trial, who pays whom? The people actually responsible are long dead. How can you hold present Tulsa taxpayers responsible for things that happened long before they were born or moved into Tulsa? Likewise, most of the victims are long-dead, and cannot be compensated.