Melong v. Micronesian Claims Commission, 76-1201
Decision Date | 12 September 1977 |
Docket Number | No. 76-1201,76-1201 |
Citation | 569 F.2d 630,186 U.S.App.D.C. 391 |
Parties | Minniah MELONG et al., Appellants, v. MICRONESIAN CLAIMS COMMISSION, an Agency of the United States, et al. |
Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit |
Richard A. Frank, Leonard C. Meeker, Eldon V. C. Greenberg, Washington, D.C., and Ann E. Allen, Saipan Islands, Mariana Islands, were on the brief for appellants.
Rex E. Lee, Asst. Atty. Gen., Civ. Div., Dept. of Justice, Earl J. Silbert, U.S. Atty., Ronald R. Glancz and Barbara L. Herwig, Attys., Civ. Div., Dept. of Justice, Washington, D.C., were on the brief for appellees.
Before McGOWAN, ROBINSON and WILKEY, Circuit Judges.
Appellants brought suit in the District Court challenging the standard by which the Micronesian Claims Commission determined the amounts of awards made to them 1 under the Micronesian Claims Act of 1971. 2 The District Court dismissed the action 3 on the ground that review was precluded by the Act. 4 In Ralpho v. Bell, 5 decided today, we found some limited scope for review of activities of the Commission, 6 and since this case, unlike Ralpho's, presents no question beyond our authority to resolve, 7 we have exercised our function fully. We find that the Commission's measure of recovery contravenes the statute of which it is a creature. We accordingly remand the case to the end that the challenged awards will be vacated by the District Court and redetermined by the Commission.
Melong Laitak died as a result of the conflict in Micronesia between the United States and Japan during World War II. When, over 25 years later, the Commission was established to deal with claims of loss arising from those hostilities, 8 his survivors, appellants here, 9 filed a claim form, praying for recompense of $11,000. 10 On the basis of their filing, the Commission issued its first opinion allowing the claim but incorporating a strikingly different assessment of the appropriate award. 11 This initial decision acknowledged the Commission's statutory duty to resolve claims "in accordance with the laws of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and international law," 12 yet it eschewed reliance on either territorial or international wrongful-death recovery rules which, like regulations applied in war-claims programs elsewhere in the Pacific theatre, 13 had as their goal compensation of survivors for "pecuniary damages sustained by them" 14 as a result of their loss. Those compensatory standards, operable as they were on an evidentiary showing, were perceived as inconvenient because "memories have dimmed and documents are much more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to obtain." 15 Instead, the Commission devised a chart setting, for all cases, the quantum of recovery entirely by the decedent's age at death. 16 Using this chart and Melong's age of 27 at death, the Commission awarded his survivors $4,400. 17
Melong's survivors then availed themselves of the mechanism for administrative reconsideration, 18 following which the Commission promulgated a final decision 19 cleaving to the measure of recovery it had previously elected but drastically revamping its reasoning. The keystone of its new rationale was the ex gratia denomination of payments under the Micronesian Claims Act, 20 for it read the congressional invocation of Trust Territory and international law 21 as directing it only to those laws pertaining to ex gratia war claims. 22 Territorial and international wrongful-death principles were dismissed as "clearly inapplicable" because rooted in culpability rather than charity. 23 Generalizing that "under international law, when no liability to compensate the survivors exists . . . an arbitrary payment may be made," the Commission related several instances in which ex gratia payments of flat sums had been made, 24 and suggested that recourse to an arbitrary rule in the instant case was "equitable and reasonable." 25 Examination of the claimants' evidence relating to damages was in its view "unnecessary"; all the Commission needed was the decedent's age at the last. 26
The Commission asks us to believe that Congress purported to bind it to the imperatives of international and local law in order merely to demonstrate the degree to which the Commission was unfettered by any legal norm, and so might act with impunity. Were anyone ever inclined to impute such queer behavior to a legislature, it could not be done here, for a ringing refutation of that view resounds from the legislature's very command.
The Act recites, to be sure, that its mission is ex gratia settlement of Micronesian war claims 27 ex gratia because both the United States and Japan have historically denied any responsibility to satisfy them. 28 Just as assuredly, Congress intended the Commission to disregard questions of culpability under international law in deciding whether claims were to be allowed, and to debar no one simply because a nation's culpable involvement in a death could not be shown. 29 Yet the statute implicitly, and its legislative history positively require consideration and adjudication of claims to be otherwise "in accordance with" international law standards. 30 And international law, though it imposes liability for death caused by unlawful activities during hostilities, 31 and prescribes therefor recovery equal to the pecuniary loss consequentially suffered by survivors, 32 assesses no liability whatever for death resulting from war lawfully conducted, and provides, of course, no "rule" at all for determining awards therefor. The Commission's ex gratia interpretation, with its built-in premise that neither the United States nor Japan contributed culpably to any Micronesian death, would permit blithe disregard of every measure of damages discoverable in international law, and charge it only to heed a nonexistent rule. Clearly no such outcome was contemplated by Congress, and its illogic is further manifested by its relegation to the whimsy of the Commission of even those whose claims might have satisfied the international law standard establishing liability.
If this were not bad enough, the Commission's reading would wreak the same evisceration of the congressional invocation of territorial law as a constraint on the Commission. Trust Territory law gives compensatory damages for wrongful death 33 but, not surprisingly, embodies no principles regarding war claims, much less guidelines for ex gratia awards deriving from deaths inflicted in derogation of no legal norm. Thus the Commission, by narrowing its perspective to encompass only ex gratia programs for Micronesians, would ignore territorial law as it is, and hypothesize rules of law that do not and never did exist in the Trust Territory. Such a construction, leading as it does to patent absurdity, is obviously to be avoided. 34
The Commission's argument cannot be supported on the ground of statutory ambiguity inherent in Congress' twin commands to pass over the normal international law inquiry into culpability but to act in all other respects in accordance with international and territorial law. Taken together, they unmistakably mean that "unlawful" deaths, like every other category of claims adjudicated by the Commission, are to be treated consonantly with those bodies of law, and if they are they will, as the Commission concedes, 35 spark recovery of such pecuniary damages as survivors are shown to have sustained. The direction to treat "lawful" and "unlawful" deaths identically 36 plainly commands consideration of both types of claims at the same rate and compliably with international and Trust Territory law respecting "lawful" death both on a compensatory basis.
Similarly, every indication in the legislative history points to determination of appropriate compensation for claimants' losses as they variously appear from case-by-case consideration. The Department of the Interior, under whose aegis the prototype bill was drafted, asserted that "even though it represents a most difficult task, the (death) claims will need to be adjudicated in terms of the values of the early 1940's." 37 The man who negotiated the treaty 38 that the Act sought to effectuate used Trust Territory wrongful death awards as indices of recoveries realizable under the Act, 39 and agreed with the Department that the Commission would need to compute recoveries in terms of wartime conditions in Micronesia. 40 Some controversy centered around the figures he adduced, 41 but no one suggested that the compensatory principles couched in Trust Territory wrongful-death awards were to be disregarded. And there was general and explicit agreement that the Micronesian awards were to be guided by war-claims awards in Guam, 42 which again were founded on compensatory principles. 43
Against this backdrop, the Commission's effort to render meaningless the directional signals provided by Congress strikes us as an abdication of its appointed role as the trier of fact in these claims proceedings as well as a clear violation of statute. One notes, moreover, that cases involving death claims by Micronesians against the United States between the end of hostilities and the return to civil government 44 which are adjudicated by the Commission under the same Act 45 are valued by the Commission on the basis of "evidence of pecuniary loss . . ., the age of the decedent and any history of earning capacity." 46 In light of that determination, and the Commission's acceptance of the necessity of adducing testimony and determining compensatory value in other sorts of cases, 47 its failure to do so in death cases all the more clearly represents a departure from statute as well as from practice.
The scope of judicial review of Commission action is, as we caution in...
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