Orlando Injury Lawyers Face Feres Doctrine
An Orlando woman came to our office to share a terrible tale of obvious neglect leaving her family member severely injured. Yes, the tortfeasor was a deep-pocket and there were no issues of comparative negligence. What’s more, hearing about the victim and his extraordinary attributes left no doubt that fair compensation would require a substantial award. Nonetheless, I spent the rest of the conference explaining why our firm could not bring a injury claim for that family. The reason: the injured plaintiff was a U. S. military serviceman and the tortfeasor was the United States.
Our military members have been barred from suing the federal government for injury resulting from negligence or medical malpractice. It does not matter how egregious the wrongful conduct, unlike civilians, the military men and women have no right to hold the United States accountable for preventable injury and death.
While injury and medical malpractice lawyers understand these limitations most Americans do not know that service members are denied the basic right to sue when they are injured by negligence. The military's loss of legal protections is the result of a 1950 Supreme Court ruling on a series of cases that became known collectively as the Feres Doctrine. It was named after Army Lt. Rudolph Feres, who died in a fire allegedly caused by an unsafe heating system in his New York barracks. In this and later opinions, the Supreme Court interpreted the Federal Tort Claims Act to effectively bar any tort actions by servicemembers, even though Congress exempted only "combat-related" injuries. The court unilaterally decided that even injuries in peacetime that are far removed from any combat-related function are still "incident to service."
With the Walter Reed Hospital scandal in the news and everyone concerned about our military working to its limits, Congress should take this opportunity to amend the Federal Tort Claims Act and end this terrible doctrine. From statements by the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts, the Feres doctrine is not well-received. Yet it remains a bar to meritorious lawsuits in a vast array of activities involving our military. One horrible example is the rape of a military woman that could have been prevented. Do we really need such injustice to continue?
