Court Asked To Reinstate Slavery Reparations Cases
September 28, 2006
By ANDREW HARRIS, Bloomberg News

CHICAGO -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., Aetna Inc. and CSX Corp. are among the U.S. corporations that should pay for their involvement in the nation's 19th-century slave trade, three lawyers told a federal appeals court Wednesday.

The attorneys asked a three-judge U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel to reinstate nine lawsuits seeking reparations from the companies, which are accused of either bankrolling slave owners, insuring the slaves or owning them outright. A lower-court judge threw out the suits last year, ruling that the defendants had not injured anyone who was alive today.

"We are here today seeking some measure of redress for the victims of a crime against humanity," plaintiffs' lawyer Roger Wareham of Brooklyn, N.Y., told the judges.

Wareham first asked the all-white, all-male panel to disqualify itself, asking why a black female judge who heard three earlier cases was no longer on the panel. He was told to file a formal motion within 10 days.

The first reparations cases were filed four years ago by a black female lawyer from New Jersey, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who was in the courtroom Wednesday.

She says her great-great grandfather was a South Carolina slave whose life was insured by Aetna.

Her suit and the others were brought in the wake of successful efforts to obtain reparations for Holocaust victims and for Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

"The importance of the issue does not excuse standing requirements," defense attorney Alan Madans of Chicago told the court.

Madans and co-defense counsel Owen Pell of New York's White & Case argued that the plaintiffs can't show they suffer today for acts that may or may not have been perpetrated against their ancestors by the defendants more than 100 years ago.

"There's no linkage," Madans said.

More than 15 corporations were named as defendants in the suits, including New York-based JPMorgan Chase, the nation's third-biggest bank; Hartford-based Aetna, the big insurer; Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX, the third-biggest U.S. railroad company; and New York Life Insurance Co. Madans and Pell argued on behalf of all of them.

Wareham and his colleagues contended that the lower-court judge, U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle, dismissed the suits prematurely without holding a hearing to explore the factual underpinnings of the plaintiffs' cases.

Presiding Judge Richard Posner and his colleagues questioned both sides about the feasibility of fashioning a remedy for the plaintiffs.

"The courts have finite intellectual resources," he said.

The judges did not render a decision.

Outside the court, Wareham continued to question the disappearance of Judge Ann Claire Williams from the panel before the reparations case was heard.

"We would have been fools to think there was not any racial aspect" to Williams' removal, Wareham said at a press conference after the proceedings.

Deputy Court Clerk Andrew Burke said in an interview that the process of selecting panel judges is done by computer and designed to ensure an even distribution of the court's caseload.

Burke conceded that if a judge had voluntarily excused herself from a panel, such information would not be made public.

A person answering the phone in Williams' chambers said the judge declined to comment on her absence from the panel. That person declined to give her name.

JPMorgan Chase spokesman Tom Kelly in Chicago declined to comment on the reparations lawsuits.

He did say that in accordance with a Chicago city ordinance, JPMorgan Chase last year disclosed that two Louisiana banks that were later acquired by Chase did accept slaves as collateral for loans made in the 1840s and 1850s.

Aetna has acknowledged that it wrote life insurance on slaves more than 140 years ago, company spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said by phone.

"In early 2000, we expressed sincere regret in apologizing for our role in an awful period in this country's history," she said. "Those wanting to make a constructive contribution to important issues should focus on the present and future."

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