By admin, on August 9th, 2008 Well, Judge Robinson finally made a ruling and it was a shocker. He bought the government’s argument hook line and sinker! The award was a little over $455 million dollars, a bare fraction of what the defendants were asking. This paltry sum for what amounts to over 100 years of demonstrated fraud, incompetence and outright theft by the government is a outrage and an affront to decency and the rule of law. If you want to read his opinion click here. You can read his reasoning, if you want to call it that, but I still have one more question. There are multifarious instances of judges spelling out their legal reasoning to cover a corrupt decision. Is this such a case? Did he bow to pressure or was he promised something? To me anyway, the decision just plain stinks.
At this point it seems that the plaintiffs should have settled for the $7 billion figure that was offered in settlement by the government a while back but even that was way too low.
I am so outraged by this that it is hard to write coherently about it so I will simply close by saying that if the plaintiffs choose to appeal I wish them all success.
To read about the background of the case go to the plaintiff’s web site.
August 9th, 2008 | Tags: 
You incorrectly say that the plaintiffs in March 2006 rejected a $7 billion offer from the government to settle the Indian Trust lawsuit.
The government has never offered to settle the Cobell vs Kempthorne lawsuit at any price. Every proposal made by plaintiffs and by mediators was rejected by the government.
The Bush administration in March 2007 suggested it was willing to spend $7 billion over 10 years to resolve a wide range of Indian issues, including land fractional land claims, the Cobell suit, scores of trust lawsuits filed by tribes and deny Indians any future legal standing to challenge these issues in the courts. This proposal was condemned by a wide range of Native leaders. It never went beyond testimony to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. And it contained no specific amount to settle the Cobell litigation.
In testimony before the committee Ms. Cobell said the figure was insufficient to settle her case alone. “This is not an offer — instead, it is a slap in the face for every individual [with] trust fund litigation,” she said. She did say that a mediator who had suggested recoveries could run between $7 billion to $9 billion in her case had made an interesting proposal and one that she “would want to talk about that more.”
But the Bush administration never followed up on her overture and never made any offer to the Cobell legal team to settle the class action lawsuit for any specific amount.
Lawyers for the Justice Department and the Interior Department have made clear during the Cobell litigation that the government’s firm position is that the Indians are owed nothing.
In 2006, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., did introduce legislation to settle the lawsuit without a specific dollar amount. He later amended that bill to include an $8 billion figure but his bill never moved out of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
Thanks for the reply. The $7 billion figure was quoted in an article on the Indian Trust – Cobell v. Kempthorne Site in an article entitled “Judge Awards Native Americans $455M in Trust Case–Far Less Than Sought”. I do hope that the amount awarded will be increased if the plaintiffs decide to appeal. I hate to say this but it’s my uneducated opinion that the fix is in and they can’t win no matter what they do. It’s a sad day in America.