Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday
HARRISBURG – Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday has joined a bipartisan group of 31 state AGs in filing a friend of the court brief at the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the victims and families of victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks demanding they be awarded financial judgements from frozen Taliban funds.
The states represented in the coalition have citizens who were among the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11, 2001, and among the Americans the Taliban has killed and maimed since. Some of those citizens – and the estates of others – won the judgments at issue here: roughly $17 billion in final judgments against the Taliban, entered by federal courts, many after decades of litigation.
Despite those judgments, the Second Circuit now has told them that $3.5 billion in Taliban-controlled funds sitting a few blocks from Ground Zero is beyond their reach because the U.S. Treasury Department froze the Taliban funds eight days before the Taliban installed their own government and took control of the country’s bank. The AGs say that was a misreading of the congressional statute.
In short, Congress has said that in every case in which a person has received a judgment against a terrorist because of an act of terrorism, any assets in the U.S., including the blocked assets of that terrorist party, can be used to fulfill that judgment. The coalition argues that simple rule applies here, regardless of when the Taliban government took over Afghanistan.
“The victims of September 11 and their families have carried the consequences of that day for 25 years,” Sunday said. “Those who have secured judgments against the Taliban deserve the opportunity to see those judgments enforced. Pennsylvania stands with these victims and families as they seek justice.”
Also joining the Iowa-led brief are the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
