Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas dissented Monday after the high court declined to consider a widow’s request to sue the federal government over her husband’s death.
According to Fox News, Thomas argued that the case presented an opportunity to revisit Feres v. United States, a decades-old precedent barring servicemembers’ families from filing wrongful death claims if the victim died while performing military duties.
“We should have granted certiorari. Doing so would have provided clarity about [Feres v. United States] to lower courts that have long asked for it,” Thomas wrote.
The case involves Air Force Staff Sergeant Cameron Beck, who was killed in 2021 while leaving a military base in Missouri on his motorcycle. Beck was on his way to meet his wife and seven-year-old child for lunch when a civilian government employee, reportedly distracted by her cell phone, struck him.
Beck died on the scene, and the woman later admitted responsibility in a plea deal.
When Beck’s widow sought to sue the federal government for wrongful death, her claim was rejected by a federal court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, both citing Feres, which immunizes the government from such lawsuits when servicemembers are killed in connection with military service.
Thomas criticized the lower courts’ interpretation, noting that Beck was off duty and not performing military service at the time of the accident. “Normally, that would be an ‘open and shut’ wrongful death case,” he wrote.
“If the Court does not want to overrule its precedents in this area, it should at least be willing to enforce them,” Thomas added. He emphasized that Beck “was not ordered on a military mission to go home for lunch with his family. So Mrs. Beck should have prevailed under Feres.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing separately, supported rejecting the petition but stressed the role of Congress in addressing the issue.
“I write … to underscore that this important issue deserves further congressional attention, without which Feres will continue to produce deeply unfair results like the one in this case, and the others discussed in Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion,” Sotomayor wrote.
The decision leaves Beck’s widow without a legal avenue to pursue her claim, highlighting ongoing controversy over Feres and the limits it imposes on families of military personnel.
