In a box delivered by rolling handcart on the morning of Feb. 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court received 40 copies of a petition so unusual a clerk decided he couldn't accept it for filing. First, though, he turned through its pages.
In a preliminary statement, he read these words: Three widows stood before this court in 1952. Their husbands had died in the crash of an Air Force plane. The lower courts had awarded them compensation. But the United States was bent on overturning their judgments, and -- to accomplish this -- it committed a fraud not only upon the widows but upon this Court.
Filed by a prominent Philadelphia law firm, this petition asked for an exceedingly rare writ of error coram nobis -- an error committed in proceedings "before us." The petition's true author -- at least in spirit -- was a middle-aged woman from Bolton, Mass., named Judy Palya Loether. Her father had perished on that doomed Air Force plane when she was 7 weeks old. For most of her life, he'd been a mystery. She felt certain he would have had an effect, would have contributed to shaping a different Judy, perhaps a better Judy. Instead, she'd had a stepfather who seemed to withhold love. She'd raised a family and served her community, but she'd never lost her sense of wonder about her father, her desire to know him. In time, this impulse drew her into the past. What Judy Palya Loether wanted the Supreme Court to do was fix that past -- to fix its own 50-year-old error.
The clerk read on: At the heart of the case is a set of reports the Air Force prepared on the accident.... The Air Force refused to produce these reports, even to the district judge.... The United States took the case to this Court ... contending that the reports contained "military secrets" so sensitive not even the district court should see them.... This Court took the government at its word, and reversed. But, it turns out that the Air Force's affidavits were false. The Air Force recently declassified the accident reports. They include nothing approaching a "military secret." ... In telling the Court otherwise, the Air Force lied.... It is for this Court in exercise of its inherent power to remedy fraud, to put things right.
The clerk didn't need to puzzle over which long-ago case the petition addressed. Although U.S. vs. Reynolds wasn't familiar to the public, law students everywhere knew it to be the landmark 1953 ruling that formally established the government's "state secrets" privilege -- a privilege that has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination.
