Staff Sgt. Cameron Beck hopped on his motorcycle on a spring day four years ago and set out for home on Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, where his wife and 7-year-old son were waiting to have their customary lunch with him.
Beck’s house was only about a mile from his workplace, but he never made it there that day, April 15, 2021. The 29-year-old was killed in a crash with Blanca Mitchell, a civilian employee driving a government-issued van.
Mitchell had become distracted by her cellphone and turned in front of him without looking, according to court documents. Beck, a cyber transport airman, died at the scene.
Now, his widow, Kari, is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review a wrongful death claim she filed against the federal government. Two lower courts rejected the case on grounds that Beck was in uniform and on base when he was killed.
“If my husband had been a civilian, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Kari Beck said in a phone interview last week. “It just doesn’t feel fair. Our service members and our families deserve better than that.”
At issue is the Feres doctrine, a judicial rule based on a 1950 Supreme Court decision that prevents active-duty military personnel from suing the federal government for wrongful injury or death related to their service.
The Beck petition asks the court to distinguish between Feres and a 1949 ruling in Brooks v. United States.
In that earlier case, the justices held that service members traveling in their vehicle on personal business could bring a claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act for injuries resulting from a government employee’s negligent driving.
Created in 1946, the act allowed plaintiffs to seek damages from the United States in claims stemming from the negligence of a federal employee.
But the Feres decision narrowed the scope of the legislation for active-duty personnel by saying that claims “where the injuries arise out of or are in the course of activity incident to service” aren’t covered.
The two lower courts that ruled in Beck’s case gave wide berth to the “incident to service” language in their interpretations.
In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit affirmed the district court decision, ruling that Feres applied to Beck’s complaint since he was on active duty, on base and subject to recall at the time of the crash.
Beck attorney Nathan Mammen argues that the Supreme Court needs to clarify what is and isn’t incident to service.
“It’s becoming increasingly where courts have thrown up their hands, ‘Well, we think it must mean, basically if you’re on active duty, then you can’t bring a claim,’ ” he said. “The Supreme Court has never said that.”
If history is any indication, Beck and Mammen face a tall order with their petition. The high court hasn’t ruled on a Feres case since 1987 despite wide-ranging calls for reexamining the doctrine, which critics say is outdated
Justice Clarence Thomas is among them. He called the doctrine “indefensible” and “senseless” in a lone, 14-page dissent from the majority in a February decision to reject review of the case of Maryland National Guard Staff Sgt. Ryan Carter.
Following back surgery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for chronic neck pain, Carter became paralyzed.
“Courts arbitrarily deprive injured servicemembers and their families of a remedy that Congress provided them,” Thomas wrote, urging the court to “fix this mess we made.”
Had Carter been a veteran rather than an inactive reservist, he could have filed a lawsuit for the same injuries arising from the same treatment by the same military staff at the same hospital, Thomas wrote.
In the Beck case, a veterans group and two civil liberties organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs that challenge both the two lower courts’ application of the Feres doctrine and the 1950 ruling itself.
Miriam Becker-Cohen, an attorney at the Constitutional Accountability Center, said the Feres decision was wrong from the get-go and has sown confusion in the decades since. “It has ballooned into a complete barrier to relief under the Federal Tort Claims Act for service members,” she said. “Different courts approach it in different ways.”
Kari Beck said that in the aftermath of her husband’s death she received hundreds of messages describing the impact he’d had on people, adding that he would have given the shirt off his back to anyone in need.
“That’s one of the reasons why I want to take this to the Supreme Court because that’s kind of his legacy, just to help others,” she said.
At the time of his death, he was working as the noncommissioned officer in charge of the 509th Bomb Wing’s communication security unit. “They needed an NCO to lead a shop that was outside of his career field,” his widow said.
He had served in the Air Force for six years.
He “was killed in such a senseless, tragic way,” Kari Beck said. “For the court to rule it was incident to service even though they acknowledged there was no military activity at the time of his death, that’s just been really hard.”
