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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 8, 1988)
Tuesday, March 8, 1988AFhe Battalion/Page 15 awyer: Settlement low or Challenger families ^WASHINGTON (AP) — An at torney experienced at representing K families of deceased astronauts Hd that the settlement negotiated by the government for four Chal lenger families was “woefully inade quate.” ■Ronald D. Krist, a Houston attor- 0U| ney who represented astronauts’ ^"vivors from the Apollo fire in 7 as well as three families from 1986 space shuttle disaster, said fe four Cnallenger families should "ve received more money and uld have if they had had formal ;al representation. Tie families, according to docu- _ nts released Monday, are divid ing a $7.735 million settlement. [jJWPart of the settlement will be paid an J * um P sums ar, d part W 'H come n | mm annuities. mdjWThe settlement was negotiated for the families by the Department of .y ptice. er '■^ orton Thiokol Inc., manufac- ’ jer of the rocket blamed for the | ( ymkallenger accident, paid 60 percent of the settlement, and the U.S. gov ernment paid the rest. Jf'If they’re happy, I’m happy for m,” Krist said of the four families t settled without filing lawsuits. Im 'But I would never have put my Stamp of approval for a settlement at 5 R level that they received. _ B“They would have netted more Hmey if they had been adequately IQ represented.” >0 Challenger exploded on Jan. 28, d l9S6, 73 seconds after it was pinched from the Kennedy Space Bnter in Florida. J^pSeven astronauts died in the Chal- ger accident. jThe husband of New Hampshire .. Bcher Christa McAuliffe, along with the wives of Challenger com mander Dick Scobee, mission spe- !rfh» list Ellison Onizuka and engineer ifijuce Jarvis, settled through the ^jifctice Department negotiations. if fcut the widow of mission special- si Ron McNair, the father of Jarvis, ‘ Uld the mother of mission specialist [udy Resnik all hired Krist to file separate suits only against Thiokol. li^BThe suits were settled out of :durt, but Krist said he was under :oiirt order not to discuss how much ceiuffcP aid - trudn ut was ^ unl a b° ut l h e g ov ‘ nJ, tltiment-negotiated settlement. B'That settlement is woefully inad- tquate,” he said. “I’m suggesting that B was representing them, I would tot have allowed any of them to set- ■ for the amount they received of ^™ than $2 million apiece (per fam- aiM ami k” But Betty Grissom, whose hus- ttnd Gus died in an Apollo space- TOft fire in 1967, said, “It sounds ; ike they did OK.” WGrissom said she received only Challenger families receive $7.7 million in settlement WASHINGTON (AP) — The government and rocket maker Mor ton Thiokol paid $7,735,000 in cash and annuities and divided the cost 40-60 to settle all claims by the fami lies of four of the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion. Documents released Monday showed that Morton Thiokol, which f iroduced the booster rocket blamed or the Jan. 28, 1986, explosion, paid $4,641,000. The government’s share of the settlements was $3,094,000. The surviving four spouses and six children actually will receive more than $7.7 million because each was given an annuity that pays bene fits larger than its cost but over a pe riod of many years. The dollar amount the families will receive over time was not re leased. With the release of the docu ments, the Justice Department set tled a civil suit brought under the Freedom of Information Act by the Associated Press and six other news organizations. The government originally had kept details of the settlements and negotiations secret, saying it needed to keep its internal deliberations confidential and also that the com pany and families demanded com plete secrecy. The settlements were reached Dec. 29, 1986, with the immediate survivors of spacecraft commander Dick Scobee, 46, a retired Air Force officer employed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administra tion; mission specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, 39, an Air Force lieutenant colonel; payload specialist Gregory Jarvis, 41, an employee of Hughes Aircraft Co.; and Christa McAuliffe, 37, a Concord, N.H., public high school teacher. The four families had no lawyers during the negotiations. They relied instead on informal advice from Leo B. Lind Jr., the law partner of McAuliffe’s husband and executor of her estate. Michael D. Oldak, the ex-husband of Judith Resnick, 36, a civilian NASA employee, represented her father, Marvm, and last month reached a settlement with the com pany to which the government did not contribute. In January, Resnik’s mother, Sa rah Resnik Belfer, and Jarvis’ father, Bruce, settled with Morton Thiokol, but the government did not contrib ute. Last May, the company settled a suit by Cheryl McNair, wife of mis sion specialist Ronald E. McNair, 35, a civilian NASA employee. $350,000, and she had to sue on her own for that. The government, she said, “didn’t care” and never attempted to help her or the widows of two other astro nauts who died in the Apollo fire. “I never heard from the Justice Department,” she said. “I thought we got an injustice done to us,” she said. “I feel like we got taken. They act like they care now, but they didn’t back then. “It kinda hurts. It stings that . . . we never got treated like that. It hurts when I think that they’re get ting that much money.” Michael D. Oldak, a Washington lawyer and ex-husband of astronaut Judith A. Resnik, said the docu ments confirm for him that Resnik family was treated unfairly by the government in settlement negotia tions. Resnik’s father, Marvin, and her estate were initially involved in set tlement negotiations with the gov ernment, sai^l Oldak, who rep resented the Resniks. He said the government made two offers, but neither was accepted. Oldak said that because Resnik was single and childless, and because the government’s compensation for mula was weighted heavily toward surviving spouses and children of as tronauts, the offer to Resnik’s survi vors was “a quarter to a half of what they were offering the other fami lies.” The government has declined to contribute anything to any of the families outside the four it nego tiated settlements with. Judy Resnik’s father and her es tate recently settled privately with Morton Thiokol for a sum that Mar vin Resnik said it was between $2 million and $3.5 million. Oldak declined to confirm the amount, but he said, “In hindsight, it was a good decision not to be part of the (government-negotiated) set tlement.” One lawsuit, filed by Jane Smith, widow of Challenger pilot Michael Smith, remains to be settled. Smith did not participate in the government-negotiated settlement, and a court ruled she could not sue the government. But she is suing Thiokol. §/lasters, Johnson fail to provide evidence to support AIDS claim i k|NEW YORK (AP) — The sex ex- Vulem Dr. William Masters and Vir- ''^ginia Johnson said Monday they could not provide scientific evidence to support their widely publicized claim that AIDS is “running ram pant” among heterosexuals. ■When Masters was asked at a con- teptious news conference how he could justify such a claim, he said, “1 itud simply believe this.” Johnson, asked the same question, said “I’m not sure we chose the word ‘rampant’ our selves.” On page seven of their new book, y write: “The AIDS virus is now ning rampant in the heterosex- il community.” The book, “Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS,” was Ipde available to reporters Monday n)orning. The first reports of its con- ii 0 *tents appeared in connection with an pkcerpt from the book published in this week’s Newsweek magazine. ji#: “We don’t see an explosion into Ule heterosexual community,” said Dr. Peter Fischinger, AIDS coordi- ||tor for the Public Health Service. iiwkW his does not mean we can be com placent about it.” He noted that na tionwide screening of blood donors has found that only about one in 40,000 has the potential of being in fected with the AIDS virus. “The Public Health Service has been working very hard to try to get the best sense of prevalence of HIV infection in the United States,” Fis chinger said. Dr. Stephen Joseph, New York City’s health commissioner, said of the Masters and Johnson study, “All in all, I think it’s greatly overblown.” He criticized them for not submit ting their data to a scientific journal where it could be reviewed in detail by other researchers, and he said their data did not support the sweeping claims they made. “1 think everyone would agree there is a serious danger in hetero sexual transmission,” he said. But “contrary to what they say, I think the Public Health Service people have been saying that for a long time.” Masters and Johnson and Dr. Robert Kolodny, their co-author and a director of the Masters & Johnson Institute in St. Louis, studied 800 men and women in Atlanta, St. Louis, New York and Los Angeles. The study, the centerpiece of their book, included only people who said they did not use illicit intra venous drugs and said they had had no homosexual or bisexual contact and no blood transfusions since 1977. Masters, Johnson and Kolodny chose four hundred men and women who said they had had at least six sexual partners each year for the preceding five years, and an other 400 who said they had been monogamous. The researchers found that 5 per cent of the sexually active men and 7 ercent of the sexually active women ad antibodies to the AIDS virus, meaning they had been exposed to it. Kolodny said the claim that AIDS is rampant among heterosexuals comes from studies by other re searchers. But other studies have di verged widely on the question of how rapidly AIDS is entering the non-drug-using heterosexual com munity. High court to review anti-racketeering law WASHINGTON (AP) — The Su- preme Court said Monday it will de cide whether states may use anti- racketeering laws to close down adult bookstores accused of selling obscene materials. ;; The court said it will review free- Sjbeech challenges to Indiana’s Rack eteer Influenced and Corrupt Orga nizations law, patterned after the much-used federal RICO act. J Under it, law enforcement offi- . cials are authorized to seize any property used in a racketeering en terprise. || The justices were told that “a growing number of states are adopt- 1 mg similar RICO laws, and there is a conflict among the states as to their constitutionality.” In other action, the court: • Ruled that companies have a heavy burden of proof when de fending themselves against investor lawsuits alleging the companies with held information about merger dis cussions. • Agreed to use a case from Can ton, Ohio, to try again to decide whether cities may be sued success fully by citizens who say their rights were violated by inadequately trained city employees. • Set the stage for an important sex-discrimination decision by agreeing to study a District of Co lumbia case in which “unconscious stereotyping” allegedly played a key role in denying a woman a part nership in her accounting firm. • Refused to free churches from having to comply with state financial disclosure laws when waging public referendum campaigns as it rejected an appeal by 13 churches in Jackson County, Tenn. • Ruled that financially troubled farmers may not avoid foreclosure under federal bankruptcy law by promising to pay back debts by using their labor and expertise while continuing to operate their farm. 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