WASHINGTON — A long and emotional legal fight that began with the 2006 kidnapping of a Sacramento Valley man in Iraq has fizzled to an unceremonious conclusion.
The father and stepmother of Redding, Calif., native Joshua Munns pressed their claims against the federal government for years, in one court after another. But in a brief decision Thursday, a judge ended the battle that had illuminated the wartime world of security contractors.
Citing a “failure to prosecute,” Judge Margaret M. Sweeney of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims dismissed the suit brought by the parents of Munns and two other security contractors. Sweeney acted after the family members’ Sacramento-based attorney, William W. Palmer, did not file a response to the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss.
In a telephone interview Friday, Palmer noted that he had pursued the litigation pro bono for many years, against a deep bench of Justice Department attorneys.
“It got to the point where we ran out of resources,” Palmer said. “It’s been a long, tough row to hoe.”
Palmer added that the families’ complaints had helped prompt the Obama administration in June 2015 to revise a former policy that had blocked relatives from communicating with foreign kidnappers. Some family members in other cases said they had been threatened with prosecution if they negotiated ransoms.
Appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, Sweeney followed other federal judges in Sacramento and San Francisco who had previously rejected, on different grounds, the family members’ various legal claims spurred by the kidnapping.
The three men, and two others, were seized while guarding a 46-truck convoy near the Kuwait border in November 2006.
“They were tortured and eventually killed,” Justice Department trial attorney Sean Siekkinen recounted in a March 2016 legal filing.
The other two kidnapped Crescent Security Group contractors whose family members were part of the lawsuit were John Roy Young of Kansas City, Mo., and Jon Cote of Buffalo, N.Y. All three men were U.S. military veterans.
Munns, a 2001 graduate of Anderson High School, was a former Marine who started working for Crescent in July 2006. Following his kidnapping, and a brief appearance in a video that McClatchy viewed in December 2007, his remains were recovered in March 2008.
But while acknowledging the three Crescent employees were “tragically murdered,” Siekkinen said the “contractor or insurance companies, not the government, are responsible for the monetary damages sought” by the family members.
Family members thought otherwise, and in court filings they shed light on the government’s relationship with and alleged shortcomings of the Crescent Security Group, a Kuwait-based company that has now apparently closed. The company’s former website address is now listed for sale.
“It was like chasing a phantom,” Palmer said of the company on Friday.
Munns and his colleagues were issued “substandard military equipment” by Crescent, Palmer said in one filing. The FBI, he said, took “little or no action” to find the men. Federal officials, Palmer asserted, “worked to impede” family members’ efforts to discover the truth.
“What began,” Palmer declared in a March 2010 filing, “is an ordeal that no American citizen should be forced to endure.”
Sacramento-based U.S. District Judge Morrison C. England Jr. subsequently dismissed the lawsuit, prompting appeals that were likewise rejected by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, leading to the revised, final case dismissed this week by the claims court.
