Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

In Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, dismissed a complaint brought by five men claiming to have been victims of the U.S. government’s extraordinary rendition program, alleged to involve international kidnapping and torture at foreign facilities. Procedurally required to accept plaintiffs’ allegations as true, the court nonetheless dismissed the complaint before discovery had begun based on the state secrets privilege and the Totten doctrine, finding that the very subject matter of plaintiffs’ complaint was a state secret and that the defendant corporation could not defend itself without evidence subject to the privilege. This Article contends that courts should almost never dismiss suits based on the state secrets privilege and should never do so in a case like Jeppesen Dataplan, in which plaintiffs did not need discovery to make out their prima facie case alleging torts by the government or its contractors.

While much has been written on the state secrets privilege since 9/11, this Article focuses on the role of the Totten doctrine in transforming the state secrets privilege into something like a government immunity doctrine. The Article first argues that Totten was wrongly decided because it is overprotective of state secrecy and requires dismissal with prejudice of suits that would more appropriately be dismissed without prejudice, subject to refiling when the relevant secrets are declassified. The Article next contends that Totten is a very narrow doctrine that cannot and should not have any role in informing cases such as Jeppesen Dataplan in which plaintiffs did not contract with the government.

In addition, the Article argues that the state secrets privilege, as laid out in the 1953 Reynolds case and subsequently expanded by lower courts, permits pre-discovery dismissal of suits based on the state secrets privilege and thus exacerbates the pro-government bias already present in Reynolds. The Article explores nine ways in which lower court decisions have all tended to make it easier for the government to assert the state secrets privilege, while the lack of penalties for overly aggressive assertion of the privilege results in intolerable abuses.

While the Article thus offers fundamental critiques of both the Totten doctrine and the state secrets privilege, it does not advocate disclosure of state secrets. Rather, in a concluding Part, the Article draws on federal statutory schemes relating to the introduction of classified information in trials and offers numerous alternatives to judgment in favor of the government and its contractors before discovery has begun in cases implicating state secrets. Congress has repeatedly empowered courts to make decisions that protect government secrecy while facilitating limited access to secret information when necessary in the interests of justice and open government. In some cases, the government’s inability to defend itself may necessitate the socialization of the costs associated with national security secrets, but that result is preferable to forcing plaintiffs to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of government secrecy.

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