Court Opinion

ID: 9455746
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:31:57.121131+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:43.028718
License: Public Domain

DAVIS, Judge
(dissenting in part):
My disagreement concerns Part I of the court’s opinion, “The Commission’s Five Percent Rule for Allowing or Denying General Gratuities of the Government as Offsets”, and within that portion of the opinion is narrowed to the directive that the Indian Claims Commission must exercise its discretion with respect to offset gratuities on an “item-by-item” basis, I agree with the rejection of the automatic “five percent rule”, as well as with the requirement that each case be considered separately. But like Judge Nichols I cannot concur that within a case there must always be item-by-item inquiries. The offset provision of the Indian Claims Commission Act, 25 U.S.C. § 70a,1 plainly envisages instances in which all gratuities can be disallowed on an over-all basis and others in which certain classes of gratuities can be rejected for reasons of history or conscience.
In this case, for instance, I would think it entirely proper, if the facts warrant it, for the Commission to find, on remand, that, wholly apart from interest, if the Delawares had received $607,980 as a result of the cession of 1854, instead of $10,000, they would not have needed all or part of the subsistence-related payments (from 1860 to 1942) which the Government is seeking to offset. If the Tribe, that is, had received over $600,000 in the middle of the 19th century, as they should have, perhaps they could and would have used that money for subsistence-related purposes, so that the Federal Government would not have had to feed and take care of them in the way it did when they re*1233eeived only $10,000.2 If that was so, I see no reason why the Commission cannot exercise its discretion to deny those offsets, as a whole, under 25 U.S.C. § 70a. The same may be true of other cases.
It is entirely wrong, in my view, to hobble the Commission, in this or any case, with instructions to comb the gratuities item-by-item. Mechanical rules are not to be applied, but otherwise the Commission should be free to apply the statutory criteria, in any particular case, to all items or groups of items. I cannot believe that the court really means what the opinion seems to say, or that it can or will abide by an iron item-by-item rule in the future.

. “ * * * tlie Commission may also inquire into and consider all money or property given to or funds expended gratuitously for the benefit of the claimant and if it finds that the nature of the claim and the entire course of dealings and accounts between the United States and the claimant in good conscience warrants such action, may set off all or part of such expenditures against any award made to the claimant * * * (emphasis added).

. The figures as to these “gratuitous” expenditures, when related to money payments by the Government to the Delawares on other claims, give rise to the suggestion, at least prima facie, that the Indians needed subsistence-related help most when they had least money of their own.