Almost 10 years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, the one remaining wrongful death lawsuit will start on June 13. The family of Mark Bavis, a scout for the Los Angeles Kings hockey team who was on United Flight 175, is suing United Airlines and others including Boeing and airline security companies. But there's a twist: The federal judge overseeing the trial has declared the trial will only take a month; Judge Alvin Hellerstein said, "The time is going to be expressed not in days, but in minutes," with each side getting an equal amount of time. Naturally, neither side is happy about this.
According to the NY Times, "Each side’s clock will start ticking whenever its lawyer rises to question or cross-examine a witness, or to argue before the jury." Hellerstein has asked both sides to prepare what the Times calls "an annotated narrative of the events of Sept. 11" and "not to explore the 'root causes' of the attacks or dwell on the personalities or motives of the hijackers." But lawyer Donald Migliori said, "The Bavis family feels very strongly that the information about how checkpoint security failed wholesale on Sept. 11 needs to be brought out into the public," noting that they had 200 depositions about airline checkpoint security and that the case was "premised on the idea that 19 for 19 hijackers got through these checkpoints and carried out a concerted hijacking that should have been prevented."
And a lawyer for United claims that different defendants will have different things to present, giving them an unfair disadvantage. But Hellerstein says, "The shorter the trial, the better the quality of the jury."
All of the other victims and victims' families have accepted payments from the 9/11 Victims Compensation fund or settled their lawsuits.
