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The Fourth Circuit vacated the $42 million Abu Ghraib torture verdict
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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A US federal appeals court on Friday wiped out the only jury verdict ever won by survivors of Abu Ghraib against an American contractor, and the reasoning matters far beyond Iraq.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting as a panel of Judges Stephanie Thacker, A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. and Henry Floyd, vacated the $42 million awarded to three Iraqi former detainees against CACI Premier Technology. Bloomberg Law reported the per curiam decision the day it issued.
The award had given each of the three men $3 million in compensatory and $11 million in punitive damages. The same court had affirmed it in March.
What changed between March and August#
On 23 June the US Supreme Court decided Cisco Systems v. Doe. It held that federal courts may not create new causes of action under the Alien Tort Statute, the 1789 provision that gave foreign nationals a door into American courts for grave violations of international law, and that the Torture Victim Protection Act does not reach aiding and abetting.
Applying that ruling, the Fourth Circuit found the district court had lacked jurisdiction from the start. The detainees' claims of conspiracy to commit torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment were judicially implied causes of action of exactly the kind Cisco forbids, and so must be dismissed.
Judge Quattlebaum wrote that the Supreme Court left no room for such creative pleading, rejecting the attempt to fit torture claims into the narrow category the older case law had preserved.
Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case, said that as radical and regressive as the Cisco decision is, a jury had unanimously concluded CACI was responsible.
The Supreme Court left no room for such creative pleading.
Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., Fourth Circuit, 28 August 2026
Why a Palestinian reader should follow this#
The Alien Tort Statute was the principal route by which people harmed abroad — including Palestinians — could bring an American company or official before an American jury. After Cisco, and after Friday's application of it, that route is effectively closed for claims the courts have not already recognised.
Set that against the direction of travel in the same court system on the other side. The Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act was written to keep US courts open to suits against the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority, and the judgments in that docket, led by the $655.5 million in Sokolow, run to sums that dwarf this one.
The result is an asymmetry that can now be stated precisely. American courts have been kept open by statute to plaintiffs suing Palestinian institutions, and closed by the Supreme Court to foreign plaintiffs suing American ones.
Congress can change either half of that. The Alien Tort Statute's reach is a matter of legislation, and after Cisco the ball is in its court — which is where the composition of the House committees decided this week acquires a second meaning.
