A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a historical accounting of money the government has been managing for Indian tribes, saying the bookkeeping chore would “take 200 years.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the tribes in their effort to block a lower court order for a detailed tally of money owed the tribes going back to 1887.
The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of Indians claim they were cheated out of more than $100 billion in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department.
In their appeals, the government and the Indians argued that the massive historical accounting Lamberth ordered would cost up to $13 billion – far more than was reasonable.
On Tuesday, a three judge appeals panel agreed, overturning the accounting and calling Lamberth’s decision “ill-founded,” an abuse of discretion and was not favored by either side in the lawsuit.
AP via Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Opinion [pdf file].
Note: The case concerns individual Indian money, not tribal money as stated in the AP story.