Home / Full timeline / Judge Louis Pollak rules that Philadelphia’s former commissioners involved in the bombing of a neighborhood that killed 11 MOVE members and destroyed 61 homes, did not have to pay damages to relatives or survivors – reversing the original ruling.
Judge Louis Pollak rules that Philadelphia’s former commissioners involved in the bombing of a neighborhood that killed 11 MOVE members and destroyed 61 homes, did not have to pay damages to relatives or survivors – reversing the original ruling.
1996 (Aug 28)
U.S. District Court judge Louis Pollak ruled that the city of Philadelphia's former fire and police commissioners would not have to pay damages to relatives or survivors of a 1985 fire involving members of the radical African American group MOVE. Two months earlier, a jury had ordered former fire commissioner William Richmond and former police commissioner George Sambor to pay one dollar per week for the next eleven years to Ramona Africa, the only adult member of MOVE to survive the fire, and to relatives of other MOVE members. The jury had also awarded the plantiffs $1.5 million in punitive damages, to be paid by the city of Philadelphia. Although the punitive damages against the city were not affected by Pollak's decision, Africa reacted angrily to his ruling. She said it "literally let [the former commissioners] get away with murder."
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.