The Supreme Court declined Thursday to halt a $2.46 billion bankruptcy settlement for the Boy Scouts of America, rejecting an emergency request from a group of childhood sex-abuse victims who said the agreement unlawfully bars them from suing groups that ran local scouting programs.
There were no noted dissents from the court’s brief order. It would have taken five votes to grant the emergency request.
The group of victims – 144 people out of more than 82,000 who filed claims against the Boy Scouts – argued the Supreme Court should halt the settlement while it considers a similar legal dispute in a separate and significant appeal involving Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid OxyContin.
The justices heard arguments in the Purdue case in December.
“BSA can justly take pride in its many accomplishments for this country’s youth,” the victims told the high court in a brief this month. “But over the past several decades, it has had to come to grips with its history of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse.”
At issue in both cases are provisions of the agreements that prohibit victims from suing third parties for damages. In the case of Purdue, for instance, the Sackler family that ran the pharmaceutical firm and made its fortune selling the highly addictive drug, agreed to pay $6 billion in exchange for being shielded from future civil lawsuits.
Some victims of the opioid crisis say the Sacklers shouldn’t be able to avoid those costly lawsuits for damages.
In the Boy Scouts matter, some of the victims want to be able to sue independent councils that ran local scouting programs and third-party organizations, such as churches and civic groups, that supported those programs. Those third-party groups contributed more than $2.4 billion to a…
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