Lowering Expectations - The Latest MCC Update

The Mass Casualty Commission has issued an update today, January 31, 2022. In the update, they discuss the upcoming proceedings, the role of Participants, forthcoming reports, and unspecified alternate forms of public engagement. In my view, the real purpose of the update, however, was to manage (that is, lower) expectations as to what take place during the Proceedings. The main section of the release deals with the role of various Participants. The Commission notes that the “Participants” section of their website has been updated, but significantly, there is still no direct statement on whether parties will be entitled to cross-examine witnesses during the proceedings. We were reminded last week that the Commission has a very large staff, so we can presume that the words in this release chosen carefully, and that the failure to answer the question about cross-examination was a deliberate choice. Today’s statement does not explicitly tell us very much that is new. The real purpose behind the statement appears to be to soften the blow for when proceedings start, and instead of witnesses telling us what they did and saw and being challenged on cross-examination, we are presented only with someone reading in an agreed statement, or some form of prepackaged question-and-answer session between Commission Counsel and representative witnesses. Such an outcome would fall far below what I sense of the public’s expectations of this Commission, and be a further disappointment to those who have invested their time and energy in this important cause.