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motions to intervene filed in September and October 1992, several
months before petitioners’ counsel executed their settlement
documents, including a case in which Mr. Sticht and Mr. Jones
were co-counsel. In view of this history, any assertion that,
when petitioners agreed to settle their cases, they thought “that
no fraud on the Court existed” is unpersuasive. When petitioners
settled, they and their attorneys clearly had received enough
information about the misconduct of the Government’s attorneys to
make an informed decision.
Petitioners have listed other circumstances surrounding
their decision to settle, but none of these circumstances was the
result of fraud on the Court or any other exceptional situation
that would permit relief from their settlement. Thus,
petitioners argue that when they settled, they thought the
Thompson settlement was harmless. This appears to be an argument
that when they settled, petitioners assumed or believed, despite
the recently revealed misconduct of the Government’s attorneys,
that this Court’s rulings of harmless error in favor of
respondent would be upheld on appeal. That assumption or belief
turned out to be erroneous; in Dixon V, the Court of Appeals for
the Ninth Circuit reversed this Court’s rulings of harmless error
on the ground that “fraud on the court” occurs regardless of
whether the opposing party is prejudiced. Dixon v. Commissioner,
316 F.3d at 1046. In any event, petitioners’ mistaken assumption
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