[Headline] Pivotal Rulings Ahead for Law On Disabilities
[Subheading] Supreme Court to Begin to Chart Protections

By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, April 18 — Beginning on Wednesday with a case that some lawyers have labeled the Brown v. Board of Education of the disability rights movement, the Supreme Court is embarking on an unusually extensive review of a single Federal statute, the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The Justices' decision to hear four disability act cases over a two-week period reflects the fact that the full dimensions of this far-reaching civil rights law remain uncharted even after nearly 10 years on the books.

The law has become broadly familiar for removing physical barriers in public places and for opening the workplace to people with disabilities. Indeed, three of the cases do involve employment disputes, presenting the surprisingly unsettled is-sue of whether a physical problem that is kept in check through medication or compensated for by some-thing as simple as corrective lenses qualifies under the law, as a disability.

The case scheduled for Wednesday, the first of the four, is different. There is no easy remedy at hand for the problems facing the plaintiffs, two Georgia women whose disabilities include mental retardation, mental illness and brain damage. In su-ing the state the two women, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, sought not employment but a life outside the Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, a large state institution. Both women spent many months in the hospital waiting for placement in a homelike environment that their doctors said would be medically and socially appropriate but for which there were long waiting lists.

The question in the case, Olmstead v. Ldi.C., No. 98-536, is whether the Americans With Disabilities Act re-quires a state to offer such a setting, for example, a small, supervised group home, for people for whom such a setting is appropriate. The Federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled last.year that it does.

In the four months since the Justices agreed to hear Georgia's appeal, the case has galvanized disability rights' advocates. It pits Georgia and a group of other states against the Clinton Administration, which is defending a regulation issued in the earliest days of the law, in the Administration of President George Bush, that endorses the principle of "integration" of people with disabilities into the wider population, to the greatest extent possible, in the provision of public services.

At issue is Title II of the law, which applies to public services offered by state and local governments. It pro-vides that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in" or "be subjected to discrimination" by a Government program or service.

A 1991 regulation, issued by the Attorney General under a Congressional directive "to issue regulations setting forth the forms of discrimination prohibited," provides that services or programs shall be offered "in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs" of people with dis-abilities. The regulation came to be known as the "integration mandate."

In its decision in the Georgia case last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declared, "By definition where, as here, the state confines an individual with a disability in an institutionalized set-ting when a community placement is appropriate, the state has violated the core principle underlying the Americans With Disabilities Act's integration mandate."

State budgetary restrictions were not a defense, the appeals court said, unless the cost of compliance was "so unreasonable given the demands of the state's mental health budget that it would fundamentally alter the
service it provides."

In ruling against the state, the 11th Circuit agreed with the one other Federal appeals court to have ad-dressed the question, in a case from Philadelphia that the Supreme Court declined to review four years ago.

It is unusual for the Court to agree to hear a case on the meaning of a Federal law in the absence of conflicting opinions among the lower Federal courts. So disability rights' advocates were alarmed when the Court accepted Georgia's appeal, interpreting the action as a signal that the Justices were moved by the strong states' rights tone of Georgia's petition for review and were leaning toward overturning the appeals court's decision.

Groups such as Adapt, a nation-wide organization of people with dis-abilities, lobbied and demonstrated in many of the 22 states that had formed a coalition in support of Georgia's appeal by signing a brief as friends of the Court. Four states later joined the coalition. But as a result of Adapt's lobbying efforts, more than half the states had dropped out of the coalition by the time Georgia filed its final brief, a highly unusual turn of events.

Typical was a public statement by Michigan's Solicitor General, Thomas L. Casey, who said that after taking a "fresh look" at the case, his state had concluded that "Georgia's arguments are not consistent with the state of Michigan's position as a leader in community-based mental health care."

Even after signing the final ver-sion of the multistate brief in support of Georgia's position, some states continued to have second thoughts, and several disavowed their position. Massachusetts Officials, for example [text breaks for a quote]

[pulled quote] The Justices' decisions will help chart a wide-reaching act

[text continues] said the state's signature on the brief "has been wrongly interpreted as a retreat by the Commonwealth from its long-standing support of dis-ability rights in general and deinstitutionalization in particular."

The states now in Georgia's camp are Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Hawaii, South Carolina, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Washington, Tex-as and Colorado.

Along with Massachusetts, Minnesota and Louisiana withdrew their support after signing the final brief. In addition to Michigan, the states that initially supported Georgia but declined to sign the final brief were Alabama, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.

At the same time, 58 former state commissions and directors of mental health from 36 states, including New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, filed a brief in their own names, supporting homelike care as more appropriate and effective and asking the Court not to accept Georgia's "alarmist claims" about the impact of the 11th Circuit's ruling.

Georgia's basic argument, made in its brief to the court, is that the appeals court misapplied the integration regulation, which itself exceeds the scope of the statute. In enacting the Americans With Disabilities Act, the brief asserts, Congress did not make "a national value judgment that the 'least restrictive treatment' must be provided to psychiatric patients, to say nothing of imposing on the states the massive and indeterminate fiscal burdens that would follow such a decision." Simply "requiring a person to wait her turn for a community placement" is evidence of fiscal constraint but not of discrimination, the state says.

Emphatic as the state is in making its argument, the other side speaks fervently of the case as the ultimate test of the statute's meaning and identity as a civil rights jaw, "the Brown v. Board of Education for disability rights," in the words of Stephen F. Gold, a lawyer represent-ing Adapt and other disability groups.

In an interview, Mr. Gold, of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, said people with disabilities had long faced segregation reminiscent of the segregation , based on race. "If the Americans with Disabilities Act did not mean to end unnecessary segregation, then all the work we did in promulgating it as a civil rights statute is a sham," he said. "We're just trying to get people out of institutions who don't have to be there."

The two plaintiffs, having won their lawsuit have been living successfully in the community, Ms. Curtis in a three-person group home and Ms. Wilson in an apartment of her own with supportive services. Both are planning to attend the Supreme Court argument.

Before the month ends, the Court will hear the three other disability act cases, which all raise the question of how to define the disabilities that bring a person within the law's protection.

The plaintiff in Murphy v. United Parcel Service, No. 9674992, to be argued on April 27, is a truck driver whose high blood pressure is controlled with medication. He sued under the disability law after his employer dismissed him, and is now appealing a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver. The court, view-ing his condition in its medicated state, concluded that he was not a person with a disability and was not entitled to sue.

On April 28, the Court will hear Sutton v. United Air Lines, No. 97-1943, a similar case in which twin sisters, both nearsighted but with vision correctable to 20/20, were denied jobs as pilots because they did not meet the airline's requirement for uncorrected vision. The same appeals court in Denver held that they had no basis for a lawsuit because their correctable vision was not a disability. In both cases, the question is whether a disability should have to be assessed in its "mitigated" or uncorrected state.

The final case, Albertsons v. Kirkengburg, No. 98-591, also scheduled for April 28, presents the somewhat different situation of a truck driver who sees out of only one eye but whose brain has compensated for the deficiency. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, concluding that he sees adequately but in a "different manner" from most other people found him to be disabled and therefore entitled to sue the employer that dismissed him. The employer is appealing.

Created on

Thursday 18 July 2013

Posted on

Monday 9 September 2019

Albums

• The Olmstead v. LC & EW Supreme Court Decision, June 22 1999

Visits

345

Rating score

no rate

Rate this photo