THE DOJ'S PROJECT CIVIL ACCESS, WHAT'S UP WITH THEM? ARE THEY GOING TO COME AND HELP US OR WHAT?

Project Civil Access is the enforcement branch of the Department of Justice's efforts to implement the ADA.  It can be found at the following link:

http://www.ada.gov/civicac.htm

I have been interested in understanding how the Department of Justice focuses it efforts and finding out to what extent the department has been successful in enforcing the ADA.  In order to obtain that information, I went to the settlements page of Project Civil Access and reviewed the page under "ADA Settlements and Consent Agreements.  The timeframe these agreements covered was from 1995 until the present. 

I wanted to find out how many of these settlements and consent agreements are for visible disabilities and how many are for invisible disabilities, and also I was interested in knowing the locations of these agreements.  Here are the results of my investigation. 

I have identified the locations where these agreements have taken place, and added up the number of agreements established in each of these locations.  The numbers break down as follows:

Government Agencies                    57

Hotels                                           56

Medical Facilities/doctors              56

Transportation                               43

Cultural and Athletic                      41

Businesses                                      28

Schools/daycare                             22

Police /Correctional Facilities         22

Colleges                                         19

Restaurants                                    19

Legal Firms                                     13

Court                                               5

Other                                               2

TOTAL                                       383

As you can see, the government is right up there on the top of the list of offenders.  That is amazing, considering they should feel the greatest responsibility for adhering to the ADA, given that their primary job is to serve the public!

Medical facilities are right up there as well at 56, but we always knew they were insensitive. 

Businesses are not as bad as I thought they would be at 22.   I have to commend them for their good sense, and probably they know that adhering to the ADA just makes for good public relations policy. 

Colleges way down low at 19.  Well, if they weren't that good, I'd give them back my diploma! 

At the very bottom of the list of noncompliant groups we have legal firms at 13 and the court at 5.  What do you think?  Does that mean that they are simply very compliant or that the Department of Justice simply chooses not to enforce the ADA in the court or in regard to legal firms. 

My impression is that the latter would be the case and that the DOJ simply will not enforce the ADA in courtrooms and with law firms. 

In my experience, I have yet to find the court compliant with the ADA in the trial courts of Connecticut.  Instead, from what I see, People I know who clearly have disabilities end up having their requests for reasonable accommodations and protection from discrimination either denied or ignored. 

The bottom line is that the Department of Justice will not hold its own group accountable, not by any means. 

After breaking down the locations of the settlements, I then turned my attention to what kind of disability were we talking about.  The vast majority of disabilities that the Department of Justice pursued were visible disabilities, most often involving mobility issues or wheelchair access.

After that a solid group of the disabilities involved in these cases were hearing impaired people who required, but were denied, access to an interpreter.  There was also a considerable group of individuals who were visually impaired and required reading material in different formats. 

There were approximately ten complaints that addressed invisible disabilities.  The vast majority of these related to autism, dyslexia, ADD, mental health conditions that are largely understood to have an extremely strong biological basis, and to affect children, and thus they are largely less stigmatizing than most mental health disorders. 

There was one incidence of major depression. 

In two situations a State had enacted legislation requiring EMTs to pass psychological tests showing them to be mentally capable of their jobs, and the Department of Justice indicated that such legislation was a violation of the ADA. 

There was one consent decree in the State of Delaware in which that state agreed to reduce the incidents of unnecessary institutionalization of people with mental illnesses and to improve access to community-based services. 

So, out of 382 cases in the last 17 years taking place all over the United States, only 10 of those cases had anything to do with mental illness, and none of the cases of mental illness took place in the courtroom. 

To me this smacks of discrimination on the part of that very institution that is supposed to be defending us from discrimination. 

Again, there were absolutely no cases that involved complaints of violations of the ADA in connection to a mental health condition that took place in a courtroom.  The five cases that occurred in a courtroom were in connection to wheelchair and/or mobility issues. 

This means that for the last 17 years, the Department of Justice has done almost nothing for litigants with disabilities who experience discrimination in the courtroom.  No wonder Sandra Lugo-Gines feels immune to any kind of consequences for the repeated decisions she has made denying ADA reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals.  She knows that the Department of Justice will never touch her.  It certainly hasn't so far, at least for the last 17 years! 

I understand the DOJ doesn't want to get involved in trial court cases and to interfere in the operation of our local courthouses.  However, the blatent discrimination and violation of federal law as legislated by the ADA is absolutely rampant in our court system.  People are being bullied, harassed, stigmatized, forced into the position where their symptoms reemerge.  They are unable to hear legal proceedings or see the court documents in front of them, and that is granting they can even make it into the courthouse, considering that we don't even have functional wheelchairs in most of our courthouses. 

This is really disappointing news.  Now I know why Sandra Lugo-Gines and her cohorts practicallly smirked when they referred me to the Department of Justice.  She knows they will never hold her accountable. It is terribly disappointing to find out that the very institutions that are established to protect your constitutional rights simply will not intervene and fight on your behalf. 

I also want to point out that I continued on to look up other information sheets provided by the DOJ.  For example, the Project Civil Access handout called "Cites and Counties:  Fierst Steps Toward Solving Common ADA Problems".  The problems listed were exclusively wheelchair access problems, plus some deaf communication issues and issues related to visually impaired folk receiving materials in a different format so they could see them.  Another sheet called "ADA Mediation Program" dealt exclusively with wheelchair access issues, deaf and visually impaired issues.  There was one case that related to a child in a daycare with behavior issues, but what the behavior was isn't indicated so its unclear what the impairment is.  The "Project Civic Access Fact Sheet" dealing with local governments was exclusively mobility issues, deaf and visually impaired issues. 

The booklet "Best Practice Tool Kit For State and Local Governments" addressed the issue of invisible disabilities to what it clearly believed was a skeptical audience.  See excerpt below:

"Does a person with depression have a disability under the ADA?

You might think the answer would be “no” because depression does not seem to substantially limit any specific major life activity. However, someone who has had major depression for more than a few months may be intensely sad and socially withdrawn, have developed serious insomnia, and have severe problems concentrating. This person has an impairment (major depression) that significantly restricts his ability to interact with others, sleep, and concentrate. The effects of this impairment are severe and have lasted long enough to be substantially limiting."

Who would have thought it! Depression is covered!  Maybe other mental health conditions might be covered as well!  Duh!

My conclusion is, we can't expect help from the Department of Justice and we have to seek redress elsewhere.