The following reports originate from a variety of sources, including the Associated Press. We're always on the lookout for news of interest. Send us news and if we use it here we'll send you a `Piss on Pity' button. Use the eMail below.
A Canadian judge ruled that Robert Latimer should receive a more lenient sentence than required by law for the murder of his severely disabled daughter. He then sentenced Latimer to one year in prison and one year probation last December.
The Canadian Department of Justice is appealing this incredible sentence.
The Saskatchewan farmer insisted he killed his 12-year-old daughter Tracy as an act of mercy. He was convicted of second-degree murder, which carries a minimum sentence of life without a chance of parole for 10 years.
Citing jurors' statements that even the minimum sentence would be unjust, Latimer had asked Judge Ted Noble to strike down the sentence as constitutionally prohibited cruel and unusual punishment.
Latimer admitted carrying his sleeping daughter out to the cab of his pickup truck in October 1993, then piping in carbon monoxide until she died.
He said he acted to end the suffering of his daughter, who had cerebral palsy and had repeated operations on her back, hips and legs.
"The evidence establishes Mr. Latimer was motivated solely by his love and compassion for Tracy and the need - at least in his mind - that she should not suffer any more pain," Noble ruled.
Latimer's wife, Laura, told jurors she had wished for death for Tracy but had been too cowardly to end the girl's life herself.
The disability community in both Canada and the U.S. strenuously protested this outrageous sentence for this outrageous act.
The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the World Committee on Disability chose Canada as the recipient of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt International Disability Award for 1997. The award consists of a bronze bust of FDR and a $50,000 grant for an outstanding disability program in the selected nation. The award trustees say they were impressed by Canada's anti-discrimination protections for people with disabilities, including "Canada's `National Strategy,' a $158 million program guided by people with disabilities, which funded hundreds of projects to improve access to housing, employment, transportation, education and communications."
Humph. Great timing in light of the atrocious injustice in the Latimer case.
An hourly shuttle service between Phoenix and Tucson has agreed to make its passenger vans accessible to those with wheelchairs or guide dogs, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
Arizona Shuttle Service also will pay about $20,000 in damages to those it turned away and in fines to the government, the Justice Department said.
The government said Arizona Shuttle took passengers with "seeing eye" dogs but not those with dogs trained to help those who are deaf, epileptic or otherwise impaired.
In addition, the government said, the company purchased two new vans in 1996 without ensuring that they were wheelchair-accessible as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The agreement was announced four days after a private legal-rights organization, the Arizona Center for Disability Law, filed an ADA suit in federal court against the U.S. Department of Transportation. The suit claims the Department of Transportation has failed to issue permanent rules making Greyhound and other private over-the-road buses wheelchair-accessible.
In our last issue ("She went to see Brooks, not butts," News & Commentary), Joanne Lawrence was on her way to federal court in Washington State þ finally. She was suing the Tacoma Dome for failing to comply with access requirements. You may recall that Lawrence went to a Garth Brooks concert and it turned into a nightmare. We published a photograph showing the behinds of the people who stood up in front of the wheelchair seating so no one sitting there could see the concert.
Just days before a full-blown trial began, the parties agreed to a consent degree. As a result, the Tacoma Dome, without admitting any wrongdoing, of course, won't discriminate by excluding any person with a disability from services, programs or activities at the Dome and will comply with all federal, state and local laws, permits and regulations.
Also, the Tacoma Dome will: provide disabled seating according to the law, including wheelchair access to all classes of seats; provide its staff with sensitivity training; provide companion seating with the disabled person; provide interpreters for deaf and hearing-impaired patrons; and provide an usher at the elevator before and after events to assist disabled patrons.
There's more, but you get the idea. Lawrence - and the disability community - won, hands down. And Lawrence will get free tickets to all events for a year so she and her colleagues can monitor the Tacoma Dome's performance.
Way to go, Joanne Lawrence.
The U.S. Navy surrendered to Pauline Horvath. Horvath, a civilian employee of the Navy from 1982 until she was fired in 1993, had sued the Navy for employment discrimination on the basis of disability and race. Last September, the Navy offered to have judgment entered against it, admitting the discrimination and violation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Horvath was awarded $300,000.
Horvath, who has rheumatoid arthritis, said her supervisor at the Naval Aviation Depot in Alameda, California, refused to allow her to use a wheelchair in her office because someone might trip over it. As a result she had to take medical leave from work and undergo a number of surgeries. In response to Horvath's requests for accommodations, she said the supervisor, who is black, replied: "I'm sick and tired of all this handicapped crap."
The Navy took three years to conduct an internal probe of Horvath's complaints. The report said most of her complaints were true and "strongly recommended" the supervisor be disciplined. But little happened and Horvath went to federal court.
Congratulations to Horvath for her tenacity and refusing to go away in the face of harassment and discrimination from a huge institution.
Last October, we reported the death of Evan Kemp, the former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a life-long advocate of disability rights. Evan was the most prominent þ and persistent þ critic of the pitiful Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis.
Following appearance of that report, we received a letter from Robert Ross, executive director of MDA, taking us to task for causing readers to think Evan was anything other than "a good friend whose ties to MDA go back to his childhood."
Ross says, "It's well known, thanks to MAINSTREAM and other disability press organs, that Evan once sought to mobilize the then disparate elements of the disability community by speaking out against MDA's Telethon. What's ignored in this regard, however, is that this took place over a quarter of a century ago and was rapidly followed, if not by a recantation, then certainly by a tempering of Evan's views."
Baloney. In the early 1980s, Evan thought he might be able to work with MDA to move the telethon away from the pity approach. Didn't work out. Evan did not relent in his criticism and MDA fought back, even trying to get President Bush to fire Evan from EEOC.
Evan's wife, Janine Bertram Kemp, tells me Evan kept a poster on his office door þ "Bag the Thon." "So, as you know, he never `mellowed' or sold out his view of the telethon."
The national Babe Ruth League has agreed to pay $8,000 to Danny Keathley, a wheelchair user and coach who was ejected as a safety hazard from a tournament in Lexington, Kentucky. Dixie Babe Ruth is also drafting a letter of apology to Keathley, a disabled coal miner from Prater in Floyd County, and to the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.
"I feel good with it," Keathley, 37, said. "I just wanted to do this for, not just myself, but other people that's handicapped."
Keathley was thrown out of a Babe Ruth tournament last July 19 after the umpires told him it was too dangerous to let him coach from the third base line. He was later ejected from Lexington's Shillito Park after his team and their parents convinced him to return to his spot.
Georgia's Medicaid program is failing to attract the poor and disabled despite a lofty goal set by Gov. Zell Miller three years ago to cut millions of dollars by enrolling them in health maintenance organizations.
His goal was to have nearly one in four eligible Medicaid recipients in HMOs, comparable to the proportion of the general public covered by managed care.
But barely 35,000 recipients have signed up, forcing the Department of Medical Assistance to change its enrollment procedures.
"When you've got 850,000 eligible people and you've got less than 40,000 enrolled and you're offering a product that is better than the average HMO, something is wrong," said Brent Layton, an Atlanta health care consultant who works with Georgia HMOs.
-- They sent out people in wheelchairs to check housing developments in the Chicago area and after the results came in, the federal Department of Justice sued a bunch of developers and architects for failing to construct accessible housing complexes and apartment buildings.
The five suits, one of which was filed with a proposed settlement, and three additional out-of-court agreements were the first actions brought by DOJ under the access provisions of the Fair Housing Act.
The alleged violations included leaving out features that would make the units accessible. Under the FHA, multi-family housing complexes with four or more units, must include, among other things, accessible routes, doorways wide enough for a wheelchair, reachable thermostats and bathroom walls equipped with reinforcements so that grab bars could be installed.
The "testers" who checked buildings found that 48 out of 49 sites visited - accounting for 4,500 units - had significant non-compliance problems.
Can you believe that Dennis Kulak, owner of KLLM Architects, one of the companies being sued, said "We were not aware of the federal law."
Wow! Wouldn't want to live in one of his buildings.
-- DOJ also sued the developers and architect of four housing developments in Las Vegas. The owner and designer of Rock Springs Visita Properties is alleged to have violated the FHA for not including features that would make four complexes accessible. DOJ wants a court to order the company to make the complexes comply with the law and pay damages for victims of discrimination and civil penalties.
-- The City of San Diego was sued for discrimination against persons with mental illness. The suit, filed by DREDF and the ACLU along with a private law firm, said San Diego illegally excludes persons with mental illness from long-term disability benefits that it offers to City employees. Jenny Badua, 40, was diagnosed with manic depression and placed on long-term disability leave in 1994. She was eligible to receive benefits for 24 months. But had she sustained a physical disability she would have been eligible for benefits until age 65.
-- A federal appeals court in Chicago upheld a ruling that the State of Illinois unlawfully denies critical educational and therapeutic services to infants and toddlers with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. "The regularity with which disabled children are placed on waiting lists for services and evaluations - some waiting up to a year - should not be tolerated," the court ruled. Since 1987 Illinois has received over $70 million from the feds to provide early intervention services designed to minimize developmental delay and help families meet the needs of children with disabilities.
The federal Education Department is changing its policy on grant applications after being criticized for rejecting one from a blind physicist because his typewritten request wasn't double-spaced.
Education Secretary Richard Riley also is inviting the Oregon State University researcher, John Gardner, to resubmit his application to develop a Braille system for computers.
"I'm very pleased the Department of Education recognizes they have some problems in their proposal procedures," Gardner said.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, had complained that the treatment of Gardner's application was a case of bureaucracy prevailing over common sense.
Gardner's assistant had typed the application for him and Gardner said he didn't know it was single-spaced.
The Education Department requires double spacing to ensure uniform limits on the number of pages allowed for any given application.
Gardner is the inventor of DotsPlus, a software program for printing tactile graphics for the visually impaired. He had asked the Education Department for about $300,000 for a two-year study he says could revolutionize access to math, science, graphs and maps.
Gardner said he remains "a little frustrated that all we can do now is wait for next year."
The American Foundation for the Blind appealed to Bill Gates, the richest man in America and the boss of Microsoft, to keep his promise to make products accessible to people with disabilities. Despite the pledge, AFB says Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0 without the features that would make it accessible to America's 10 million blind or visually impaired people.
Members of ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) converged on Washington, DC, last November in support of HR 2020. The Medicaid Community Attendant Services Act is designed to help people with disabilities stay in their own homes and out of nursing homes and still receive attendant care services. The bill is gaining more sponsors but faces tough opposition from the nursing home industry.
Call your congressperson and urge him or her to support the bill.
The new czar of the Social Security Administration, Kenneth Apfel delivered on his promise to review the impact of welfare reform on children receiving SSI. Of a million kids on SSI, about 228,000 were subject to redetermination under the new law. The review,Apfel says, shows Social Security did a good job overall, but that there were problems.
To deal with those problems, Apfel says the agency will go back to give another chance to appeal to families who have been cut off. He believes now that 100,000 children who received benefits will be affected by the new law.
Once a month, year after year, a house painter in Fort Pierce, Florida, got down off his ladder, put down his paint buckets, strapped on an arm brace and got into a wheelchair to play the part of a disabled veteran.
Then he'd go downtown to pick up thousands of taxpayer dollars in government benefits checks.Now, after more than two decades passing himself off as a person with a disability, 71-year-old William Alfred Hitt's acting days are over. He has been sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison.
-- he Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, editors. The University of Michigan Press. $49.50 cloth; $17.95 paper. This collection of essays seeks to introduce disability studies into the humanities by exploring the fantasies and fictions that have crystallized around conceptions of physical and cognitive difference.
-- One-Handed in a Two-Handed World by Tommye-K. Mayer. Prince Gallison Press. Independent and thriving, more than merely coping with the use of only one hand.
-- Awakening to Disability: Nothing About Us Without Us by Karen G. Stone. Volcano Press. $14.95. Stone writes a column on disability in Albuquerque, N.M.
-- The Post-Polio Syndrome Bibliography by Bonnie Hatfield. Comprises 1,200 listings dealing with medical, physiological and psychological aspects of PPS. Current and quality literature resource updated annually. Bonnie Hatfield, 2 Coral Way, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019.
Associated Press reports were used compiling this column.