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.
Justin Dart tells a group of protesters at the site of the soon-to-open FDR Memorial in Washington, DC that it would be an obscene distortion of history not to show Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheelchair.
To fail to show Roosevelt's disability also will reinforce negative stereotypes of people with disabilities, the protesters say.
I. King Jordan, president of Gallaudet University, and Evan Kemp, former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, were among the dozens of protesters, joining Dart in calling for a statue of FDR in a wheelchair. The FDR Memorial Commission has refused the protesters' demands. There will be 10 sculptures in the memorial.
Cincinnati nailed its scofflaw meter-feeder, but it's decided not to go after its jaywalking blind man.
Jeff Friedlander (who is blind) was slapped with a jaywalking ticket after he was hit by a pickup truck and broke his tailbone Jan. 22. The police officer who ticketed him thought he stepped out of the crosswalk and caused the accident.
But less than a week after a woman was convicted of putting coins into other people's expired parking meters, prosecutors dropped charges against Friedlander.
"While this person technically was in violation, there just was no purpose in continuing with the prosecution at this point," prosecutor Charlie Rubenstein said.
Friedlander said he was going to pay the $100 fine until he discovered that Ohio law gives the right-of-way to blind people carrying white canes.
There are no audio warning devices at the corner, as there are at some busy Cincinnati intersections. The city is going to look into putting audible signals at more crosswalks.
And another one ...
The saga of Spencer, Massachusetts continues. Advocate Tom Hopkins took this town to federal court for failing to comply with the ADA. The town was pretty belligerent. Hopkins won and changes have occurred. But not everyone is happy.
Xavier's restaurant has been putting up snotty messages seemingly aimed at Hopkins, who sued to force the eatery to make its bathrooms accessible. The first message said: "We're closed. No handicapped bathrooms." The next said: "We are open. We'll comply by 4/22." Then: "Come see our $10,000 bathrooms."
The latest: "Tom -- Friends may come & go, but enemies accumulate."
Hopkins calls it "direct harassment and intimidation under the ADA."
Keep up the fight, Tom.
The Justice Department has reached agreements with two Mississippi counties to allow deaf people to serve on juries.
The agreements resolve complaints against Hancock and Harrison counties filed under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Charles Carver, a deaf Mississippi resident who communicates by sign language, had complained that he was barred from juries in 1992 and 1994 because he is deaf.
"A prospective juror's deafness does not render him or her incapable of performing the duties of a juror," acting Assistant Attorney General Isabelle Katz Pinzler, head of the department's civil rights division, said. "Today's agreement will ensure that persons who are deaf or hard of hearing will no longer be excluded from jury service."
The Justice Department reached a similar agreement with Utah's state court agency in 1993.
-- Deval Patrick, the assistant Attorney-General for civil rights, resigned in January with the inauguration of Clinton II. Patrick was appointed a visiting professor of law at Stanford University in California and was also expected to join a major Boston law firm. He did a pretty good job pushing the ADA. As noted in the above item, Isabelle Katz Pinzler replaced Patrick on an interim basis.
-- Attorney-General Janet Reno asked Congress for an increase in funding for fiscal year 1998 for more vigorous enforcement of the ADA. She asked for a 5 percent boost ($477,000) to hire additional investigators, mediators and an architect.
TAKE NOTE: Just because it is in the budget does not mean it will get funded. Last year Reno asked for an increase for ADA enforcement and it did not get funded. It is crucial that we all tell our members of Congress that this funding is vital to our community. In fact, tell as many members of Congress as possible.
Disabled Texans must lobby state lawmakers to help remove barriers to their independence, Supreme Court Justice Greg Abbott says.
Abbott, the state's first disabled Supreme Court judge, addressed hundreds of disabled citizens rallying at the Capitol. They called for better health services and greater independence for the state's 3.5 million disabled Texans.
"We've all heard about bridges to the future. Well, our bridge to the future is a bridge from disability to ability," Abbott said. "That bridge is paved by the removal of institutional and architectural barriers that no longer need exist. That bridge to the future for the disabled in the state of Texas can be built only when we work with, not against, the legislators here in Austin."
Representatives from more than 50 disabled groups said among other things, they want:
Better enforcement of the American Disabilities Act and state laws that protect the civil rights of Texans with disabilities;
Texans with disabilities prefer home and community services, which currently have waiting lists, to institutional care; and
Improving Texas' employment rate of people with disabilities (28 percent) which ranks last in the nation according to the 1994 Census.
Sen. Mike Moncrief, D-Fort Worth, encouraged the groups to return to the Capitol and to work with lawmakers.
"Don't just show up today. Show up tomorrow and the next day and the day after and as a constant reminder to those of us who are policy makers that there are issues out here."
Four men at the El Dorado Correctional Facility near Wichita, Kansas translate texts into Braille. It takes a special kind of prisoner to do the work þ at $1.05 a day one of the highest paid jobs at the prison. The Braillists' motivations vary from altruistic to anti-establishment.
Jack Deal, incarcerated since 1977, joined the Braille program nine months ago. He's working toward his certification, which requires 18 lessons and a final exam. The reasons for his participation in the program are rooted in childhood.
"When I was a kid, I read a lot," said Deal, who can translate a 200-page book in 38 hours. "It was my escape from a bad situation at home. When I was 8 years old, I got a real bad head injury and lost 90 percent of my vision. The thing that scared me the most was not knowing if I could read anymore.
"When I heard about this program, I thought if I could give that refuge (reading) to some kid who's blind, that would be something worthwhile to do."
Once a month, Jackie Denk, the director of the Kansas Instructional Center for the Blind, travels the three hours from her Kansas City, Kansas, office to the prison with a handful of texts for translation.
A St. Louis woman has won a 10-year fight to get the St. Louis Zoo to make itself accessible to wheelchairs.
Under an out-of-court settlement, the woman and other members of the disabled community will help the zoo pinpoint access problems for all disabled people, and solutions.
"They are helping us find areas of the zoo that are obstacles," zoo director Charlie Hoessle said. "We do want to make the zoo accessible as quick as we can, as the budget allows and as the problems are made apparent to us."
The lawsuit was filed in 1995 by Nancy Verderber, who has cerebral palsy and uses a motorized cart, and three families with children who use wheelchairs.
But Ms. Verderber's complaint goes back 10 years, when she took a group of children to the zoo. Half the youngsters were in wheelchairs and were barred from riding the zoo train. So began her push to force the zoo to become accessible.
Ms. Verderber was pleased by the settlement but nonplussed that her battle took so long. "In 1997, we shouldn't have to be pushing for things like this," she said.
She said the decade-long fight was difficult. Publicity surrounding it brought anonymous hate calls from people who wanted to know how could she do this to the beloved zoo.
"I did it because it was the right thing to do and it was the law," she said.
The Canadian Supreme Court ordered a new trial for a farmer convicted of killing his severely disabled 12-year-old daughter, saying jurors should not have been asked their views on mercy killing.
The ruling means another emotional courtroom drama in a drawn-out case that has divided Canadians over the issue of euthanasia.
The farmer, Robert Latimer, was convicted of second-degree murder in November 1994 for killing his daughter, Tracy, who had severe cerebral palsy. She could not walk, talk or feed herself, and Latimer said he acted out of compassion when he placed her in a pickup truck and killed her with carbon monoxide in 1993 at the family farm in Wilkie, Saskatchewan.
His action attracted sympathy from many Canadians, a phenomenon that disturbed advocates for people with disabilities.
Latimer was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years, but served only one day in jail because of appeals.
Michael Graves' walks across the campus at the University of Mississippi in Jackson with his dog are not casual strolls without a purpose.
Distractions, he says, such as stops for petting or yells of "Come here, boy" at Diego are an annoyance he sometimes doesn't need. Diego is Graves' 3-year-old golden retriever þ and guide dog.
The state Senate passed a bill creating a misdemeanor to harass or interfere with guide dogs, hearing dogs for the deaf or animals helping disabled people get around.
Violators could be fined up to $500 and jailed three months.
The Nippon Foundation awarded a $3 million grant to Gallaudet University for a deaf leadership development program in developing countries. A 1991 study found that less than 20 percent of deaf children in developing nations go to school regularly, and in some countries deaf children are neglected because they are seen as being incapable of becoming productive citizens.
Educators in Andrews, Texas struck a compromise with a girl with cerebral palsy, saying she could become a full-fledged member of the varsity cheerleading squad if she qualifies, minus the gymnastics.
Callie Smartt, 15, had been an "honorary cheerleader" at Andrews High School, zipping her motorized wheelchair along the sidelines and waving her black-and-gold pompons.
But in June, the school district decided she could be injured so close to the action. It banned her from basketball courtside and allowed her to appear only at home football games.
School officials cannot prevent her from trying out for the varsity squad in April, but did not agree until recently to waive the jumping and flipping usually involved.
"I feel good about it," she said of the ruling. "I won't have to do everything, (like) dance with my feet."
Three non-disabled guys in Houston were hauled off to the pokey after they parked illegally in a disabled parking spot at a grocery store. They refused a security guard's request to move. The cops came and found out that these geniuses were wanted on outstanding arrest warrants. Their truck was towed.
Way to go, Houston!
New York State's highest court ruled that a mentally retarded man cannot be force-fed with a feeding tube over the wishes of his parents.
The state Court of Appeals said that a feeding tube was not necessary for 28-year-old Scott Matthews because he was not on the verge of death. The high court also ruled that it was unclear if a tube would improve Matthews' life.
Parents Gary and Kathy Matthews sued the Albany-based Center for the Disabled þ their son's medical caretakers þ last year when doctors said a feeding tube was necessary to keep Scott Matthews alive.
Matthews has been severely retarded and disabled since birth and has never weighed more than 55 pounds. The center claimed a tube was necessary to prevent him from losing more weight.
The Matthews objected, however, contending that being fed was one of the few "human pleasures" their son enjoyed and that, according to their own doctors, a tube was not medically necessary.
The Georgia House agreed to grant homeowners income tax credits of up to $500 for fitting their houses with features for the disabled such as ramps and wider doorways.
The House voted 168-0 for the bill by Rep. Jeanette Jamieson, D-Toccoa, even though there is no estimate of how much the tax break would cost the state.
It's one of two proposals addressing the need to equip homes for the disabled, and it is the more lenient of the two because it is voluntary.
Eleanor Smith of the grass-roots accessible housing organization Concrete Change, doesn't like the Jamieson bill because it falls far short of what is needed.
The other proposal, being pushed by House Judiciary chairman Jim Martin, D-Atlanta, would require home builders to install wider doorways, ramps, more accessible light switches and reinforced bathroom walls to accommodate grab bars. The same bill failed in the final days of last year's session.
Martin, whose proposal now awaits action in the House Health and Ecology Committee, said a voluntary tax credit program still will leave many disabled Georgians with few housing choices.
Smith agrees. Making basic access a requirement for builders would create far more accessible housing. Smith says the voluntary program promoted by the building industry sounds good, but that there is no real commitment to putting it into practice. She says that's a shame because the access features are inexpensive -- less than the cost of adding a bay window off the kitchen of a tract house.
So if it doesn't cost much, why such resistance? Builders, like most businesses, don't like being told what to do. They dig in their heels, and won't make their products more inclusive and accessible. Stupid.
Commercial airlines must help disabled passengers with their carry-on luggage if the airlines know they need help, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled in a lawsuit against Northwest Airlines.
"Disabled passengers may justifiably expect some assistance with carry-on baggage when they need it," the court said. "Northwest's position is untenable."
Sadie Pearl Vaughn suffered injuries while attempting to stow her baggage on a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to her home in Lansing, Michigan, in October 1992, the court said.
Before boarding, she explained to a ticket agent that she was under doctor's orders not to strain herself or carry heavy baggage because of fibromyalgia, a connective tissue disorder.
She informed three Northwest employees that she was physically disabled, asked each for help boarding and was denied assistance from all, according to the court.
The Wall Street Journal reports an American Bar Association study that says employers win about 90 percent of lawsuits filed by workers under the ADA. Workers often can't provide the level of proof required to win, the lawyer's group said. Workers must show they are capable of doing the jobs but at the same time showing that their disability substantially affects them.
In the February issue, in the resource guide "Catalogs & Aids to
Daily Living," under the category "CATALOGS: Recreative Therapy &
Specialty Adaptive Toys," we incorrectly listed the address of
Enabling Devices / Toys for Special Children. The correct address
is: 385 Wharburton Avenue,
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706;
telephone: 800-832-8679.
Access to Recreation should've also been listed. To reach them,
write:
2509 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Suite 430,
Thousand Oaks, CA 91360;
or call (805) 498-7535.
Associated Press reports were used compiling this column.