By Jon Caswell, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – We've heard a lot about heroes recently. I've only known one in my life, and she wasn't a fireman or cop. Her name is Carolyn Cleveland, and she is a most unlikely hero. A grandmother, she is a stroke and lung cancer survivor who made the world a fairer place. She suffered an injustice and fought it all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
Carolyn's case involved a suit for accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Following a stroke in 1994 at age 58, she was severely disabled and her daughter applied for Social Security Disability. However, Carolyn was determined to recover, and stopped the application and returned to work.
Back in the office, her co-workers ridiculed her impaired speech. The company refused a workplace coach offered free by the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. Her supervisor even called her in and told her that she would never be more than a vegetable. Two weeks before the end of her trial work period, she was fired. Anyone can see the cruelty and injustice in those facts, but because of a hitch between Social Security regulations and the ADA, no lawyer would touch her case, that is until her attorney John Wall saw its potential.
Like Carolyn, many people with disabilities were snagged by a legal Catch-22. Typically, employers have to make their work place disability-friendly. The legal term for that is "accommodation." Here was the hitch, however: if a disabled person had ever filed for Social Security Disability, they couldn't sue for accommodation under the ADA.
In legal jargon this maneuver is called "judicial estoppel," and in 1994 when Carolyn filed her suit, it prevented 7 million disabled Americans from exercising their rights under the law that bears their name.
Carolyn's former employer tried to block her case from going to trial where it could be heard on its merits, but it went forward on the procedural question. During oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the company's attorney trotted out the tried-and-true principle of judicial estoppel. When he finished, Sandra Day O'Connor had one question, "What did you expect her to do?" When the attorney started to answer, she curtly told him to sit down.
In the case of Cleveland v. Policy Management Systems, the compassionate reason reflected in Justice O'Connor's question carried the day, and the justices voted 9-0 to overturn the Catch-22 of judicial estoppel. They allowed Carolyn's case to go forward, and in the process put some muscle into the accommodation clause of the ADA.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the federal agency in charge of enforcing the ADA, called Carolyn's victory the most important case in their history. This doting grandmother did the uncommon deed: she experienced injustice and refused to let it stand. It seems to me that by any measure, that makes her a hero.
Jon Caswell is editor of "Stroke Connection" Magazine, a publication of the American Heart Association.