Bizarre ruling in HIV discrimination case

U.S. District Judge Barbara R. Crabb granted the defendant-employer’s motion for summary judgment in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Lee’s Log Cabin, Inc., 2006 WL 1793661 (W.D.Wis., June 23, 2006), based on an absurd distinction raised by Judge Crabb between HIV+ status and full-blown AIDS.

According to uncontradicted factual allegations in the complaint, Korrin Krause Stewart, now 21, was diagnosed HIV+ at age 14 and quickly progressed to full-blown AIDS, which she controls through medication. She applied in March 2004 for a waitress job at defendant’s restaurant. One surmises from the court’s account of the complaint that the assistant manager who took her application realized that she was the complaining party in another EEOC case against a restaurant for firing an HIV+ employee, and made an HIV notation on the application form. The assistant manager now claims that she volunteered the information that she was HIV+, which she denies. In any event, she also indicated on the application form that the heaviest weight she could life was 10 pounds, in response to a question whether there were any job duties she could not perform. When she received no response to her application, she inquired further and saw a copy of her application form with the HIV notation. She requested and was allowed to keep the form, which she brought to the EEOC to support her discrimination claim. The employer denies that her HIV status was the reason she was not hired.

The EEOC filed suit, claiming unlawful refusal to hire on account of HIV status. In responding to the defendant’s motion to dismiss, EEOC provided information about how Stewart as a person with AIDS was physically limited in her major life activities, in order to establish her identity as an "individual with a disability" under the ADA.

Judge Crabb, asserting that there is a big difference between being HIV+ and having AIDS, found that the complaint only asserted discrimination based on HIV+ status, not AIDS, and therefore the evidence about how AIDS limits Stewart’s major life activities was not relevant to the question whether she had a disability under the ADA. Instead, said Judge Crabb, the question was whether HIV+ status is a disability, and pursuant to Bragdon v. Abbott, 524 U.S. 624 (1998), this had to be decided on an individualized basis, with the burden on the EEOC to show how the plaintiff’s HIV+ status limited her performance of major life activities. Crabbe would not credit any of the EEOC’s evidence about the impact of AIDS on Stewart’s abilities, because of the purported distinction Crabbe found between HIV and AIDS.

Crabb, noting that the EEOC’s complaint alleged discrimination on the basis of HIV status, said that the EEOC’s contention in its responsive papers that Stewart suffered discrimination because of AIDS was a "novel argument," even though the uncontradicted facts show that Stewart had AIDS when she applied for the job. Apparently, Crabb is proceeding on the assumption that Lee’s Log Cabin did not know Stewart had AIDS, merely that she was HIV+, and therefore the employer could not be charged with discrimination on account of AIDS, because the requisite motivation would not be present. (An employer’s actual or presumed knowledge about an alleged disabling condition is universally held by courts to be a prerequisite to ADA liability.) Of course, Crabb makes no mention of the fact that many people assume, incorrectly, that anybody who is HIV+ has AIDS, or that the distinction between the two is an artifact of the definition of AIDS adopted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; all people with AIDS have HIV infection, and some specialists prefer to refer to a spectrum of HIV disease, casting aside a bright line distinction between HIV infection and AIDS.

In this case, it is clear that Stewart has had AIDS during the entire relevant time, and any disabling effect of that must be relevant to the question whether she has a disability under the ADA. But, seizing upon the technicality that the complaint does not mention AIDS, Crabb faults the EEOC for failing to present any evidence explicitly keying her disabling symptoms to her HIV status as opposed to her AIDS diagnosis.

The legal analysis in this opinion can only be characterized as bizarrely formalistic, the product of a judge (or more likely a judge’s clerk) who has gotten hold of a dangerous piece of information (the distinction between HIV infection and AIDS) and misused it to grant summary judgment to the employer on an illegitimate ground.

Crabb notes, parenthetically, that given her weight-lifting restrictions, Stewart could have lost the case on the alternative – and more legitimate – ground of not being qualified for the job. Indeed, after reading Crabb’s summary of the EEOC’s evidence of Stewart’s AIDS-related symptoms, one wonders how anybody so afflicted could possibly provide effective service as a waitress. But it would be nice for the court to have grounded its decision more appropriately, and it is possible that the question of qualifications could not properly be decided on summary judgment due to factual disputes. (Certainly, the question of employer motivation should not be disposed of on summary judgment, when it is factually contested in this case.)

Ironically, just a few days later, the D.C. Circuit issued its decision in Taylor v. Rice, in which the State Department, defending against a hiring discrimination complaint from an HIV+ foreign service applicant, conceded that the ADA applied and that he was a person with a disability, without any need to show how his HIV infection limited his performance of major life activities. Despite the limiting language in Bragdon, many courts are ready to assume that anybody who is HIV+ has a disability within the meaning of the ADA, and that the important question goes to qualifications and employer motivations in denying employment. In light of Congressional intent as reflected by the legislative history of the ADA, this would be the sounder way to proceed, except for the fact that the anti-legislative history justices on the Supreme Court have denigrated the relevance of expressed Congressional intent in construing these provisions of the ADA in light of their convoluted and hopelessly inadequate language (which was largely borrowed form the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, passed at a time when AIDS was unknown).

Comments

[AIDS Chat]

Some jobs I could see not being able to do if you had HIV. For instance, if a boxer had HIV, I don't think he should be going in the ring and fighting people as blood can be transferred...

[Mad Professah]

AIDS Chat, I believe that is already the state of the law. There are numerous examples of boxers testing HIV+ and then being denied boxing licenses in Nevada. One of the problems there is that confidentiality (and informed consent) provisions of the HIV testing regime in the boxing arena are seriously lacking.

Thanks for the update on these two recent HIV discrimination ruling, Art. I'd love to hear what you have to say about the California Supreme Court ruling on HIV liability in John B. vs. Superior Court.

[Art Leonard]

My comment on the California case is now posted.

AIDS Chat, the issue in this case is not whether the waitress applicant is qualified, but whether the court even gets to that issue, since it first must determine whether she has a disability that limits one or more of her major life activities. What is bizarre in this ruling is that the court rules out as irrelevant the evidence of the impact of AIDS on her, because the EEOC, in its complaint, says she was discriminated against because she was HIV+, and the court sees this as a qualitatively different case from saying that she was discriminated against on account of AIDS. An example of where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - the court knows the difference between HIV+ and AIDS and so thinks EEOC is trying to prove a different case in defending against the s.j. motion than the case they filed, which, of course, is not fair to the defendant in the Dickensian formalist thinking of the court.

[Online Casino]

best site
http://www.onlinecasino.org.in/

[Online Casino]

best site
http://www.onlinecasino.org.in/