Civil Rights Are "Interim" In the State of Maine · 2005-08-11 19:54

The Portland Press-Herald reports today on the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine upholding the “interim” banishment from public property of a disabled 9-year old boy:

Falmouth school officials did not break the law when they denied a disabled home-schooled student access to a playground, Maine’s highest court found on Wednesday.

The court ruled that Jan Rankowski, a 9-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome, posed a threat to himself and other students when he played at the Plummer-Motz School, and that the school was right to ban him from the playground until a behavior plan was developed.

...Fitzpatrick said her son, now 11, is thriving in spite of the legal setbacks. She said he is working at a 10th-grade level in schoolwork and attends recess at playgrounds in Portland and Gray.

But not in Falmouth, Maine.

In their respective decisions, Falmouth school officials and the Maine court system chose to disregard nine inches’ worth of behavioral, neuropsychological and medical evaluations that had been submitted to the school district prior to the incidents discussed in the case, and chose to disregard the fact (confirmed in testimony) that Jan had harmed no one during his time on the Maze Craze playground, or at any other time.

No further appeals are planned.

From Jan’s mother, plaintiff Gayle Fitzpatrick:

Who would have thought—civil rights are interim (sarcasm). Silly me, I thought that civil rights were 24/7. The Maine Supreme Court has ruled otherwise, in a decision which will affect everyone.

As per this Decision, people may be denied access to public accomodation for an interim period of time while some other people somewhere make a decision as to whether they have enough information to allow access.

From the Decision of the Supreme Court of Maine: “The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that an entity providing a place of public accomidation was not liable for discrimination during an interim period in which it was requesting additional information.”

Remember, our case was based on a Maine law which states that an individual cannot be denied access to public accomodation unless they pose a direct threat.

“The parents’ refusal to consent to the (functional behavioral assessment) meant that the school officials were unable to determine whether (Jan’s) behavior constituted a direct threat and, if so, what modifications, if any, could eliminate it,” wrote Justice Susan Calkins for the unanimous Supreme Judicial Court. “The school officials did not unlawfully discriminate against (Jan) by temporarily suspending him in order to make that determination.”

If there was no evidence that this child posed a direct threat, why was the law which stipulates presence of a direct threat utilized?

In addition, a de novo review, by the Supreme Court, of facts and evidence was requested in the Appeal, because facts and evidence were not utilized by the lower court. The Supreme Court also decided to pay no attention to the facts or evidence presented during three days of Hearings.

Facts and evidence played no part in this important legal decision.

See Maine Playground Discrimination Case for further information, including transcripts of all testimony.

Comments


  1. Glum

    What price an ‘expert’? After all the school laid claim to all this ‘expertise’ that the courts relied on exclusively and without question in the face of a lot of evidence that said quite the opposite. This is a travesty of justice with a lot of implications. After all if the courts believe that an autistic is automatically like some unstable gelignite – liable to go off explosively at any time, what is to prevent all those authority figures out there from excluding autistics from everywhere social? Did they think of that? As human rights abuses sans evidence go, this is a real beaut.

    I think a nice little post about the calibre of 90% of autism expertise would be about right. — Alyric    2005-08-12 03:01    #

  2. i suspect the decision is based on public policy concerns, rather than the strict letter of the law.

    be interested to see how (and by whom) this decision get used in the future.

    it’s not uncommon for beaurocracies to want to do things for themselves, and to consider other evidence ‘insufficient’ or ‘untrustworthy’.

    why did the parents choose not to allow the school to conduct this behavioural assessment thingy? [apart from already having provided a bundle of information] — maelorin    2005-08-15 03:32    #

  3. Where government bureaucracies are allowed to act unlawfully (that is, outside “the strict letter of the law”) by a court system ostensibly established to interpret and uphold the law, there is tyranny.

    The parents chose not to allow the school to conduct a behavioral assessment because Jan already had a plan in place which was being followed. All the testimony in the case is available to read; see particularly http://www.neurodiversity.com/falmouth01c_fitzpatrick.html and http://www.neurodiversity.com/falmouth02a_fitzpatrick.html.

    What is not mentioned in the testimony is the fact that one of the defendants in the case—the principal of the school who made the decision to suspend Jan’s right to play on the playground—is the wife of a Maine State Court judge who is a colleague and friend of Judge Humphrey, who heard the case.

    Given this source of bias, is simply amazing to me that Judge Humphrey did not recuse himself from the case. — Kathleen Seidel    2005-08-15 08:29    #

  4. http://disability.law.uiowa.edu/lhpdc/publications/documents/blanckdocs/Congress_PBlanck_070902.doc
    Statement of Professor Peter Blanck
    Before the U.S. House of Representatives
    Subcommittee on Social Security

    Thursday, July 11, 2002

    — scap_64    2005-08-21 02:00    #