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Home / Albomlar / The Olmstead v. LC & EW Supreme Court Decision, June 22 1999 29
The Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson was a pivotal point in disability law. The decision said that unnecessary institutionalization based on disability was discrimination. The case was based on another case, known as Helen L., that was argued by Steve Gold. ADAPT had argued for years that if states had money for services for a person in a nursing home, why couldn't these funds be used to serve the person in the community instead? Helen L was based on this principle and when it was won in lower courts and turned down by the Supreme Court, the ideas behind it were promoted nationally and other attorneys in other states started filing similar suits. When Olmstead made it up to the Supreme Court, states, organized by Florida, started filing briefs against the disability position. ADAPT began a campaign to counter this effort and, joined by activists from all the states, we were able to bring on and even get states to reverse themselves so that in the end a majority of states supported the disability position, and ultimately the Supreme Court agreed. In addition to this campaign, in May of 1999 ADAPT organized the Don't Tread on the ADA Rally, one of the largest disability rallies ever, to support the effort to free our people from unnecessary institutionalization. When the Supreme Court finally released their decision, ADAPT and other disability activists camped out on the steps of the Supreme Court to be among the first to hear in person the court's decision.
- Original Olmstead organizing list 1
The original list used to track states that went on and came off the States' Olmstead Amicus brief (aka the Evil Empire Brief). A handwritten list of states, some crossed off. All listed originally signed onto the anti-disability brief; those crossed off were convinced by the disability community to come off the brief in the end. SIGNED ONTO STATES OLMSTEAD AMICUS FL (organized other states) [crossed off] AL [crossed off] CA [crossed off] CO DE [crossed off] HI LA [crossed off] MD [crossed off] MI [crossed off] MS [crossed off] MT NE [crossed off] NV (became new coordinator) NH [crossed off] PA [crossed off] SC [crossed off] SD [crossed off] TN TX UT [crossed off] WV [crossed off] WY NEW IN [crossed off] MA [crossed off] MN [crossed off] WA [crossed off] crossed off = came off brief Evil Empire Brief : NCLS, Council State Governments, NGA, Nat. Assn. Counties, US Conference of Mayors, Natl. League of Cities, Internat. Municipal Lawyers Assc., Internat. City/County Management Assn. - Sue Jamieson, the lead attorney in the Olmstead case, at Atlanta Olmstead rally 2009
Sue Jamieson was the lead attorney in the Olmstead v LC and EW case that went to the Supreme Court. - Lois Curtis
Close up of Lois Curtis (LC) one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court Olmstead decision. Photo by Tom Olin - Elaine Wilson (EW)
Close up of Elaine Wilson (EW) one of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court Olmstead decision. - ADAPT (1190)
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General Mike Fisher Attorney General 15th floor, Strawberry Sq. Harrisburg, PA 17120 Fax: (717) 772-4526 Phone: (717) 787-1100 January 29, 1999 Stephanie A. Daniel Assistant Attorney General Attorney General's Office The Capitol Tallahassee, Florida 32399-1050 Via mall and fax Re: Olmstead v. L.C., No, 98-536 Dear Ms. Daniel: The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does not wish to join the brief on the merits which Florida has prepared in the above case. Sincerely, [signed] Louis J. Rovelli [typed] Louis J. Rovelli Executive Deputy Attorney General Director, Civil Law Division Litigation Section JGK/hs - ADAPT (1189)
State of Indiana Office of the Attorney General [illegible address] Jeffrey A. Modisett Attorney General [illegible phone number] March 29, 1999 William K. Suter Clerk of Court Supreme Court of the United States [illegible address] Washington, D. C. 20543 RE: Tommy Olmstead et el v. L. C. and E. W. each by Jonathan Zimring Case No. 98-136 Dear Mr. Suter: This letter is to inform you that the State of Indiana is withdrawing its participation in the amicus case brief filed by the State of Nevada in the above-entitled matter. Sincerely, [signed] J Modisett [typed] Jeff Modisett Attorney general cc: Thubert A. Baker, Georgie Attorney General John C. Jones, Georgia Sr Assistant Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, Nevada Attorney General Anne B. [illegible] Assistant Attorney General - ADAPT (1183)
State of Mississippi Office of the Attorney General Mike Moore Attorney General Civil Litigation Section Robert L. Sanders [illegible phone number] [illegible email address] March 19, 1999 Clerk of the Court Supreme Court of the United States 1 First Street, N. E. Washington, D. C. 20543 re: Tommy Olmstead v. L.C. and E. W. by Zimring, No. 98-536 Dear Clerk, The State of Mississippi hereby withdraws from the Amicus Curise Brief of the States in Support of Petitioners in the above cause. We will furnish a representative to physically redact the Mississippi signature block from copies of briefs on file with the Court. Please contact me if anything further is required. With best wishes, I am Very truly yours [signed] Robert E. Sanders [typed] Robert E. Sanders Assistant Attorney General RES/vs cc: Frankie Sue Del Papa, Anne B. Cathcart, Albert Gilbert - ADAPT (1182)
J. Joseph Curran, Jr. Attorney General Carmen M. Shepard Donna Hill Staton Deputy Attorneys General State of Maryland Office of the Attorney General Telefone No. (410) 576-6955 Writer's Direct Dial No. (410) 576-6318 January 14, 1999 Florida Attorney General's Office The Capitol, Suite PLO1 Tallahassee, Florida 323994-1050 Re: Olmstead v, LC and E. W, by Zimring Dear Attorney General: Please be advised that the State of Maryland will not be offering milieus support in the above-referearteed case. Sincerely, [signed] J. Joseph Corran, Jr. [typed J. Joseph Curran, jr. Attorney General JJC:dom - ADAPT (1172)
Bill Lockyer Attorney General State of California Department of Justice 1300 I Street Suite 125 P.O. Box 944253 Sacramento, CA 94244-2550 Public: (916) 324 3502 Facsimile: (916) 322 0206 (916) 323 7355 February 3, 1999 Stephanie A. Daniel Assistant Attorney General Office of the Attorney General State of Florida Civil Division/State Programs Section By TELEFAX ONLY-(850) 488 4872 Re: Olmstead v. L. C. U. S. Supreme Court No. 98-536 Dear Ms. Daniel [crossed out in pen, handwritten to say Stephanie--] This is to inform you that California will not be joining in the multi-state amicus brief Florida has prepared in the above-entitled case. Please do not hesitate to call me in you have any questions. Sincerely, [signed] Thomas F. Gede [typed] Thomas F. Gede Special Assistant Attorney General For Bill Lockyer Attorney General - ADAPT (1170)
[graphic of a judge holding a gavel at his bench, next to an American flag. A banner on the bottom of the image reads Judgement Day] In Olmstead v. L, C, and E.W. the Supreme Court will determine if states have the right to lock their citizens away for the crime of having a disability. More than 2 million of those people are currently locked away. We are those people and we'd rather go to jail. - ADAPT (1194)
26A Denver Rocky Mountain News World & Nation Insidedenver.com/keyword: AP News Desk — (303). 892-2728 e-mail newsdesk@denver-rmn.com [Headline] Court rules in favor of disabled [Subheading] Supreme Court says group homes appropriate for some hospitalized mental patients By Linda Greenhouse The New York Times WASHINGTON Isolating people with dis-abilities in big state institutions when there is no medical reason for their confinement is a form of discrimination that violates federal dis-abilities law, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. The 6-3 decision, in a case brought against the state of Georgia by two women with mental impairment, was a substantial victory for a disabilities rights movement. That movement has looked to the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 as a tool for breaking down institutional walls that separate people with serious mental and physical problems from the larger community. The ruling affirmed, in most respects, a decision last year by the federal appeals court m Atlanta, which held that states have a duty under the 1990 law to provide care in group homes when medically appropriate. In 1994 the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, in the only other appellate decision on [separate article begins] IN COLORADO Activists for the disabled in Colorado said Tuesday's Supreme Court decision is a major victory. "It's a critical step to show the state that people have the right to choose where and how they receive services and that segregated services will not be tolerated," said Joe Ehman, organizer with ADAPT, which works on issues for the disabled. "It says to (Gov. Bill) Owens that people have a right to choose where they live, and it's not the state's job to do that." Colorado was one of seven states that supported a Georgia law that kept two women in mental hospitals long after Georgia's department of human services recommended they be transferred to the community. Mike McLachlan, solicitor general with the Colorado Attorney General's office, said he had not seen the decision. However, he said he believes that the ruling will have little impact on Colorado. "Colorado already by law encourages community settings instead of institutions," he said. "The question is the speed by which the people who are in institutions must be integrated into the community." It was not known Tuesday how many people in Colorado would be affected. — Tillie Fong, News Staff Writer [this article ends] [originally article resumes] the subject, reached the same result. The Supreme Court's decision six months ago to hear Georgia's' appeal in this case alarmed advocates for people with disabilities, who feared that the court might steer the law in the opposite direction and reverse the nationwide trend toward deinstitutionalization. An unusually vigorous grass-roots campaign sprang up around the case, leading 15 of the 22 states that had originally supported Georgia to disavow the state's position in the Supreme Court. The case involved a 1995 lawsuit filed on behalf of Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, both of them mentally retarded and mentally ill, who sought state care outside the Georgia Regional Hospital, where they had lived, off and on, for years. Both remained in the hospital for sever-al years after state doctors had concluded that they could be more appropriately cared for in small group homes. In some respects, the decision Tuesday was the court's first, rather than last, word on the subject, and it may require more cases to clarify the full dimensions of the ruling. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion held that states' obligation to care for people in small, neighborhood-based settings was limited to some degree by available resources. States are not required to close their big hospitals — which, the court stressed, may still be appropriate for some people — or to create group home programs that they do not now have. In fact, though, every state now has such a program. The decision interpreted a regulation that requires states to make "reasonable modifications" in their programs to avoid discriminating against people with disabilities, while at the same time providing that states heed not make "fundamental" alterations. - ADAPT (1193)
[Headline] Pivotal Rulings Ahead for Law On Disabilities [Subheading] Supreme Court to Begin to Chart Protections By LINDA GREENHOUSE WASHINGTON, April 18 — Beginning on Wednesday with a case that some lawyers have labeled the Brown v. Board of Education of the disability rights movement, the Supreme Court is embarking on an unusually extensive review of a single Federal statute, the Americans With Disabilities Act. The Justices' decision to hear four disability act cases over a two-week period reflects the fact that the full dimensions of this far-reaching civil rights law remain uncharted even after nearly 10 years on the books. The law has become broadly familiar for removing physical barriers in public places and for opening the workplace to people with disabilities. Indeed, three of the cases do involve employment disputes, presenting the surprisingly unsettled is-sue of whether a physical problem that is kept in check through medication or compensated for by some-thing as simple as corrective lenses qualifies under the law, as a disability. The case scheduled for Wednesday, the first of the four, is different. There is no easy remedy at hand for the problems facing the plaintiffs, two Georgia women whose disabilities include mental retardation, mental illness and brain damage. In su-ing the state the two women, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, sought not employment but a life outside the Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, a large state institution. Both women spent many months in the hospital waiting for placement in a homelike environment that their doctors said would be medically and socially appropriate but for which there were long waiting lists. The question in the case, Olmstead v. Ldi.C., No. 98-536, is whether the Americans With Disabilities Act re-quires a state to offer such a setting, for example, a small, supervised group home, for people for whom such a setting is appropriate. The Federal appeals court in Atlanta ruled last.year that it does. In the four months since the Justices agreed to hear Georgia's appeal, the case has galvanized disability rights' advocates. It pits Georgia and a group of other states against the Clinton Administration, which is defending a regulation issued in the earliest days of the law, in the Administration of President George Bush, that endorses the principle of "integration" of people with disabilities into the wider population, to the greatest extent possible, in the provision of public services. At issue is Title II of the law, which applies to public services offered by state and local governments. It pro-vides that "no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in" or "be subjected to discrimination" by a Government program or service. A 1991 regulation, issued by the Attorney General under a Congressional directive "to issue regulations setting forth the forms of discrimination prohibited," provides that services or programs shall be offered "in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs" of people with dis-abilities. The regulation came to be known as the "integration mandate." In its decision in the Georgia case last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declared, "By definition where, as here, the state confines an individual with a disability in an institutionalized set-ting when a community placement is appropriate, the state has violated the core principle underlying the Americans With Disabilities Act's integration mandate." State budgetary restrictions were not a defense, the appeals court said, unless the cost of compliance was "so unreasonable given the demands of the state's mental health budget that it would fundamentally alter the service it provides." In ruling against the state, the 11th Circuit agreed with the one other Federal appeals court to have ad-dressed the question, in a case from Philadelphia that the Supreme Court declined to review four years ago. It is unusual for the Court to agree to hear a case on the meaning of a Federal law in the absence of conflicting opinions among the lower Federal courts. So disability rights' advocates were alarmed when the Court accepted Georgia's appeal, interpreting the action as a signal that the Justices were moved by the strong states' rights tone of Georgia's petition for review and were leaning toward overturning the appeals court's decision. Groups such as Adapt, a nation-wide organization of people with dis-abilities, lobbied and demonstrated in many of the 22 states that had formed a coalition in support of Georgia's appeal by signing a brief as friends of the Court. Four states later joined the coalition. But as a result of Adapt's lobbying efforts, more than half the states had dropped out of the coalition by the time Georgia filed its final brief, a highly unusual turn of events. Typical was a public statement by Michigan's Solicitor General, Thomas L. Casey, who said that after taking a "fresh look" at the case, his state had concluded that "Georgia's arguments are not consistent with the state of Michigan's position as a leader in community-based mental health care." Even after signing the final ver-sion of the multistate brief in support of Georgia's position, some states continued to have second thoughts, and several disavowed their position. Massachusetts Officials, for example [text breaks for a quote] [pulled quote] The Justices' decisions will help chart a wide-reaching act [text continues] said the state's signature on the brief "has been wrongly interpreted as a retreat by the Commonwealth from its long-standing support of dis-ability rights in general and deinstitutionalization in particular." The states now in Georgia's camp are Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Hawaii, South Carolina, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Washington, Tex-as and Colorado. Along with Massachusetts, Minnesota and Louisiana withdrew their support after signing the final brief. In addition to Michigan, the states that initially supported Georgia but declined to sign the final brief were Alabama, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. At the same time, 58 former state commissions and directors of mental health from 36 states, including New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, filed a brief in their own names, supporting homelike care as more appropriate and effective and asking the Court not to accept Georgia's "alarmist claims" about the impact of the 11th Circuit's ruling. Georgia's basic argument, made in its brief to the court, is that the appeals court misapplied the integration regulation, which itself exceeds the scope of the statute. In enacting the Americans With Disabilities Act, the brief asserts, Congress did not make "a national value judgment that the 'least restrictive treatment' must be provided to psychiatric patients, to say nothing of imposing on the states the massive and indeterminate fiscal burdens that would follow such a decision." Simply "requiring a person to wait her turn for a community placement" is evidence of fiscal constraint but not of discrimination, the state says. Emphatic as the state is in making its argument, the other side speaks fervently of the case as the ultimate test of the statute's meaning and identity as a civil rights jaw, "the Brown v. Board of Education for disability rights," in the words of Stephen F. Gold, a lawyer represent-ing Adapt and other disability groups. In an interview, Mr. Gold, of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia, said people with disabilities had long faced segregation reminiscent of the segregation , based on race. "If the Americans with Disabilities Act did not mean to end unnecessary segregation, then all the work we did in promulgating it as a civil rights statute is a sham," he said. "We're just trying to get people out of institutions who don't have to be there." The two plaintiffs, having won their lawsuit have been living successfully in the community, Ms. Curtis in a three-person group home and Ms. Wilson in an apartment of her own with supportive services. Both are planning to attend the Supreme Court argument. Before the month ends, the Court will hear the three other disability act cases, which all raise the question of how to define the disabilities that bring a person within the law's protection. The plaintiff in Murphy v. United Parcel Service, No. 9674992, to be argued on April 27, is a truck driver whose high blood pressure is controlled with medication. He sued under the disability law after his employer dismissed him, and is now appealing a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver. The court, view-ing his condition in its medicated state, concluded that he was not a person with a disability and was not entitled to sue. On April 28, the Court will hear Sutton v. United Air Lines, No. 97-1943, a similar case in which twin sisters, both nearsighted but with vision correctable to 20/20, were denied jobs as pilots because they did not meet the airline's requirement for uncorrected vision. The same appeals court in Denver held that they had no basis for a lawsuit because their correctable vision was not a disability. In both cases, the question is whether a disability should have to be assessed in its "mitigated" or uncorrected state. The final case, Albertsons v. Kirkengburg, No. 98-591, also scheduled for April 28, presents the somewhat different situation of a truck driver who sees out of only one eye but whose brain has compensated for the deficiency. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, concluding that he sees adequately but in a "different manner" from most other people found him to be disabled and therefore entitled to sue the employer that dismissed him. The employer is appealing. - ADAPT (1192)
This page continues the article from Image 1193. Full text available on 1193 for easier reading. - ADAPT (1181)
[title] Victory in Olmstead by Homer Page On June 22, 1999, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Olmstead Case. Olmstead originated in Georgia and involved two women with disabilities who desired to live in an integrated setting. For the first time the court affirmed the right of persons with disabilities to live in the most appropriate integrated setting... - ADAPT (1180)
[added text lays over the document reading This Victory by ADAPT] [original document reads] Supreme Court of the United States No. 98-536 Tommy Olmstead, Commissioner, Georgia Department of Human Resources, et al., Petitioners v. L. C., by Jonathan Zimring, guardian ad litem and next friend, et al. On writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit [illegible date] Justice Ginsburg announced [illegible] and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts [illegible] with respect to Part III-B, in which O'Connor, Souter, and Breyer, joined. This case concerns the proper construction of the anti-discrimination provision contained in the public services portion (Title II) of the Americans with Disabilities Act [illegible] Stat. 337, 42 U.S.C. 12132. Specifically, we confront the question whether the [illegible] may require placement of persons with mental disabilities in community settings [illegible] in institutions. The answer, we hold, is a qualified yes. Such action is in order when the State's treatment professionals have determined that community placement is appropriate, the transfer from institutional care to a less restrictive setting is not opposed by the affected individual, and the placement can be reasonably accommodated, taking into account the resources available to the State and the needs of others with [text cuts off] [text resumes] For the reasons stated we conclude that, under Title II of the ADA, States are required to provide community-based treatment for persons with mental disabilities when the State's treatment professionals determine that such placement is appropriate, the affected persons do not oppose such treatment, and the placement can be reasonably accommodated, taking into account the resources available to the State and the needs of others with mental disabilities. The judgement of the Eleventh Circuit is therefore affirmed in part and vacated in part, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It is so ordered.