Recently, there has been a court case in the news about Jarek Molski. He is a Californian that has recently been told he can no longer bring lawsuits against public businesses that are in violation of the ADA by not allowing for access to their services by wheelchair users. These violations are of the sort where businesses do not have wheelchair ramps or accessible parking. The US Supreme court upheld the decision to ban Molski from filing any more law suits — by refusing to hear his most recent case — because he has filed more than 400 of them.
I have no legal training, so my analysis and opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. However, strangely enough, I agree with the US Supreme court on this one, not because of the NUMBER of cases but because of the OUTCOME of many of these 400 cases. The LA Times reports, “Fear of adverse judgments compelled many to settle out of court, earning the Polish-born plaintiff hundreds of thousands of dollars in less than two years.” That is, these businesses were not becoming accessible as a result of these law suits, but paying this man settlements instead.
To me, this is completely absurd. In fact, I don’t think personal payments should even be allowed in these kinds of ADA cases. I don’t have a law degree, but it seems to me that these kinds of cases involving access to public space (as opposed to cases that have to do with something like employment discrimination) have very little to do with harms to an individual, but rather harm an entire community or class of people. It makes absolutely no sense for a harm being visited upon a large group of people to be “settled” by a payment to an individual.
I find the notion that any one individual should have personal gain from these kinds of cases completely and utterly despicable. This is because he is essentially making a profit of off our community’s marginalization and oppression. In my opinion, he is no better than a nursing home industry lobbyist that makes a profit off of the isolation and incarceration of our people, who want to live in the community but are stopped by his work manipulating health care benefit laws to exclude community choice. Somehow, it feels even more repugnant because Molski is supposedly “one of us.” He knows what it feels like to be excluded from a restaurant or a bar or a barber shop or a book store or any number of places, but chooses to line his pockets and preserve that feeling for others. This is the ultimate act of selfishness and exploitation.
Perhaps, in the most egregious of cases, it would make sense to award punitive damages to punish the offending business (especially when that business has very deep pockets and could have easily been accessible). Even then, I feel uncomfortable at the idea of making a payment to an individual as a way of mitigating a harm suffered by an entire community. I wonder if it would be possible to pay such fines to non-profit organizations that fight for the good of people with disabilities as a whole, like Centers for Independent Living. Perhaps payments could be made to a scholarship fund for students with disabilities who want to attend college or a fund that helps individuals with disabilities to afford modifications to their living space or transportation to make it accessible? Maybe these are all pipe dreams, but the thought of paying a single person money to somehow make up for the marginalization of an entire people turns my stomach. This is NOT what Justin Dart had in mind when he devoted his life to freeing our people with the passage of the ADA.
November 26th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Unfortunately, there are more Jarek Molski’s out there running amok for personal gain and giving the disability community a bad reputation. A number of folks file frivolous or near-frivoulus ADA lawsuits offering their ADA “consultant” services and expertise to fix the problem. These folks will say that they are helping in the “enforcement” of the ADA and, in turn, doing a good deed for the disability community, and that is the only way to accomplish ADA accessibilty. This “Rambo” type of approach does not serve our community well and I hope the U.S. Supreme Court’s upholding of the decision again Molisky will further signal to others, enough of this personal gain, at the expense of the greater disability community. The disability community needs to collaborate with the business community and governmental and non-profit entities to find more amenable and workable ways to make our communities accessible.
November 27th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
I’d have to disagree Craig. I think you can separate out the “rambo” tactics from the personal gain. That is, if an aggressive stance backed by a lawsuit is the only way to get it done (as it OFTEN is), then I am all for such methods. What I have a problem with is using such methods to line your pockets rather than create needed changes. If kind words and cooperation were all that is needed to gain public access, there would have been no need for the ADA in the first place. Sometimes, we need legal teeth.