George Lane, one of the plaintiffs in a state sovereign immunity vs. disabled rights law case that the Supreme Court just heard, has often been described as quite sympathetic and deserving of empathy. And surely there’s something to that; but, on the other hand, as reader Robert Schwartz points out, there are other things that are less sympathetic about him. Here’s an AP article:
Eight years ago, after an auto wreck left him unable to walk, George Lane crawled up two flights of stairs at the Polk County Courthouse to face reckless driving charges.
He says he will never forget the humiliation of having to drag his body up 30 tile steps. ”Two law enforcement officers and county officials stood at the top and laughed,” he says. . . .
Lane, 40, has been arrested more than 30 times on charges that include drunken driving, drugs and traffic offenses. No longer in a wheelchair, Lane now walks with an artificial leg inside Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex, where he was sent for slamming a fellow prisoner in the head with a crutch at a county jail. . . .
Courthouse employees who witnessed Lane’s crawl in Benton, about 40 miles from Chattanooga, say that no one laughed and that he refused offers of help. In fact, Lane declined a judge’s offer to move the hearing to a ground-floor room.
When Lane chose not to climb the stairs a second time, he was arrested for failure to appear in court.
Two years after Lane’s crawl, Polk County spent $108,000 to install an elevator at the courthouse. . . .
Lane was maimed in an auto accident that killed a woman; he was driving on the wrong side of the road. The reckless driving case happened four months later.
Lane’s case has been joined by a perhaps more sympathetic plaintiff: Beverly Jones, a court reporter who says she cannot pursue her livelihood in at least 25 courthouses in Tennessee because she uses a wheelchair.
This doesn’t tell us what the right answer should be in Lane’s case, of course. To the extent that there are new rules to be made with an eye towards the practical effects of the decision (something that courts sometimes do have to do), the Court should try to consider the practical effects on the run of cases, and not the particular and perhaps unusual attributes of this plaintiff. But this does, I think, bear on the “George Lane, super-sympathetic plaintiff” theory.
UPDATE: D’oh! When I first posted this, I credited the article to the Miami Herald, even though it was an AP article that just ran in the Herald (presumably among many other papers). My mistake; I usually try to credit AP stories to the AP, but this time I just missed it.
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