John Charbonneau v. John Gorczyk

Plaintiff John Charbonneau appeals a decision
by the Orleans County Superior Court dismissing his claim against John
Gorczyk, Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections (DOC) for
discrimination under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Following a bench trial, the trial court concluded that (1) plaintiff is
not "disabled" under the ADA, and (2) if plaintiff is disabled, his
requested modifications to accommodate the disability are unreasonable. We
affirm the court's decision that plaintiff is not disabled within the
meaning of the ADA, and therefore we find it unnecessary to determine the
reasonableness of plaintiff's requested accommodations.

2. The facts presented at trial were essentially undisputed. At
issue here is whether the facts support the trial court's legal
conclusions. Our standard of review on questions of law is de novo. State
v. Pollander, 167 Vt. 301, 304, 706 A.2d 1359, 1360 (1997). We now turn to
the facts as found by the trial court.

3. Plaintiff is a prisoner at the Northern State Correctional
Facility (NSCF). He suffers from Prinz-Metil angina, a heart condition
that causes intermittent, involuntary spasms of the coronary artery,
restricting blood flow to the heart. The spasms are unpredictable and are
not necessarily caused by stress or overexertion. People with this
condition can suffer spasms even at rest. When these spasms occur,
plaintiff experiences acute pain and he must take three nitroglycerin
tablets over a fifteen minute period. If the pain persists despite the
medication, more intensive medical intervention is necessary to diagnose
the potential for a heart attack. Timely medical care following a spasm is
essential to successfully monitor and manage plaintiff's condition.

4. While incarcerated, plaintiff has experienced sixteen of these
episodes. One of those sixteen episodes required a hospital visit. At the
time of trial, plaintiff was housed at NSCF, a facility with a nurse on
duty twenty-four hours per day.

5. Although most individuals who suffer from Prinz-Metil angina
must live in an area where they have access to medical care, many can live
and work in the community with few, if any, residence, travel, or work
restrictions. Thus, plaintiff has been able to work while in prison,
performing janitorial and laundry services. For his work, plaintiff has
received earned reductions in his term (ERT).

6. Seeking additional ERT, plaintiff asked for a transfer to a
prison work camp in St. Johnsbury. The work camp is a special prison
facility that houses a small number of inmates. It provides a program
whose mission is rehabilitation through community service. Inmates at the
camp receive additional ERT, reducing their sentences at a faster rate than
inmates at other facilities, like NSCF. DOC officials denied plaintiff's
transfer request because he was not medically qualified for the program due
to the lack of full-time medical coverage necessary to monitor and mange
his Prinz-Metil angina. Plaintiff grieved the denial to the DOC. He
requested to attend the work camp or, in the alternative, to receive the
additional ERT he would receive at the work camp while remaining at NSCF.
Prison officials denied his grievance.

7. Following the prison's denial of his grievance, plaintiff filed
suit in Orleans Superior Court on November 7, 2000. At trial, he argued
that under the ADA, he should either be given access to the work camp or
receive the additional ERT he would have earned at the camp. Following a
bench trial, the Orleans Superior Court dismissed plaintiff's claims,
finding that he is not disabled under the ADA because his impairment does
not substantially affect his ability to work in a broad range of jobs. The
court also found that even if plaintiff were disabled within the meaning of
the ADA, his request to attend the work camp could not be made without
undue hardship to the DOC. This appeal followed.

8. This case is governed by Title II of the ADA, which prohibits
state agencies like the DOC from excluding an individual from a DOC program
because of the individual's disability. See 42 U.S.C. § 12132 (1995)
(forbidding disability discrimination by states). A person is disabled if
the person (1) has a "physical or mental impairment," (2) "that
substantially limits one or more of the major life activities." 42 U.S.C.
§ 12102(2)(A) (1995). Under the regulations implementing Title II of the
ADA, to which we must accord great deference, Bartlett v. N.Y. State Bd. of
Law Examiners, 226 F.3d 69, 79, 82 (2d Cir. 2000), a substantial limitation
is established "when the individual's important life activities are
restricted as to the conditions, manner, or duration under which they can
be performed in comparison to most people." 28 C.F.R. Pt. 35, App. A §
35.104 (2003); see also Gonzales v. Nat'l Bd. of Medical Examiners, 225
F.3d 620, 626-27 (6th Cir. 2000) (DOJ regulations require comparison of
plaintiff's limits to those of general population). To be "disabled," a
causal nexus must exist between the impairment and the substantial
limitation of the major life activity at issue. Bartlett, 226 F.3d at
84-85. "In other words, the definition of 'disability . . . encompasses
the requirement that it be the impairment, and not some other factor or
factors, that causes the substantial limitation." Id.

9. In this case, there is no dispute that Prinz-Metil angina is
a physical impairment. At issue is whether plaintiff's impairment
substantially limits a major life activity. The major life activity the
parties contest is plaintiff's ability to work. Thus, a determination of
whether plaintiff is disabled within the meaning of the ADA turns on
whether his working ability is substantially limited by his Prinz-Metil
angina rather than some other factor. The trial court found that
plaintiff's heart condition is not one which normally limits, in a
meaningful way, a person's capacity to work. Many persons with Prinz-Metil
angina live and work with few, if any, restrictions. Plaintiff's condition
has not affected any of his day-to-day activities, nor interfered with his
ability to perform laundry and janitorial jobs at the prison. In fact,
plaintiff held a position in the prison laundry at the time he testified in
this case. The fact that plaintiff could perform work while incarcerated
demonstrates that his medical condition does not substantially limit his
ability to work. Cf. Gelabert-Ladenheim v. American Airlines, Inc., 252
F.3d 54, 59-63 (1st Cir. 2001) (relying in part on plaintiff's pre- and
post-impairment work history, court concludes that plaintiff was not
"substantially limited" in her ability to work); Dutcher v. Ingalls
Shipbuilding, 53 F.3d 723, 727 (5th Cir. 1995) (welder was not
substantially limited in her ability to work where she could work as welder
in fab shop); Heilweil v. Mount Sinai Hosp., 32 F.3d 718, 722-24 (2d Cir.
1994) (construing Rehabilitation Act's similar definition of disability and
concluding that asthmatic was not substantially limited in working because
she could work in other areas of hospital without aggravating her asthma);
Smaw v. Va. Dep't of State Police, 862 F. Supp. 1469, 1475 (E.D. Va. 1994)
(plaintiff's "present position as a dispatcher would seem to negate any
argument that she is disqualified from her profession by her weight").
Significantly, plaintiff himself describes his condition as an
inconvenience.

10. Plaintiff argues that notwithstanding his ability to work at a
number of jobs at the prison, his need to be in reasonable proximity of
medical care presents a geographical and temporal limitation on his ability
to work. He points out that regulations issued under Title I of the ADA
direct courts to consider the jobs available and foreclosed to the
individual in the geographical area to which the individual has access.
See 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(j)(3)(ii)(A) (2003). Plaintiff analogizes his
situation to one described in guidelines interpreting those regulations:

[S]uppose an individual has an allergy to a substance found in
most high rise office buildings . . . [making] breathing extremely
difficult. Since this individual would be substantially limited
in the ability to perform the broad range of jobs in various
classes that are conducted in high rise office buildings within
the geographical area to which he or she has reasonable access, he
or she would be substantially limited in working.

29 C.F.R. Pt. 1630.2(j), App. (2003). Plaintiff claims that because his
condition precludes him from working any job at the work camp, his
impairment is substantially limiting.

11. Plaintiff's analogy is inapposite. It is not, in the instant
case, a matter of an individual being precluded from a wide variety of jobs
because the medical condition is aggravated by a factor common to the
workplaces where the jobs are (i.e., an allergy aggravated by substances in
high-rise office buildings). Rather, the individual is precluded from a
wide variety of jobs because he is in prison having been convicted of a
crime. Thus, plaintiff's situation is more analogous to a worker whose
allergies preclude her from doing office work in a particular office
building (the work camp) but can perform similar work in other buildings
without problems (NSCF). See Heilweil, 32 F.3d at 723-24. As such,
plaintiff's choice of work sites may be limited, but the limitation is not
a factor of his medical condition, it is a factor of his incarceration.

12. It will always be the case that an inmate's "restrictive
environment" creates a substantial limitation in a broad range of jobs in
various classes. A prison guard with the same medical condition as
plaintiff could not successfully argue that she was disabled within the
meaning of the ADA by insisting that only correctional facilities be used
as the "geographic area" to determine whether her angina substantially
limited her ability to work. Yet, plaintiff's arguments seek exactly that
result. We do not believe this is what Congress intended when it passed
legislation to enable the disabled to "pursue those opportunities for which
our society is justifiably famous." 42 U.S.C. § 12101(a)(9) (1995).
Plaintiff is not disabled within the meaning of subsection (2)(A) of §
12102.

13. Plaintiff claims that even if his impairment does not
substantially limit his ability to work, the DOC regards him as disabled,
and thus he falls within the ADA's protection. Under § 12102(2)(C), a
person is disabled if he is regarded as having "a physical or mental
impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life
activities." Id. § 12102(2)(A), (C). To benefit from this definition of
"disabled," plaintiff must show that the DOC believes either that plaintiff
"has a substantially limiting impairment that [he] does not have or that
[he] has a substantially limiting impairment when, in fact, the impairment
is not so limiting." Sutton v. United Airlines, Inc., 527 U.S. 471, 489
(1999). Key to each instance is that the covered entity misperceives the
individual's actual circumstances. Id. Moreover, under Title I of the
ADA, employers are free to set certain physical and medical qualifications
for particular jobs and not run afoul of the Act. Id. at 490. In other
words, employers may "decide that some limiting, but not substantially
limiting, impairments make individuals less than ideally suited for a job."
Id. (emphasis in original).

14. In this case, the DOC decided not to place plaintiff at the
work camp to perform the same job he was doing at the prison because it has
no medical coverage for plaintiff's condition. The DOC holds no
misperceptions about the nature of his heart condition, however, nor does
it regard plaintiff as substantially limited in his ability to work. As
the trial court found, the DOC permitted plaintiff to work full time at the
prison laundry in addition to other jobs. Because the DOC does not regard
plaintiff's heart condition as substantially limiting his ability to work,
plaintiff is not disabled within the meaning of § 12102(2)(C).

15. In light of our holding that plaintiff is not disabled for
purposes of the ADA, we render no opinion on the trial court's decision
that plaintiff's accommodation request was unreasonable.

* * *

Click the case caption above for the full text of the Court's opinion.