By Emily Nelson
Ruby Maes, a former corrections officer at the City of Española Detention Facility, sued the City and the Detention Facility’s Director for disability discrimination, alleging that it refused to provide a reasonable accommodation for her disability, responding to her request telling her that her health issues were “your problem.” The City filed a motion for summary judgment, arguing that Maes’s medical conditions (depression, severe insomnia, and migraines) did not qualify as a “disability” because the inability to sleep does not “substantially limit a major life activity,” under the ADA. The federal district court of New Mexico disagreed with the City, finding, among other things, that such conditions do qualify as a disability, and allowed Maes to proceed with her discrimination claims.
Maes was diagnosed with depression, severe insomnia, and migraine headaches prior to being hired at the Detention Facility. In 2010, two years into her employment there, Maes presented the Facility’s Director, Ted Garcia, with a letter from her doctor explaining her conditions, and that they were triggered if she had to work the graveyard shift past midnight. Garcia accommodated Maes’s disability by simply not assigning her to the graveyard shifts. During this time, Maes received good job performance reviews. However, in February 2011, Garcia left his position as Director, and was replaced by Defendant Christian Lopez.
Maes informed Lopez of her conditions soon after he began as Director, and Lopez was also aware of the doctor’s note explaining Maes’s conditions and stating that their exacerbation could be avoided by not working the graveyard shift. Nevertheless, Lopez assigned Maes to work fourteen graveyard shifts from March through April 2011, allegedly “because of other employees concerns that [Maes] was working only day shifts.” After Maes wrote a letter to Lopez, he amended her schedule to all day shifts and placed Maes on the “standby” schedule. During that time, Maes was called in to cover a graveyard shift. Again, Maes informed Lopez that she could not work past midnight, and asked him what she should do if she couldn’t find a replacement, to which Lopez responded, “That’s your problem.”
Maes was unable to find a replacement and left a couple hours into the shift to avoid having to work past 12:00am. Maes contends she was thereafter forced to resign, stating in her resignation letter that “[t]he stress and, what I consider mental abuse, therefore leave me no other option but to respectfully submit my letter or resignation, effective immediately.” Maes then filed suit, alleging that the City had failed to reasonably accommodate her disability, and that she was constructively discharged.
The City filed for summary judgment, arguing that it was not required to provide a reasonable accommodation, because Maes’ conditions did not qualify as a disability under the ADA because “the inability to sleep does not substantially limit a major life activity.” The New Mexico federal district court disagreed:
The ADA Amendments Act of 2008, (ADAAA) rejected the Supreme Court’s decision in Toyota Motor Manufacturing v. Williams, which held that the term “major life activities” referred only to activities of “central importance to most people’s daily lives.” Congress stated that “the question of whether an individual’s impairment is a disability under the ADA should not demand extensive analysis” and “usually will not require scientific, medical, or statistical analysis.” Now, under the ADAAA, “major life activities include, but are not limited to … sleeping, … and working.” As well, an impairment that “substantially limits one major life activity need not limit other major life activities in order to be considered a disability.” Finally, an impairment that is “episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.”
Working under the new, less restrictive definition of a “disability” as provided by the ADAAA, the court found that a reasonable jury could conclude that Maes had a “physical impairment that substantially limits the major life activity of sleeping.”
Continuing its analysis, the court further found that Maes had submitted sufficient evidence for a jury to find that she could perform the essential duties of a detention officer with the reasonable accommodation she had requested, and that a jury could also find that she had been discriminated against on the basis of her disability due to the City’s refusal to provide a reasonable accommodation:
Based on this evidence, a reasonable jury could determine that Defendants failed to make a reasonable accommodation to Plaintiff’s known medical conditions when Defendant Lopez scheduled her for standby and Defendants Lopez and Montoya refused to excuse her from working a graveyard shift on April 6, 2011. Additionally, Defendants do not present evidence that allowing Plaintiff to be excused from working the graveyard shift on April 6, 2011, would have caused them an undue hardship. Plaintiff has put forth evidence that raises a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether Defendants discriminated against Plaintiff because of her disability.
Editor’s Note (Jim Cline): Federal law has imposed some hurdles on disability discrimination plaintiffs, requiring that their conditions interfered with a “major life activity.” The amended ADA liberalized that standard. But even under the original ADA, medical conditions such as those at issue here, which affected sleep, should likely have been recognized as a qualified disability.
