This disability discrimination lawsuit went to trial but the jury ruled against the plaintiffs and in favor of the hospital, rejecting the claim that the hospital failed to accommodate the plaintiffs over their hearing deficiency. This case reminds us how difficult it is to override the jury's findings on appeal.
The case is Van Vorst v. Lutheran Healthcare, a summary order issued on December 22. We have four plaintiffs. The district court's post-trial ruling summarizes the plaintiffs' claim:
Each of the plaintiffs is deaf, and each received medical care at Lutheran on multiple occasions between 2012 and 2016. During that period, Lutheran generally relied on Video Remote Interpreting (“VRI”), a videoconferencing system, to allow off–site interpreters to interpret deaf patients’ American Sign Language (“ASL”) into English for Lutheran personnel and the personnel's English into ASL for the deaf patients.
The overall reliability of the VRI technology was disputed at trial, but the technology occasionally failed due to technical difficulties. When that occurred, plaintiffs communicated with their doctors and other Lutheran personnel in English through lipreading and by reading and writing notes. The principal focus of plaintiffs’ motion turns on the process used to obtain their consent to medical procedures and whether they were capable of understanding information that was conveyed to them prior to signing consent forms.
Since the case went to trial, there was a factual dispute for the jury about whether the defendants were liable under the New York City Human Rights Law, which provides a more liberal liability standard than the federal disability law, the Americans with Disabilities Act. Plaintiffs lose the appeal on several grounds.
First, the jury charge was fine, the Court of Appeals says, in telling the jury that "the Hospital had an obligation under the NYCHRL to ensure effective communication with patients on an individual basis and to consider each patient's preferred or requested communication method." The jury accepted the Hospital's argument that it had effectively accommodated the plaintiffs' disabilities.
The interesting part of this decision for me is the Court's finding that defendants' lawyer was able to attack the credibility of the plaintiffs at trial, undercutting their claims and supporting the verdict on appeal. While plaintiffs' expert said the plaintiffs' reading levels were at the first- to four-grade level, a factual argument that would make it easier for plaintiffs to win the case in challenging how the Hospital tried to accommodate their disabilities, cross examination seriously challenged that assertion. The Court of Appeals writes in a footnote that one plaintiff testified that "he used to spend every morning reading newspapers on politics and sports; he reads the magazine Model Aviation; he used to work at a printer, where he was required to read backwards; and he provided detailed errata and substantive comments on his deposition transcript in this case, which the jury specifically requested during its deliberation. Another plaintiff testified that she communicated exclusively through English lipreading and writing in grade school, with her immediate family members, in her job as an encoder at a bank, and with a home health aide in 2016; and that she watches TV with closed captions. You get the point. Evidence like this makes it quite difficult to overturn the jury's verdict, as everyone knows that credbility issues are for the jury and cannot be challenged on appeal.
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