Disability Law Commons^™

Understanding Jurors’ Judgments In Cases Involving Juvenile Defendants: Effects Of Confession Evidence And Intellectual Disability, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Bette L. Bottoms

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Juveniles are at heightened risk for falsely confessing to crimes, particularly if they are intellectually disabled. We conducted a mock trial experiment to investigate the effects of a juvenile defendant’s confession and status as intellectually disabled on jurors’ decision making. As expected, jurors discounted a juvenile’s coerced confession: Jurors’ judgments were similar for a juvenile who was perceived to have confessed under coercion and a juvenile who did not confess. In general, these effects were explained by the fact that, compared to a juvenile who was perceived as having confessed voluntarily, a juvenile who was perceived as having confessed under …

The Death Penalty And The Mentally Ill: A Selected And Annotated Bibliography, Jean Mattimoe

Articles

The United States Supreme Court over the last decade has selectively whittled away at the scope and availability of the death penalty by exempting certain groups from execution under the Eighth Amendment. In 2002 the court ruled that executing mentally retarded criminals violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In 2005 the court ruled that the Constitution forbids the execution of individuals who were under the age of 18 when they committed their crimes. Currently there is an active debate on whether to extend the categorical exemptions created by the Court to the mentally ill. At the forefront …

Battling Ptsd: Getting Reservists Suffering From Ptsd Back To Work Through Proposed Amendments To Userra And Va Disability Compensation Benefits, 45 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1201 (2012), Jeremiah Stephan

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Childhood, Interrupted: Encouraging The De-Institutionalization Of Utah's State Hospital, Sara Montoya

Utah OnLaw: The Utah Law Review Online Supplement

While boasting a culture that is rich in family and community values, Utah ought to be leading the way in developing and implementing a comprehensive and efficient system of care that protects children and families by placing tools within the home and the community to strengthen these core units of Utah society. Further, with the Utah State Hospital at the end of its physical lifespan, and a crippled economy requiring more budget pinching than ever, the timing is particularly conducive to taking these crucial steps forward. With these litigation tools, an advocacy group or family might be able to successfully …

A Call For Standards: An Overview Of The Current Status And Need For Guardian Standards Of Conduct And Codes Of Ethics, Karen E. Boxx, Terry W. Hammond

Articles

The role of trust in guardianships is rarely discussed, perhaps because of the assumption that court supervision of guardians reduces their power to act in any way other than trustworthy. However, as the number of persons needing guardianship protection increases while the resources available to courts to finance supervision decreases, the role of guardian is starting to become a more conventional fiduciary relationship complete with a hallmark downside-lack of supervision. Because of this trend, the concept of delineated standards for performance of a guardian's duties has taken on critical importance.

The 2001 Wingspan Conference, the second national conference on guardianship …

Common-Law Interpretation Of Appropriate Education: The Road Not Taken In Rowley, Mark Weber

College of Law Faculty

Thirty years old in 2012, Board of Education v. Rowley is the case that established a some-benefit or floor-of-opportunity standard for the services public school districts must provide to children who have disabilities. But the some-benefit approach is by no means the only one the Court could have adopted. It could have endorsed the view of the lower courts that each child with a disability must be given the opportunity to achieve his or her potential commensurate with the opportunity offered other children. Or it could have adopted a standard based on achievement of the child’s full potential or the …

School Districts And Families Under The Idea: Collaborative In Theory, Adversarial In Fact, Debra Chopp

Articles

To read the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is to be impressed with the ambition and promise of special education. The statute guarantees disabled students a "free appropriate public education" (FAPE) in the "least restrictive environment." At the core of this guarantee lies an entitlement for the parents of a disabled child to collaborate with teachers and school administrators to craft an educational program that is both tailored to the child's unique needs and designed to help her make progress in her education. This entitlement, and the IDEA generally, represents an enormous advance for children with disabilities--a community that, …

Estate Planning For Individuals With Disabilities, Thomas Simmons

Faculty Publications

The basic federal safety net program for elderly, blind and disabled persons is Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The Social Security Administration (SSA) administers the program and eligibility is based upon financial need. The basic eligible criteria are that an individual have less than two thousand dollars ($2,000) in assets, or three thousand dollars ($3,000) for a couple, although certain limited resources are excluded. There are also income limitations that individuals must satisfy to qualify for SSI. SSI’s sister in welfare benefits is the Medicaid (Title 19) program. While SSI is entirely a federal program, Medicaid, which shares the same basic …

Data Note: What Are The Employment Experiences Of Youth With Autism After High School?, Alberto Migliore, Agnieszka Zalewska

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

As the number of youth diagnosed with autism increases across the nation, there is a growing interest in knowing about their employment experiences after high school. To explore this, we examined the findings from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2.

As Table 1 shows, over half of youth with autism worked at some point after leaving high school (67%). This figure was greater than for their peers with an intellectual disability (ID) (53%), although smaller compared with their peers with other disabilities (86%). When looking only at those employed at the time of the interview, however, the figures were smaller across …

Data Note: Growth In Community-Based Non-Work, Jean Winsor, John Butterworth

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

Understanding the role of community-based non-work (CBNW) services is complex. While different data sources suggest different levels of investment, there is consistent evidence that the service is being used more frequently. The number of states reporting that they provide CBNW services on the IDD Agency Survey grew from 18 in FY1996 to 30 in FY2010. Nationally, the reported participation in CBNW services has grown steadily for states that report it as a service, from 18.7% in FY1999 to 47% in FY2010.

CBNW services also accounted for 57.7% of state IDD (Intellectual and Developmental Disability) agency expenditures for FY2010, for states …

Data Note: Prevalence Of Youth With Autism Who Received Vocational Rehabilitation Services, Alberto Migliore, Agnieszka Zalewska

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

In 2002, about six children aged eight years per every 1000 people in the general population received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The corresponding figure in 2008 was about 11 children, a 78% increase in just six years¹.

To better understand how the increasing population of people with autism may impact adult programs, we examined the number of youth with autism served by state vocational rehabilitation programs in 2010. To account for the states' general population sizes, we reported the number of youth with autism served per 100,000 in the state general population (prevalence).

As Figure …

Data Note: Vocational Rehabilitation Employment Outcomes For Transition-Age Youth With Intellectual Disabilities, Agnieszka Zalewska, Jennifer Sullivan Sulewski

Data Note Series, Institute for Community Inclusion

As transition services evolve, increased attention is being given to the outcomes of transition-age youth. Since different age groups have different employment support needs and unique circumstances, it is crucial to monitor their outcomes separately and to address their services in a customized manner. This Data Note will focus on employment outcomes of transition-age youth with intellectual disabilities (ID) as compared with older age groups of people with ID. In this analysis, transition-age youth with ID are divided into two groups: ages 16–21 and ages 22–30. They are then compared to all other working-age adults.

Nationally, the percentage of closures …

The Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: Beginning To Examine The Implications For Canadian Lawyers' Professional Responsiblities, H Archibald Kaiser

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (hereafter the CRPD or the Convention) should herald a new epoch in the way persons with disabilities are treated throughout the world community. The entire panoply of ramifications of this Convention, the purpose of which is “to promote, protect and ensure the full enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity”, (Article 1) is as yet unascertainable. However, States Parties must “take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination by any person, organization or private enterprise” (Article …

A Female Disease: The Unintentional Gendering Of Fibromyalgia Social Security Claims, Dara Purvis

Faculty Scholarship

Social Security disability claims are not supposed to be decided based on the gender of the applicant. Reliance on the apparently neutral mechanism of clinical medical evidence, however, has a disproportionate impact on women bringing disability claims based on fibromyalgia. Recognizing and identifying disability has been delegated by Congress and the Social Security Administration almost entirely to physicians, based upon a misguided and mistaken belief that clinical medical evidence evaluated by a trained physician will answer with certainty whether an individual claimant is capable of working. Fibromyalgia, a diffuse syndrome characterized by excess pain that is overwhelmingly diagnosed in women …

The London Paralympis Games 'Inspire A Generation' And Spark Abortion Controversy, Emily Hardy

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Seeing A Future For Accessible Reading Materials: The Wipo Treaty For The Visually Disabled, Marjorie Kennedy

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Pregnancy As 'Disability' And The Amended Americans With Disabilities Act, Jeannette Cox

School of Law Faculty Publications

The recent expansion of the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) protected class invites reexamination of the assumption that pregnant workers may not use the ADA to obtain workplace accommodations. The ADA’s scope now includes persons with minor temporary physical limitations comparable to pregnancy’s physical effects. Accordingly, the primary remaining justification for concluding that pregnant workers may not obtain ADA accommodations is that pregnancy is a physically healthy condition rather than a physiological defect. Drawing on the social model of disability, this Article challenges the assumption that medical diagnosis of “defect” must be a prerequisite to disability accommodation eligibility. The social …

Overcoming Our Global Disability In The Workforce: Mediating The Dream, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

The unparalleled global support for the 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") highlights the global schism between the public extolling of human rights for individuals with disabilities and the private castigating of such individuals in their daily lives and in the workforce. The CRPD explicitly mandates that work is a right accorded to individuals with disabilities, and global employers are now being challenged to implement that right. Yet, in order to ensure meaningful, universal compliance with its directives, the CRPD imposes affirmative duties on Supporting States to develop a customized, workable plan that effectively …

Confine Is Fine: Have The Non-Dangerous Mentally Ill Lost Their Right To Liberty? An Empirical Study To Unravel The Psychiatrist’S Crystal Ball, Donald H. Stone

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article will examine the reverse trend in civil commitment laws in the wake of recent tragedies and discuss the effect of broader civil commitment standards on the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, and the 2012 Aurora movie theatre shooting have spurred fierce debates about the dangerousness of mentally ill and serve as cautionary tale about what happens when warning signs go unnoticed and opportunities for early intervention missed. This piece will explore the misconception about the role medication and inpatient civil commitments should play in prevention …

Implementing Legal Capacity Under Article 12 Of The Un Convention On The Rights Of Persons With Disabilities: The Difficult Road From Guardianship To Supported Decision-Making, Robert Dinerstein

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.