Disability²

No limits for plaintiff in Kmart disability lawsuit

Carrie Ann Lucas has come to terms with the disability that has taken her hearing and her sight and her ability to walk.

“I don’t think my life is unfair,” the 34-year-old mother of two said Tuesday, a day after the announcement of a landmark $13 million settlement in a class-action disability discrimination lawsuit against Kmart in which she was lead plaintiff.

“My disability is part of my identity. What’s unfair is the systems I have to deal with that are supposed to work, and don’t work.”

…

She never planned to go to law school, but after working for years with the Cross-Disability Coalition, she said, “It was really my experience seeing the number of violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, seeing the way people’s rights were being violated, that prompted me to go to law school.”

To be good parents, Lucas said, some of her clients may need different help from the ordinary parenting classes to which social workers commonly refer people. Some are deaf or have cognitive difficulties. Some need housing accessible to people with disabilities. Some need a lawyer who will spend more time explaining legal matters to them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 7:33 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.