Opinion ID: 502246
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether Carter's Handicap Could Have Been Reasonably Accommodated In His New Job

Text: 13 The district court concluded that the Department has met its burden of persuasion with evidence that it reasonably accommodated plaintiff's handicap. Carter, 651 F.Supp. at 1301. Implicit in this conclusion is the factual finding that the Department did not assign Carter to a position in which it was impossible to reasonably accommodate a visually handicapped person. We review this finding under the clearly erroneous standard. 14 The nature and requirements of Carter's job were not disputed. The parties agreed that answering congressional inquiries in this instance required considerable technical knowledge of three civil rights statutes and of the implementing regulations and the implementing policy directives. Tr. at 160. The government conceded that Mr. Carter did not have a fundamental understanding of [those] basic statutory provisions. Id. It was also undisputed that answering congressional correspondence requires considerable research into regulatory guidelines and letters of noncompliance; it also involves drafting and revising replies and in the process incorporating verbal and written suggestion from others in the office. See id. at 46-47. The district court implicitly found that with the assistance of readers or other accommodations, a visually handicapped person would be capable of performing these functions. 1 15 Carter now challenges this finding, based on both his own testimony at trial and the testimony of his former supervisor. Specifically, Carter testified that he was the only blind person in the OCR charged with answering congressional correspondence and that even if he were provided with a full-time reader and extensive equipment (which in his estimation would case $65,000-$70,000), he still could not be as efficient as a sighted person in performing the duties expected of him. See id. at 100. According to Carter, he could only do satisfactory research if all the materials were written in Braille--and they were not. In his words: There is no way that you can interpret subtle thoughts to a reader who is doing research.... To delve seemingly with no direction into files to get information--I don't know how you could do it unless you can see enough to do it yourself. Id. Norma Mohr, Carter's former supervisor, corroborated Carter's opinion. She explained: 16 [The congressional mail] required research through the files, ... it involves consulting the guidelines, letters of noncompliance.... Some preliminary research is typically required before you can give a sensible answer.... The other thing is ... the letter takes a trip down the corridors from office to office and notes are put in the margins, so the letter writer must come back with his original draft and see these notations and make decisions, and perhaps incorporate them, ... I don't think a visually handicapped person could do this in a timely way. 17 Id. at 46. The record, however, also contains evidence that conflicts with the testimony of Carter and Ms. Mohr. Dale Pullen, Carter's supervisor for most of the period covered by the complaint, testified that although he agreed that Carter was improperly placed on the Special Concerns Staff, in his view Carter was perfectly capable of answering congressional correspondence. Id. at 242. According to Pullen, Carter's letters were primarily issue-oriented and less than routine; no legal analysis was required for 95% of his work. Id. at 223-24. Pullen testified that Carter needed only very basic skills, such as making phone calls within the office to obtain information and inserting boilerplate language into form letters. Id. at 225. 18 The district court apparently credited the government's testimony on Carter's ability to perform the functions of answering congressional correspondence over the testimony offered by Carter's witnesses. The district court's credibility determinations are entitled to the greatest deference from this court on appeal. See, e.g., Wainwright v. Witt, 469 U.S. 412, 105 S.Ct. 844, 83 L.Ed.2d 841 (1985). When a trial judge's finding is based on his decision to credit the testimony of one or more witnesses, each of whom has told a coherent and facially plausible story that is not contradicted by extrinsic evidence, that finding, if not internally inconsistent, can virtually never be clear error. Anderson v. Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 575, 105 S.Ct. 1504, 1512, 84 L.Ed.2d 518 (1985). Because we cannot second-guess the trial court's credibility determinations, and because we are not left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed, we uphold the finding below that Carter was not assigned to a position in which it was impossible for him to be reasonably accommodated. 19