Opinion ID: 1472683
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 13

Heading: the circumstances at the time of trial

Text: I turn now to the situation confronting the judge on the eve of trial, when he was called upon to rule on the question whether Ms. Douglas' attorney should be permitted, on the record as it then stood, to present a Fair Housing Act defense. The critical facts at that time were as follows: 1. From the date of the notice to quit or cure to the trial date, neither the tenant nor the District had done anything at all to remedy the violations of the lease and the law that prompted the landlord to send the notice. 2. The conditions in and around Ms. Douglas' unit were extreme, and they had been so for over a year, with the stench and the assorted housing code violations inevitably threatening the health and safety not only of Ms. Douglas but of the landlord and of the other tenants as well. As a matter of common sense, very frequent and very thorough cleaning and disinfecting by APS would be required immediately in order to remedy the situation. 3. On June 17, 2002, the eve of trial, Ms. Douglas' attorney was unable to tell the court how long a delay he was requesting on his client's behalf: THE COURT: How much time did she ask for? COUNSEL FOR: As I stated, she's mentally ill. MS. DOUGLAS 4. Ms. Douglas' attorney acknowledged that he could not speak for the District. 5. Although the District's representatives, including Mr. Byrd of APS, had appeared before the court, no proffer or representation had been made by the District or by any of its agents or employees (and the court had no way of guessing) whether, when, how often, or how thoroughly APS was prepared to clean the unit and restore safe and healthy conditions. 6. Ms. Douglas had not participated in the lawsuit or cooperated with her attorney, and she was nowhere to be found. 7. In asking for a reasonable accommodation, Ms. Douglas' attorney had no information regarding whether such an accommodation would be acceptable to her, and he could make no representation in this regard. 8. Finally, there was no evidence that representatives of the District would be admitted to Ms. Douglas' unit to clean and to make repairs. Perhaps it is (theoretically) minimally possible that, notwithstanding all of these obstacles, Ms. Douglas could nevertheless have presented a case, sufficient for consideration by the jury, that she or the District could promptly cure her extreme and protracted violations of the lease and the law and eliminate the threat to health and safety. At some rarefied level of abstraction, her counsel might conceivably have been able to show that, if one considered only the future and not the past, the accommodation that her attorney had requestedapparently, that she be allowed to stay in her unit for some period while APS cleaned it and kept it cleanwas a reasonable one. In theory, APS might suddenly, frequently, efficiently, and with lightning speed, do that which it had failed to do at all for a year. It is said that anything is possible, and I suppose that, hypothetically, Ms. Douglas might now abandon her policy of non-cooperation and welcome the cleaning crew with open arms. Perhaps the corridor outside her apartment would soon smell like a rose. But I perceive no realistic chanceindeed, no chance at allthat all of these improbable and implausible possibilities would come to pass. I quote the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: Nearly seven months [22] passed from the time that the tenants were served with the notice to quit and the trial was held in the summary process action. That was more than ample time for the tenants to put in place an effective treatment plan for addressing Barskaya's health problems while eliminating, or significantly reducing the excessive noise emanating from her apartment. [23] The fact that Taylor was still complaining about the noise on a daily basis in May 2003, suggests that the tenants were unable to abate the problem. [24] Andover Hous. Auth., 820 N.E.2d at 825. The court suggests that a remand is appropriate because it would not take long to determine whether, with the aid of APS, Ms. Douglas could or would clean her unit, eliminate the odor, and maintain safe and sanitary conditions from that moment on. In my opinion, however, the majority's notion that all would be resolved in a couple of weeks is illusory. I reiterate what I wrote when the case was before the division: Even ifand on this record it is a gargantuan and almost droll ifrepresentatives of the District were suddenly to [straighten] up and fly right [25] and to clean the apartment within a week or two of an order of the trial court, there would be no assurance (or reason to believe) that the unit would remain clean. If it did not, there would of course be more allegations and denials, more litigation, more delay, and more arguable violations of the lease and of the law, and it is naive indeed to suppose that the case would quickly be over. Moreover, given the state of the apartment over a long period of time, as well as the tenant's lack of interest in and absence from the pretrial proceedings and from the trial, no impartial jury could reasonably find the proposal made by counsel for the tenant to be a reasonable accommodation (and, in my opinion, no reasonable jury would have so found). Douglas I, 849 A.2d at 973 (dissenting opinion). Accordingly, I would affirm the judgment. [26] GLICKMAN, Associate Judge, with whom WASHINGTON, Chief Judge, and WAGNER, Associate Judge, join, and with whom SCHWELB, Associate Judge, joins with respect to all but the first paragraph, dissenting: I agree with certain important conclusions that the majority reaches. In particular, I agree that Ms. Douglas proffered enough evidence to permit a trier of fact to find by a preponderance of the evidence that mental illness and alcoholism rendered her unable to keep her apartment clean and sanitary as required by her lease. [1] In principle, I also agree with the majority's conclusion that the Fair Housing Act permits a handicapped tenant to request a reasonable accommodation to enable her to maintain her tenancy at any time before a judgment of possession has been entered. As a corollary, I agree as well that a landlord who ignores even a last-minute request by a tenant to accommodate a disability does so at its peril, though I think it overstates matters to suggest that a landlord's failure to open a dialogue with the tenant and engage in an interactive process is in itself a violation of the Fair Housing Act. The violation lies in the landlord's unjustified refusal to grant a handicapped tenant's request for a reasonable accommodation that is necessary to afford the tenant equal opportunity to use or enjoy the leased dwelling. 42 U.S.C. § 3604(f)(3)(B). Finally, I also agree with the majority that, in determining whether a landlord is justified in rejecting a requested accommodation because the tenant poses an unacceptable threat to the health or safety of others, a court must consider the extent to which the proposed accommodation would alleviate the threat. Nonetheless, I think the majority goes astray in concluding that a jury could find that Ms. Douglas requested a reasonable accommodation in this case. Her only request was for a last-minute, indefinite stay of the eviction proceedings to allow her counsel to continue to try to enlist the District of Columbia government to develop, fund and carry out a suitable plan of some kind to keep her apartment clean. The only concrete proffer her counsel could make in support of this request was that a government fund did exist for paying contractors to clean apartments for handicapped persons in need of such services, and that Ms. Douglas, though she had disappeared, was eligible for such assistance. Although counsel had been in contact with the government officials for months, the District still had not agreed to clean the apartment and no cleaning plan had been proposed or even developed. [2] Judge Schwelb's dissent amply demonstrates the unreasonableness of Ms. Douglas's stay request in light of the inadequacy of her counsel's proffer, the serious health hazards created by Ms. Douglas's tenancy, her disappearance and her resistance to remedial measures, and the District government's demonstrated lack of interest and prolonged failure to address the situation. I write separately because I think it important to highlight another, more basic respect in which Ms. Douglas's request was deficient. As the trial court recognized, Ms. Douglas's proposal was simply too vague to rise to the level of a bona fide request for a reasonable accommodation under the Fair Housing Act. Judge Ferren's opinion for the court insists there was no disqualifying vagueness here. Ante at 1121. Given the number of judges who have joined either this dissent or Judge Farrell's concurrence, that is not a statement to which a majority of this court subscribes. As Judge Ferren is compelled to concede, Ms. Douglas never proffered the kinds of details that ordinarily would be required to convince a fact-finder that [her] proposal was reasonable, that is, likely to keep the apartment clean. Ante at 1136. For example, the majority opinion acknowledges, tenant's counsel did not specify the number of days required for the stay, or the basis for assuring tenant cooperation, or the frequency and duration of cleaning by the District government. Id. The February 20 letter from Ms. Douglas's counsel, on which the majority opinion places so much reliance, did not even state what kind of accommodation the tenant was seeking or how ... the District government would help, and it did not even mention a stay of the eviction proceedings. Id. at 1124. Despite its evident appreciation that Ms. Douglas in fact never made a specific enough request for accommodation, Judge Ferren's opinion offers two reasons for refusing to affirm the trial court. The first reason is that the February 20 letter supplied enough detail [3] to obligate the landlord to open a dialogue with the tenant and press[] for particulars. Ante at 1137. By declining to do so, the majority asserts, the landlord failed to demonstrate any missing element or other inherent defect in the tenant's proposal [and] thereby kept the level of specificity required to establish prima facie `reasonableness' at the minimum. Id. at 1137. The second reason advanced by the majority is that it is, supposedly, clear from the record that any more detail proffered by the tenant to the trial court would have been fruitless, because the court's rulings against Ms. Douglas on other grounds would likely have forestalled further inquiry into whether any kind of stay, coupled with a cleaning effort, would have been reasonable. Ante at 1138. These reasons do not stand up to scrutiny. The first reason, the landlord's supposed non-responsiveness to Ms. Douglas's request, is flawed both factually and legally. To begin with, as a factual matter, it is unfair for the majority to castigate the landlord for not opening a dialogue with Ms. Douglas and her counsel to fill in the details of her February 20 request for an unspecified accommodation. Although the landlord did not respond to that vague request immediately, the record does not support the assertions in the majority opinion that the landlord's counsel essentially stonewalled and refused any dialogue with the tenant's counsel until it was too late for a good faith exchange. Ante at 1142, 1143. Two weeks prior to trial, when a productive dialogue was still possible, the landlord's counsel solicited the details of a suitable accommodation from Ms. Douglas's counsel, and her counsel could not provide them. The landlord cannot be faulted for having concluded then, just as a majority of this court has concluded now, that the tenant's proposal simply lacked any specifics and could not be evaluated. Id. at 1117. Thereafter, as trial drew nearer and Ms. Douglas's counsel furnished no additional information in response to the landlord's inquiry, it was understandable that the landlord did not see there's any way to get around or to accommodate Ms. Douglas in this matter to allow her to stay. [4] Id. at 1117. No reasonable jury, I respectfully suggest, could find on these facts that the landlord was not open to any accommodation even if reasonable. Id. at 1117 n. 4. In point of fact, moreover, Ms. Douglas herself disappeared  several weeks  before the April 17 pretrial conference, i.e., soon after the February 20 letter, and her counsel was unable to find or contact her. See id. at 1116 n. 3, 1117 n. 4. As a result of Ms. Douglas's conduct, a meaningful dialogue of the sort envisioned by the majority ceased to be possible. [5] More fundamentally, any failure of the landlord to pursue a dialogue with Ms. Douglas and her counsel was legally immaterial because the landlord was not responsible for Ms. Douglas's failure to fill in the details and the landlord had no duty to fill in the details itself. The details that were necessary depended not on information to be supplied by the landlord, but on information that needed to come from Ms. Douglas herself, the District government, and its cleaning contractor. A landlord's failure to open and maintain a dialogue with a tenant may be material, and can result in liability under the Fair Housing Act for discrimination, if it thwarts the development, presentation or evaluation of the tenant's request for a reasonable accommodation and operates as a disingenuous excuse for not granting that request. [6] Cf. Jankowski Lee & Assocs. v. Cisneros, 91 F.3d 891, 895 (7th Cir.1996) (Petitioners' denial of Rusinov's request based on their lack of knowledge of the extent of his injury is simply a ruse to avoid the penalty for violating the FHA.... If a landlord is skeptical of a tenant's alleged disability or the landlord's ability to provide an accommodation, it is incumbent upon the landlord to request documentation or open a dialogue.). But Ms. Douglas makes no plausible claim that her landlord's inaction frustrated her efforts to provide the requisite specifics for her accommodation request. Ms. Douglas simply needed to work with the District to produce a reasonable cleaning plan that the government would commit to fund and carry out, or at the very least a firm timetable for the District to develop and commit to such a plan; except insofar as her disappearance probably made it impossible, [7] it remains an unexplained mystery why her counsel and the District failed to do the necessary work by the time of trial. In this mystery, the landlord had no part. [8] As to the second reason offered by the majority, that it would have been fruitless for Ms. Douglas to proffer more detail about her accommodation request because the trial court (supposedly) forestalled further inquiry by ruling against her on other grounds, it too is flawed. If anything is clear from the transcript, it is that even as of the day of trial, Ms. Douglas's counsel had no further detail to proffer. If the trial court had allowed Ms. Douglas to put on her discrimination defense, it would have fallen flat on its face, because she had no evidence to present. Briefly put, her counsel did not know and could not proffer how long a stay of eviction would be necessary to develop and implement a cleaning program, what kind of cleaning program the District government might be prepared to fund and institute if given enough time, or even whether the missing Ms. Douglas would permit the District's agents, whom she distrusted, to enter her apartment to carry it out. [9] In sum, I think we should affirm the trial court's preclusion of Ms. Douglas's discrimination defense on the ground that she never specifically requested a reasonable accommodation and therefore had no such defense to present.