Opinion ID: 158329
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Scope of the ADA's Applicability to an Arrest or Investigation

Text: 27 Amirault invoked a rule that police protection is not an individualized benefit in addressing a narrow claim, i.e., that the ADA affirmatively obliged police to protect a person from his own actions, which were caused by that person's disability. In this case, the magistrate and district court divorced Amirault's invocation of that rule from its narrow context and apparently converted it into a broad rule barring any Title II claim arising from an arrest or related police interaction involving a person with a disability. 2 28 Federal courts have addressed Title II claims arising from arrests under two different theories. See generally Patrice v. Murphy, 43 F. Supp.2d 1156, 1158 60 (W.D.Wash. 1999) (surveying cases). The first is that police wrongly arrested someone with a disability because they misperceived the effects of that disability as criminal activity. See Lewis, 960 F. Supp. at 176 77; Jackson, 1994 WL 589617, at . The second is that, while police properly investigated and arrested a person with a disability for a crime unrelated to that disability, they failed to reasonably accommodate the person's disability in the course of investigation or arrest, causing the person to suffer greater injury or indignity in that process than other arrestees. See Gorman v. Bartch, 152 F.3d 907, 912 13 (8th Cir. 1998) (holding such claim viable); Rosen v. Montgomery County, 121 F.3d 154, 157 58 (4th Cir. 1997) (suggesting in dicta such claim not viable); Patrice, 43 F. Supp.2d at 1160 (holding such claim not viable). 29 This case is logically intermediate between the two archetypes envisioned by those theories. Officer Enright did not use force on Mr. Lucero because he misconceived the lawful effects of his disability as criminal activity, inasmuch as Lucero's assaultive conduct was not lawful. Neither did Enright fail to accommodate Lucero's disability while arresting him for some crime unrelated to his disability. See Patrice, 43 F. Supp.2d at 1159. Instead, Enright used force on Lucero while Lucero was committing an assault related to his disability. 30 This court need not decide whether this case is better analyzed under a wrongful-arrest or reasonable-accommodation-during-arrest theory. Even assuming both theories are viable, the first does not apply to the facts of this case, and Gohier has expressly declined to invoke the second. Accordingly, this court merely clarifies that a broad rule categorically excluding arrests from the scope of Title II, like the rule derived from Amirault by the district court in this case, is not the law. It remains an open question in this circuit whether to adopt either or both the wrongful-arrest theory of Lewis and Jackson and the reasonable-accommodation-during-arrest theory of Gorman.