Word: shuttleworth
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Eight months after a diagnosis in January 1984 revealed that he had AIDS, Todd Shuttleworth was fired from his job as a budget analyst for Florida's Broward County. "We just couldn't take the chance of anything happening to employees or to anyone visiting the office," explains John Canada, budget and management policy director for the county. Many AIDS victims who feel wronged hesitate to embark on legal battles that they may not live to see completed. Not Shuttleworth. He brought a $15 million lawsuit against the county, and has continued to press it while struggling through AIDS-related...
Although gravely ill, Shuttleworth, 34, has lived to see his case scheduled. It will come to trial next week before U.S. District Judge Jose Gonzalez in Fort Lauderdale. If the court decides in Shuttleworth's favor, it will be an important victory for AIDS victims, just the second ruling from a U.S. district court that a federal law prohibiting discrimination against the handicapped protects people with AIDS. The first came only two weeks ago, when a judge in California ordered the Atascadero school district to readmit Ryan Thomas, 5, who had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion and been banned...
Although medical evidence shows that AIDS is not transmitted by casual con tact, fear of infection has caused widespread and usually unwarranted prejudice against even those merely suspected of having the disease. Thus many of the AIDS legal cases, like Shuttleworth's, are based on claims of discrimination -- in employment, health care, insurance, housing, child custody and schooling. And where the law appears to be heading in these disputes is increasingly clear. Courts and agencies in at least 20 states have decided that AIDS victims are protected by existing state laws that prohibit discrimination against the handicapped...
This week, just days before the Shuttleworth trial begins, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in another Florida case, School Board of Nassau County v. Arline, that may have an important bearing on whether federal laws for the handicapped can be used to protect AIDS victims. The suit was brought by Gene Arline, who was dismissed in 1979 from her job as a third-grade teacher because she had tuberculosis, which can be passed on by sneezing or coughing and is far more easily transmitted than AIDS...
Increasingly, it may not be that easy. Swinney, Cronan and Shuttleworth are all suing their employers for damages as high as $15 million. Earlier this month, the U.S. Government for the first time filed a complaint on behalf of an AIDS victim. The Health and Human Services Department accused the Charlotte (N.C.) Memorial Hospital of violating the civil rights of an AIDS-afflicted registered nurse by firing the man and refusing to offer him any other work. By the time the Government acted, however, the AIDS victim had been dead five months. Indeed, no AIDS victim has yet lived long...