 You're watching FJTN, the Federal Judicial Television Network. Coming up on Court to Court. It was really great to see that, you know, it's not, it's not that I just have to deal with it. People will make the accommodations that are necessary. It makes me take time and be intentional about my communication with other people. And the courts really give it that personality and character. They can be as creative as they want to be. This is Court to Court. Your connection to what's happening in the federal courts around the country, providing information and ideas that will enhance your job and how the courts function. Now with today's program, Michael Burney. Welcome to Court to Court, the Federal Judicial Center's Educational Magazine program for all court employees. Today's program features two courts that know the value of making accommodations for staff with disabilities. How an outreach program from the administrative office was implemented by two courts and another moment in court history. As the courts seek to hire and retain qualified employees, accommodating persons with disabilities creates special challenges. Although the Americans with Disabilities Act does not apply by its terms to the federal courts, that doesn't mean the courts aren't meeting the challenges. At the district court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, Chief Judge John C. Kuhnauer first encountered the need to make changes with the recent law clerk, Sungita Jan. What's really interesting is when people are a little different than what we're accustomed to dealing with, it is a very short period of time before you quit thinking about the fact that Sungita is in a wheelchair. If I hadn't been willing to consider her because of her handicap, that would have been stupid on my part. I would have lost some of the greatest talent I've ever had in these chambers. Sure. We're charged with enforcing the ADA and making people make these accommodations. If we were to say, well, of course, we don't have to because we are the federal courts, that would be profoundly offensive, I would think. After Jan accepted his offer to be his law clerk, Judge Kuhnauer invited her to come in and help them understand what needed to be changed. I had complete input into that. I spent a few hours here and just went through the daily life of a clerk and we just saw what kinds of things needed to be done. It was really great to see that it's not that I just have to deal with it. People will make the accommodations that are necessary. Anybody who is considering the accommodations that must be made for somebody that has a disability should not assume that it's gonna require a tremendous amount of effort on their part. In my experience, it's not gonna be nearly as much of a commitment as one might otherwise think. My office doubles as the conference room as well and so one of the modifications they made was they actually moved the desk in the table so that there would be enough room for me to go by easier. It was a simple thing to do but it makes a big difference. I think most of the changes that need to be made to make things accessible are just tiny little modifications, just things like putting a desk up on blocks. If the desk wasn't higher, I wouldn't go to fit under it to be able to do my work. But other things just, I think, made it a little bit easier for me to do my work independently as opposed to having to just rely on people all the time to do different things for me. For example, we changed the way the books were shelved so I could reach them easier so I wouldn't always have to go get someone to get the books for me. And one of the other changes they made was to take this door off so I could get inside the kitchen easier. It was a small doorway and with the door there, it was just really hard to get inside the little room and so they just completely removed the door. She says that another accommodation involved simply assigning tasks. Other law clerks would get files for her or retrieve mail from downstairs while she would answer the door to chambers. So it allows me to ask who's at the door and to see who's at the door and then to just release the lock from my desk as opposed to having to go to the door and actually answer it. Judge Kuhnauer says that sometimes in court, judges hear arguments against making disability accommodations because only a few people might be helped or the cost is too great. Well, those factors aren't relevant when we're making a decision as to whether somebody is gonna have to comply with a statute so that we least of all should say, well, it's gonna cost too much money. That's an absolutely irrelevant consideration as far as I'm concerned. And the end result for Jan? Well, I think the modifications that have been made just made all the difference in me being able to work here. Other kinds of disabilities aren't always permanent but are serious. The Western District of Washington's jury clerk, Jeff Humeneck, was surprised at the pain which developed in his forearms and which didn't go away. His doctor diagnosed repetitive stress injury, told him it could lead to permanent injuries and said he should stop all repetitive motion activities. If I got a phone call from a juror, had to look their name up, I wasn't able to touch my keyboard so you can imagine not being able to write or use a keyboard for an administrative type job. The clerk's office uses a team-based management structure so Humeneck asked coworkers to help with day-to-day functions. I found that I got an overwhelmingly positive response for their assistance. Management also supported changes to his workstation as recommended by his doctor. We raised the monitor up, got a different style of keyboard. It's a split keyboard. It's kind of a tent. Keeps everything close together and creates a more ergonomic angle, allowed me to bring the mouse closer in, got a document holder so my eye level was not down but it was up and of course my even view with the monitor helped. In addition to that, we got this chair, it's called a kneeling chair and automatically creates good posture while you're sitting versus slouching which is another cause of the injury. So if you make corrective measures, take corrective measures now, it can make a difference in the long run. When we come back, we'll see how another court has accommodated a different disability. Still ahead on court to court, we'll hear how two courts extended their outreach by participating in the AO's Open Doors of Justice program and we'll learn about a trial for libeling the president. Now watch this. I'm an evaluation form You've surely seen me before Well I'm part of your materials and I perform a vital chore Well the information in me helps the center to take stock It helps them make their programs work to help you do your job Please fill me in Oh we need this information Please fill me in Oh we need to know the score Please fill me in Your feedback is important And if you don't complete this form We'll sing this song again Oh oh oh oh Your feedback is important Please fill in the evaluation form available in your program materials or online on the DCN. As we saw in Seattle, making accommodations for court employees with disabilities can be relatively simple. We also visited the bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Ohio and Dayton and learned that outlook also makes a big difference. When they hired me for the job I had a lot to learn how to type and how to put the files away and bankruptcy is very, very strict about how they want things done and it just influenced me to learn a lot new vocabulary, new words sometimes I didn't understand so I had to pull out my dictionary Case Administrator Barbara Morgan whom everyone calls Barbie has been with the court 21 years. She's been deaf since early childhood. She's an oral person in that she does talk so we were able to learn how to attune our ears to her speech patterns. Yeah, go ahead. I had to be there, I had to be there. I had to be there, I had to be there. Probably just a judgment. All the coworkers here are wonderful. They learn to listen to my voice and they understand that I am lip reading and we get used to each other and we've built that skill and it's wonderful. We talk, we communicate. The way our clerk's default order works it does not work for the debtors only for the creditors. Morgan's supervisor, Talanda Gilmer says that at first communicating with her was challenging but that together they have learned how to make it work. The only thing you really need to do is to make sure you give her eye contact and that you're looking directly at her so that she is able to read your lips. If this is for the debtor, if the debtor filed it we can't do the CDO. We need an order from the debtor's attorney. Deputy in charge Sylvia Mosley believes there's a lesson in even a simple greeting. When I say good morning I can't say it in passing I have to slow down, take my time and be intentional about speaking to her. It's a good thing for me because it makes me take time and be intentional about my communication with other people. Sometimes we can get sloppy with communication we can become careless communicators. And I think having to slow down and think about it makes us, makes me anyway a better communicator. But it wasn't this way when Morgan started. Every time they would have a meeting they would discuss and talk about different things or funny things and they would laugh and it just really stirred my emotions. So I would get up and walk out and I would just go back to work. Once when that happened, Morgan's supervisor came to her and using a written note asked why she couldn't stay for the meeting. And I wrote back to him, there was no interpreter. I did not understand what was going on. If you bring me an interpreter, I will be there. That was then this is now. And you know some motion for relief from stay something that would require a filing fee. Let someone in the intake know or let the supervisors know to alert the intake department so we don't continue to process the check. Clerk of court Michael Webb says the biggest challenge to making accommodations often comes from within. Come face to face with your own biases. And we all have them when we first hired Barbara. We had staff saying well how can she perform the job? She can't even talk on the telephone but we weren't getting past the disability. Once she started work with us we found out the disability was really nothing to accommodate. And we all are accommodated in one way or another. Barbara's is just a little more obvious accommodation. The clerk's office bought a TTY phone so that Morgan can make and receive calls from her family. And sometimes if there's something that I need to tell her that may be detailed, I'll like email her or write it down for her. Question for you. Yes. A lot of times we do next day docking so therefore the check's in deposit. Mosley says that sometimes bankruptcy jargon isn't understood by interpreters but the staff handles that in stride too. We stop and we give the interpreter a little lesson in bankruptcy. And then the interpreter says oh okay and then she interprets for Barbara. Having an interpreter available for meetings takes advanced scheduling and there are costs. But that cost is minimal compared to with what you get from the individual. It's hard enough for the court to recruit qualified applicants these days. If the court cuts off a whole segment of society just because of their disability you're losing a lot of talent. The court will soon make the transition to CMECF. If there's an interpreter there with my training I can learn everything. Schedule B should they have to pay the $20? Not if they're not adding creditors that's only if they're adding creditors that's when you need the $20 filing fee. So check to see which schedule it is that they filed the amendment for. And the payoff for the clerk's office? That you have an employee who knows how to do the job. You want a diverse court because our diverse staff because that staff can then relate to the community. If you're a reflection of your community then you're better able to serve your community. We become better servants to the public. There are a lot of people that come in our court that are not like us. And so we develop a mindset of being sensitive. I think we are better people, better employees. We're better human beings just for having been involved in the whole process. The doors of federal courthouses were opened wide to more than 4,500 high school students last October in a national program called Open Doors of Justice, the Bill of Rights in Your Life. Students saw up close the importance of the Bill of Rights and how the federal courts protect their rights. 42 courts participated in the program sponsored by the administrative office. As the following story from the AO makes clear it takes time, commitment and a team effort for a successful community outreach event such as this. When bus loads of high school students arrive at your doorstep looking for a challenging learning experience, you'd better be ready. In St. Louis, Missouri and Louisville, Kentucky they were more than ready for the challenge. We started planning this in about May and the first thing we did was ask the judges if they would be interested. We have 16 judges here. I had four judges volunteer the first day. You definitely need the support of your judges. You need the support of your clerk if in fact your clerk is not the coordinator and you need the support of your coworkers. You cannot pull off something like this by yourself. It's impossible. I began soliciting, begging people in the clerk's office but hey would you come and help and I probably have about 15 people. It takes planning and coordination, takes communication I think is the biggest with the schools, the teachers. We began sending letters out, sending materials about the program, advising them of the website that the Office of Public Affairs has and told them to look at that. We had a teacher orientation about a month before the program began and then it just kind of rolled together after that. And of course I think you always have to assume that the day before and the morning of it's gonna be hectic and it's gonna be a little crazy. But I think that happens with any event that you plan and you throw a party and you hope the people are gonna come. Not to worry, more than 160 students showed up in St. Louis alone. The Open Doors of Justice program has four main components. It includes the teachers institute that familiarizes educators with the program and course material. On the day of the event, there's a Bill of Rights videotape that helps establish the theme of the program. There's a Fourth Amendment case that lets students wrestle with the judicial process and discover the role of the federal courts in protecting the U.S. Constitution. There's a discussion element that puts judges, attorneys, and students together to talk about the Bill of Rights as a living document. The program also includes an essay contest. Courts can use as much of the program as they want. It's designed to be flexible and easy to use. We got a lot of help from the administrative office, a lot of assistance from Rebecca Fanning and the public affairs office with suggestions and technical suggestions and tips. So we didn't feel like we were in it alone. I think really the strength of this program is its flexibility and what the courts bring to it. So we provide the shell and the courts really give it that personality and character. They can be as creative as they wanna be. So they can use any parts of the components that we offer and they can add their own. And many courthouses do. And I think that really makes the program work. You don't have to do everything that's on the program. We didn't. And the administrative office was very supportive even though we weren't going to do the whole program as they had it laid out. They were very supportive. I think the goal is to create the opportunity for the students to come in and interact with you. And by doing that, you increase their knowledge and their understanding of how our system of justice works. What I found, I think really probably most interesting was that they seem to have to develop a comfort level of being in the courthouse, which is really a goal that I had in having this program. I think that the federal courts over time have tended to be rather isolated. And I wanted the students to leave with the notion that this was their building and that when they come here again as jurors, that they can look around and say, hey, I've already been here. This is some place I know where the courtrooms are. I even know two or three of the judges. And I'm gonna be coming here as a juror and I'm very comfortable. This isn't only establishing a one day event that this is a continuing opportunity, I think, for the courts and the school. You know, we occupy a very prominent building in downtown St. Louis now. Everybody knows that this is the United States courthouse. I think we have a responsibility, not just to let them know that this building is here, but what goes on here and that the public has a stake in what we do in the federal court and that they can come to this courthouse and see us in action almost anytime they want to. And this is the first step in that effort. Building a relationship with the community is not only important to the court's mission, but also provides the court staff valuable feedback. It's helpful for the court staff to understand what is in the minds of the community about their work. What's the opinion that the students have of the court? And we had a lot of those conversations after the presentation. They came up and started asking my staff questions, what do you do? How do you do it? And how does it relate to me? They were all very appreciative and very nice, thanked us for everything we did for them. And that's very rewarding. My staff did a great job. I'm extremely proud of them. I'm appreciative that our judges were as supportive of our interest in conducting this program as they were. And from what I can tell of listening to people talk about the way it went, everyone seems to be very pleased with how it turned out. I think that all the judges were so impressed and the lawyers that participated. And everybody said how much they enjoyed it and that they'd be willing to do it again and so forth and so on. I think that whatever benefit the students had, we had twice that. Federal courts in all 12 regional circuits participated in similar events. The Open Doors of Justice program is one of many educational resources that the federal courts have created to bring courts and classes together. To find out more about this exercise and other community outreach resources, go to www.uscourts.gov and click on educational outreach. We introduced our moment in court history feature in a previous program with the story of woman suffragist Susan B. Anthony's trial for voting. Today we bring you another trial from the past, this one for violating the Sedition Act of 1798. Here with that story is my colleague, Bob Fagan. In 1798, our national government was hardly a decade old, but already there was sharp partisan conflict between the federalists, men such as John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong central government and the Democratic Republicans as those who followed Thomas Jefferson were then known. They feared the new national government would usurp the authority of the states. The young federal judiciary became caught up in the dispute. In that year, Congress passed legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made it a crime to speak or publish any false, scandalous and malicious writing against the government, Congress or the president. Sponsored by the federalists, the laws were intended to strengthen the central government and suppress political opposition from the Republicans. Earlier in the year, one Republican member of Congress, 49-year-old Matthew Lyon from Vermont, had already gained notoriety when he attacked fellow Congressman Roger Griswold with a pair of fire tongs on the floor of the House of Representatives. Griswold, a federalist, had responded to one of Lyon's tirades against President Adams by insulting Lyon, who then spit on Griswold. When Griswold retaliated by caning him, Lyon armed himself with the tongs. A period drawing of this fight became a popular item. A native of Ireland, Matthew Lyon had come to America as an indentured servant, but by hard work and thrift earned his freedom. He became wealthy from several mills and other enterprises. He even discovered that paper could be manufactured from wood pulp. Lyon also established his own newspaper, which he used to express his vehement anti-federalist opinions. In one of his editorials in 1798, he criticized President John Adams for what he called an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice. Matthew Lyon became the first person brought into court for violating the Sedition Act. The grand jury's indictment described Lyon as, in its words, a malicious and seditious person and of a depraved mind and of a wicked and diabolical disposition. The indictment charged that with intent and designed to defame the United States and John Adams, president, and to excite against the government the hatred of the good people of the United States, Matthew Lyon did wickedly, knowingly, and maliciously write, print, utter, and publish a certain scandalous and seditious writing. Lyon was tried in the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Vermont in Rutland. At that time, circuit courts had jurisdiction over most federal crimes and were the primary federal trial courts. But circuit courts had no judgeships of their own and so the district judge and a Supreme Court justice presided over them. The flamboyant Lyon served as his own attorney and called as his only witness the presiding circuit justice, William Patterson. Lyon asked Patterson, who frequently dined with President Adams, to testify in defense of the claim that Adams was pompous. Lyon was convicted by the jury, which he claimed was packed against him, sentenced to four months in jail and fined $1,000. Depending on whose formula one uses, that fine today would be somewhere between $11,000 and $15,000. Lyon became a political martyr and a hero to many. He easily won reelection to Congress in the fall despite being unable to campaign because he was in prison. In 1801, Congress allowed the unpopular alien and sedition laws to expire. In that same year, Matthew Lyon moved to Kentucky and eventually served in Congress from that state. He continued to be a leader of the Jeffersonian Republicans. In 1840, Congress voted to exonerate Matthew Lyon posthumously for his conviction and returned his fine plus interest to his heirs. The Supreme Court never ruled directly on the Sedition Act of 1798. But in 1964, in the famous case of New York Times versus Sullivan, the court said in the words of Justice William Brennan, although the Sedition Act was never tested in this court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history. That's a moment in court history. I'll be back with another in a future court to court. That's our program for today. We want to hear from you about topics you want us to cover and also your comments and evaluation of the program. Please contact us at the address on the screen. Click on FJC broadcasts on the FJTN and then click on court to court to select the evaluation form. There are two forms. One can be printed, filled out and mailed or faxed to us. The other can be completed online. Both forms invite your ideas for future topics. For our next program, we're working on a segment about office dress codes. In future programs, we'll see how one court has made video conferencing part of its day-to-day business and we'll get tips on how and when to deal with staff training for CMECF. We hope you'll join us. I'm Michael Burney. On behalf of everyone at the Federal Judicial Center, thank you for watching today.