If one wonderswhy the District of Columbia government sometimes has fiscal problems, look no further. Even when D.C. officials try to do the right thing, the D.C. Court of Appeals won’t let them.
In McCamey v. D.C. Department of Employment Services, the D.C. Court of Appeals refused May 15 to let the city’s director of employment services maintain existing safeguards against spurious workers’ compensation claims.
To overrule both the director and an administrative law judge, plus the appeals court’s own three-judge panel, the full appeals court employed a phantasmagoria of seemingly relevant legal citations and analogies. But it was all sophistry.
Here’s what happened: While Charlene McCamey was working for D.C. Public Schools as a “visiting instructor” in September 2000, a table collapsed as she helped move it, causing her to fall and injure her forehead, lower back and neck. Workers’ compensation of course covers treatment for those physical injuries.
But McCamey also filed a claim for “temporary total disability benefits” for psychological injury: “depression, panic attacks, confusion, auditory hallucinations, and memory loss.” She claimed the accident caused those symptoms.
The psychiatrist hired by D.C. Public Schools, Dr. Bruce Smoller, used an MRI brain scan and thyroid test among his diagnostic tools and “opined that the source of Ms. McCamey’s psychological injury was not her accident, but rather a pre-existing psychosis.”
It is incontrovertible that in the mid-1990s she had indeed been treated for what the court called “a serious pre-existing psychological illness” brought on by the death of her father. The appeals court nevertheless ruled that the “plain meaning” of the District’s public-sector workers’ compensation law required that McCamey’s full disability claim be honored.
But that statute says the District is liable for employee disability “resulting from personal injury sustained while in the performance of his or her duty.” To most people, it would be quite “plain” that falling tables don’t ordinarily cause depression and hallucinations.
But — aha! — the court noted that McCamey’s own personal psychiatrist said the accident “exacerbated” her previous illness. And while the applicable law does not expressly provide for compensation when an accident “aggravated” an existing condition, the District’s workers’ comp law for the private sector “expressly codifies” an “aggravation rule” that the court decided should apply to public-sector workers as well.
Moreover, the D.C. public-sector law was deliberately designed to mirror the federal government’s law on workers’ compensation, and — ta-da!! — the federal Employees Compensation Appeals Board also enforces an “aggravation rule,” even though the federal law also fails to specifically codify that rule.
Thus does the court decide that nonexistent language in a federal law and actual language in a law for private-sector workers supply the “plain meaning” for a law written for non-federal, non-private-sector employees, even though the actual law at issue has no such language.
Previous D.C. Appeals Court decisions required that an “objective test” be used to prove causality between a workplace accident and psychological injury. But now the court explicitly rejects that objective test in favor of what it calls “the principle that ‘workers’ compensation statutes should be liberally construed to achieve their humanitarian purposes.’ ” The court tries to justify its application of that principle by yet further appeals to outside authorities, including other courts across the country.
An observer might note that if the meaning were so “plain” in favor of the court’s decision, it would hardly have needed such lengthy analysis and so many strained interpretations of outside references. It is the court’s decision, not the falling table, which should leave District residents confused and depressed.
On March 28, I wrote here about a case in which the Justice Department challenged an appointment the Alabama governor made to fill an unexpired term on the Mobile County Commission, even though the state Supreme Court ruled that the governor’s interpretation of state law was correct. (You can read the column at: examiner.com/a-1306594~Quin_Hillyer__
Alabama_case_could_nullify_state_courts.html.) It was a major test of the principle of federalism, which allows states to manage their own affairs unless a civil rights violation is involved. I wrote that the Justice Department’s position was “nonsense,” and that the U.S. Supreme Court should rule in Alabama’s favor. On Tuesday, the court did just that, in a 7-2 decision criticizing the Justice Department’s “interference with a state supreme court’s ability to determine the content of state law.”
