Disability Law Colorado (DLC) reached an amended settlement agreement with the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) following allegations that CDOC was out of compliance with a 2022 settlement. The amended agreement comes after almost a year of negotiations and, crucially, adds a Monitoring and Training Plan that will ensure that CDOC complies and that deaf and hard of hearing prisoners receive the accommodations CDOC has promised to provide.
Students at the University of Denver’s Civil Rights Clinic (CRC) have taken the lead throughout the litigation, and it has been Fox & Robertson’s privilege to co-counsel with them and with attorneys from DLC. I am also excited to announce that the Monitoring and Training Team established by the amended agreement will include Howard Rosenblum, a prominent Deaf lawyer and founder and Chair of Deaf Equality, as well as former United States Magistrate Judge Kristen Mix.
A copy of the Amended Agreement, including the Monitoring and Training Plan, is available at the link in this sentence. The agreement was approved and adopted by the Court this past Tuesday.
This case began in 2019, when teams of CRC student attorneys, along with DLC and F&R attorneys, began investigating reports of discrimination against Deaf and hard of hearing people throughout CDOC. After two years of investigation and attempted negotiations with CDOC, we filed suit, alleging that CDOC violated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide sign language interpreters for medical appointments, classes, and other significant interactions; failing to provide equal access to notifications and alarms; and failing to provide and maintain hearing aids. Not long after discovery got underway, the parties began discussing settlement in late 2021 and reached the original settlement agreement in August 2022.
Unfortunately, by early 2023, the CRC began receiving reports that CDOC had failed to implement the terms of the settlement agreement, and on June 1, 2023, DLC and its counsel initiated the informal dispute resolution process provided for in the original agreement. From June to early 2024, CRC student attorneys Kristiana Camacho-Miles, McKenna Milton, and Cynthia Mouzis investigated the scope of CDOC’s violations and collected substantial evidence in support of a formal enforcement action. In early 2024, the students drafted and sent CDOC a comprehensive letter compiling the evidence of violations and threatening to invoke the dispute resolution provisions of the original agreement. In response, CDOC agreed to renegotiate the original agreement and to create a monitoring and training plan (Exhibit C of the attached) that will ensure CDOC’s compliance with the original agreement. From March to December 2024 — again with student attorneys taking the lead — the parties negotiated the terms of the new monitoring plan, renegotiated some of the terms of the original settlement, and settled on additional attorneys’ fees for DLC’s monitoring and enforcement efforts. From September onward, student attorneys Stephanie Holt and Isaac Sargent joined returning student Cynthia Mouzis in finalizing the negotiations and reaching this agreement. And they have already started the process of coordinating with the monitoring team and CDOC to ensure that the implementation phase of the agreement gets started as smoothly as possible.
Through the years, seven generations of Denver Law student attorneys have worked on this case, including Kristiana Camacho-Miles, Kira Case, Melody Fields, Anna Goebel, Stephanie Holt, Tom Ford, Stephanie Frisinger, Alia Haley, Olivia Kohrs, McKenna Milton, Cynthia Mouzis, Kassidy Roberts (who continued to work on the case after graduating and joining DLC!), Isaac Sargent, Jennifer Tuttle, Hannah Williams, and Z Williams. They have been supervised by current and former CRC faculty members, including Nicole Godfrey, Danielle Jefferis, Jenipher Jones, Miriam Kerler, Nick Lutz, Aurora Randolph, and Laura Rovner.