No ID. No Utilities. Now A Man’s Dead. This is What Happened in the Court Case

J. Jean Johnson was delivered into this world by a Mississippi midwife, and he never did have a birth certificate or photo ID.

All he had was a social security card and his identification card from his job as a city garbageman. But that was not enough for Memphis Light, Gas & Water, which denied Johnson electricity, heat and air conditioning because he did not have state-issued photo identification. In August 2011, Johnson, an illiterate man with intellectual disabilities, died of heat stroke when the internal temperature of his apartment reached 93.2 degrees.

Even though Johnson’s niece and coworker both testified that he was unable to care for himself without help and that he often became frustrated when communicating with others, U.S. District Judge S. Thomas Anderson ruled that the time period for Johnson’s wife and sister to bring claims against the utility company had expired.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently reversed the judge, ruling that a jury should decide if Johnson was of “unsound mind” and if his intellectual capacity tolled the time period in which his relatives can sue the utility.

Circuit Judge Jane B. Stranch noted that the test for whether a person’s unsound mind will pause, or toll, a statute of limitations is “‘whether a person could know or understand his or her legal rights sufficiently well to manage his or her personal affairs.’”

“The deposition excerpts and affidavits read together plausibly show Johnson to have been an individual with extremely limited intellectual abilities who lacked the capacity to ‘carry out legal functions,”’ Stranch said. “He was able to function somewhat independently only with the regular assistance of family, friends, and co-workers. The record suggests that Johnson, poor and apparently disconnected from social services, was as dependent on such informal networks as a comparably disabled middle-class individual might be dependent on an assisted living facility or a court-appointed guardian.” 

An even more heart-wrenching aspect of the case is that there was an exception to the ID policy that probably should have applied to Johnson.

When Johnson tried to get utilities in 2010 at the age of 65, the utility company had an exception to the requirement that customers show valid government-issued ID— if people were in their sixth decade or older. “But MLGW did not train employees regarding how to advise customers who did not possess the necessary photo identification, nor did it train employees on how to deal with customers who were illiterate,” Stranch noted.