No damages in Privacy Act case for HIV-positive pilot, court rules

— The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a private pilot whose HIV-positive status was improperly shared between government agencies cannot collect damages for the emotional distress he suffered when he was punished for hiding his medical condition from the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a case that pitted competing interests of public safety, personal privacy and the broad immunity of the government from liability lawsuits, the court’s more conservative majority found that Congress had not allowed compensation for mental anguish when violations of the Privacy Act of 1974 inflicted no actual damage, such as a loss of income.

During argument of the case in November, lawyers for the government had said that to allow the kind of compensation that the pilot, Stanmore Cooper, was seeking would expose the government to a much broader array of claims than Congress ever intended. Cooper’s side, on the other hand, argued that to limit the claims would also have broad repercussions, for example making it easy for the government to silence whistleblowers by subjecting them to embarrassing disclosures.

The decision, which endorsed the government’s position and overturned an appeals court’s ruling in favor of the pilot, split the court 5-3 along familiar ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the more conservative wing to form the majority, and Justice Elena Kagan not participating because she worked on the case while solicitor general. The majority opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito, with a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The ruling turned on the meaning of the statutory phrase “actual damages,” which has been described as a chameleon that takes on different legal hues in different contexts.

In the privacy law, the court decided, Congress had left the meaning of the term ambiguous enough that it could not be used to waive the sovereign immunity that often protects the government from being sued for damages.

“The Privacy Act does not unequivocally authorize an award of damages for mental or emotional distress,” Alito wrote.

In the case at hand, Federal Aviation Administration v. Cooper, No. 10-1024, Cooper had complained of deep distress after the Social Security Administration told the aviation agency that he had collected disability payments for his HIV infection, first diagnosed in 1985. A private pilot, he had failed for years to inform the FAA about his HIV status on a form that prospective pilots are required to fill out. At the time, the aviation agency did not issue medical certificates, which are required to operate an aircraft, to people with HIV.

When his omissions were discovered in a database investigation called “Operation Safe Pilot” that cross-referenced information held by various agencies, he pleaded guilty to the crime of making false statements to the government, losing his license and paying a $1,000 fine.

He then sued the government for violating the Privacy Act. A district court rejected his claim, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in his favor.

Justices Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented, saying they would have let the Privacy Act lawsuit move forward. The ruling “cripples the Act’s core purpose of redressing and deterring violations of privacy interests,” Sotomayor said.

Information for this article was contributed by Jesse J. Holland of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 03/29/2012

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