By Michael Phillips | The People’s Law Review
The Americans with Disabilities Act turned 35 this year. Its mandate for equal access to public services — including courts — is well-settled law. Title II of the ADA applies to state and local government entities without exception. State courts are covered. The obligation to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities is not discretionary.
And yet, in the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, a litigant with a documented PTSD diagnosis spent the better part of a year being told no — through a combination of procedural deflection, a one-line denial with no explanation, and a referral to an ADA office that, according to court staff, did not exist.
The case is Reichert v. Hornbeck, a long-running Maryland custody dispute that has generated more than five appellate proceedings and, separately, a federal civil rights lawsuit. It is already the subject of ongoing investigative reporting at Riptide Investigations. But one thread of that case — the disability accommodation thread — raises questions that go well beyond the parties involved. It illustrates a structural gap between what the ADA requires on paper and what disabled litigants actually encounter at the courthouse door.
What the Law Requires
Title II of the ADA prohibits public entities, including courts, from excluding qualified individuals with disabilities from participating in or benefiting from services, programs, or activities. The Department of Justice regulations implementing Title II list “video-based telecommunications” explicitly among the auxiliary aids and services courts must consider providing. Under 28 C.F.R. § 35.101(b), the definition of disability is to be construed broadly, and the primary inquiry is whether an entity has complied with its obligations — not whether the individual’s disability clears some threshold of severity.
The Supreme Court addressed this directly in Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509 (2004), emphasizing that meaningful access to courts is a core ADA obligation. The Court highlighted the absurdity of expecting compliance without infrastructure: the plaintiff in Lane had crawled up two flights of stairs to reach a courtroom without an elevator, and when he refused to do so again, he was arrested for failure to appear. The Court was explicit that cost and convenience alone cannot justify denying meaningful court access to a person with a disability.
Maryland’s own procedural rules reflect this framework. Under Maryland Rules 21-101 and 3-513, both circuit and district courts are authorized to permit remote electronic participation in judicial proceedings, in evidentiary and non-evidentiary matters alike, at the discretion of the judge.
The accommodation being sought in the Reichert case — remote appearance by Zoom, Teams, or telephone — sits squarely within this framework. It costs the court nothing. The technology is already in place. It is routinely granted to attorneys, witnesses, and parties for reasons far less significant than a diagnosed psychiatric disability.
What Happened
Jeff Reichert has a documented diagnosis of PTSD and severe anxiety, with panic attacks specifically triggered by in-person courthouse appearances in Anne Arundel County. The connection between the diagnosis and that specific court setting is not incidental: filings in the case state that the PTSD was caused by events in that county’s proceedings. Reichert resides in Chesapeake, Virginia — approximately five hours from the Annapolis courthouse — compounding both the logistical burden and the disability-related stress of appearing in person.
His attorneys filed formal accommodation requests on the Maryland Judiciary’s official form (CC-DC-049) on multiple occasions across multiple case numbers, clearly documenting the disability, the requested accommodation (remote appearance for Anne Arundel County proceedings only), and the basis for the request.
On July 30, 2025, the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court issued its determination. It is a single checkbox — “The request for accommodation is DENIED” — followed by one handwritten line noting the denial was without prejudice to future motions filed under the Maryland Rules of Procedure. No legal analysis. No engagement with the disability documentation. No explanation of why the accommodation was deemed unreasonable.
The same form, printed at the bottom, instructs litigants that the clerk’s office and the ADA Coordinator are available for further assistance.
When Reichert’s counsel and an ADA advocate attempted to follow that instruction after a hearing — asking the clerk’s office where the ADA office was located — they were told there was no ADA office in the courthouse.
A Structural Barrier for Emergencies
The problems extend beyond the denial itself. Anne Arundel County Circuit Court’s policy for accommodation requests requires submission at least 30 days in advance of the proceeding for which accommodation is sought. That is a standard administrative lead time, reasonable on its face for scheduled hearings.
But family court proceedings are frequently not scheduled 30 days in advance. Emergency petitions, by definition, are filed the same day they are heard. The court’s 30-day advance notice policy — applied without exception — functions as an absolute bar to disability accommodation for any emergency proceeding. A litigant with a documented disability who needs to appear for an emergency custody matter cannot satisfy a 30-day advance notice requirement for a hearing that did not exist 30 days ago.
Filings in the case made this point directly: the policy “does not provide at all for remote appearance for an emergency petition, which is filed same day. Essentially acting as a bar to remote appearance for emergencies in this court.” The ADA requires reasonable accommodations irrespective of local administrative policy. A blanket procedural rule that makes accommodation structurally impossible for an entire category of proceedings is not a reasonable accommodation framework — it is the absence of one.
The Federal-State Contradiction
The sharpest dimension of this record is the direct conflict between what the federal court did and what the state court continued to do.
On January 13, 2026, in Reichert v. Hornbeck, Case No. 1:24-cv-01865 (D. Md.), U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Coulson issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order granting Reichert the right to appear remotely for all pretrial matters — depositions, hearings, and conferences — as a reasonable accommodation for his PTSD diagnosis. Judge Coulson found that Reichert had presented sufficient evidence of his diagnosis and its connection to in-person legal proceedings, and that for pretrial matters “routinely conducted by remote means even in the absence of such diagnoses,” there was no specific objection from the other side sufficient to outweigh the accommodation request.
One week later, on January 20, 2026, Reichert filed an emergency motion for remote appearance in the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court proceeding — attaching the federal court’s order as an exhibit. The motion laid out the resulting contradiction plainly: denying the accommodation would contradict a federal court’s adjudication of the same rights, perpetuate the conduct alleged in a pending federal civil rights complaint against the circuit court itself, and risk the appearance of retaliation against a litigant for seeking federal enforcement of disability protections.
The Anne Arundel County Circuit Court had, by this point, been named as a defendant in a separate federal civil rights action brought by Reichert specifically for the exclusion of a disabled litigant from judicial proceedings.
The federal court found the accommodation reasonable. The state court kept saying no.
What This Illustrates
The Reichert accommodation record is not primarily a story about one litigant’s bad experience. It is a documentation of how ADA compliance fails at the operational level in ways that are largely invisible.
The failure is not dramatic — there is no official refusing to install a ramp or threatening to arrest someone for not climbing stairs. It is quieter than that. It is a checkbox denial with no reasoning. It is a referral to an office that does not exist. It is a 30-day advance notice requirement that no one has bothered to reconcile with same-day emergency filings. It is multiple accommodation requests, properly submitted on the court’s own forms, met with the same result each time.
For litigants without attorneys — and family court has a high proportion of self-represented parties — this system is nearly impossible to navigate. Even with counsel, the Reichert record shows, the formal process produced denials without explanation and directed people to resources that weren’t there.
The ADA has been in effect for 35 years. Remote appearance technology has been standard in Maryland courts since at least the COVID-19 pandemic. The accommodation being requested was minimal, documented, and consistent with what a federal magistrate judge found entirely reasonable.
The question raised by this record is not whether Jeff Reichert should have been granted remote access. The question is what it means that obtaining something this routine required years of filings, a federal court order, and a civil rights lawsuit before the state court took the obligation seriously — if it has.
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