Saturday, March 18, 2000
Disabled trucker wins shot at license
BY JOHN NOLAN
The Associated Press
A disabled trucker on Friday won another chance to get a federal license to operate outside the state.
An appeals court overruled the federal government's refusal to grant a permit to Jerry Parker, who is missing part of one arm and has good vision in only one eye.
The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ordered the Federal Highway Administration to develop a procedure to evaluate Mr. Parker's driving skills based on his capabilities.
Mr. Parker is licensed to drive commercial trucks within Ohio. He provided the court with evidence that he had driven 1.2 million miles in a commercial truck within the state since 1985 without an accident. He applied to the government in 1996 for the interstate license.
Mr. Parker, who lives in the southwest Ohio town of Martinsville, said he has been limited for years to driving his truck to Cincinnati — but not to customers in Kentucky — because he was denied the federal license.
“It just made no sense,” his lawyer, Gerald Von Korff of St. Cloud, Minn., said Friday.
The federal agency has often granted interstate driving licenses in recent years to truckers with good vision in only one eye.
But the agency denied Mr. Parker a license, saying it had no statistical data available to evaluate whether a driver with multiple impairments could safely operate a truck. Agency officials said federal law did not allow them to make an exception for Mr. Parker.
The government will consider whether to ask the full, 12-judge appeals court to rehear the case, said Michael Singer, a Justice Department lawyer representing the highway agency.
Mr. Parker suffers from a congenital disease that has limited the sight in his right eye to 20/300, even with corrective lenses. The corrected vision in his left eye is 20/20. Part of his left arm was amputated after a grain elevator accident 20 years ago.
He could not be reached Friday for comment.
Mr. Von Korff has helped other drivers with good sight in one eye to win trucker's licenses from the Federal Highway Administration, including two recent clients, one from Tennessee and one from Minnesota.
Each had to battle to obtain the federal license, even though both had safe driving records and one of them had even been honored as Minnesota's safe driver of the month, Mr. Von Korff said.
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