This Case Of A Phantom Pooper Is Hugely Important For Genetic Testing Laws
It was a weird and disgusting crime: Someone was leaving piles of poop in the aisles of a grocery warehouse run by Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services outside of Atlanta. So the company made a list of employee suspects and asked them to take a voluntary DNA test.
Two warehouse workers, Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds, were on that list. Worried they would lose their jobs, they allowed a scientist to brush the inside of their cheeks with cotton swabs and run DNA tests on the samples. The tests came back negative: Neither man was the “devious defecator,” as a judge later dubbed the culprit.
But Lowe and Reynolds were humiliated by the ordeal, and afraid of how their DNA might be used in the future. So in May 2013, seven months after the testing, they sued Atlas, citing the federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), which states that employers and medical insurers are not allowed to collect genetic data.
The men won their suit in May, and this Monday a federal jury granted the men $2.2 million in damages.
This is the first GINA case to go to trial, and sets a crucial precedent for labor law, experts say.
“It will be a famous and/or notorious case, depending on your perspective,” Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University, told BuzzFeed News. “This case went, in a couple of weeks, from being a locker-room punchline, a scatological joke, to something which I don’t think any employer is laughing about now.”
Read more at...