Wisconsin Labor and Industry Review Commission --
Summary of Wisconsin Court Decision relating to Unemployment Insurance


Subject: Jermaine F. Walls v. LIRC and Cornwell Personnel Associates, Ltd., Case 05CV006013 (Wis. Cir. Ct., Milwaukee Co., January 31, 2006)

Digest Codes:    PC 712.5

The employee timely requested a hearing, which was scheduled for February 28, 2005. He was incarcerated beginning February 16, after his bail was revoked for his failure to comply with the conditions of his release pending trial on a burglary charge. He was in regular contact with his mother after incarceration, but he never asked her to contact the hearing office on his behalf, to see whether he could appear by telephone from jail or get a postponement. He did send a letter of explanation to the hearing office, but only mailed it on the day of the hearing, February 28. The commission held that the employee did not have good cause for failing to appear at the hearing, for two reasons. First, his incarceration was due to his failure to comply with the conditions of his bail, and thus was his own fault. Second, despite opportunity to do so, the employee made no attempt to timely contact the hearing office after he was incarcerated.

Held: Affirmed. The court questioned the fairness of holding the employee’s incarceration against him, but gave great weight deference to the commission’s ruling and so ultimately accepted its reasoning on this point. (The court opined that an individual’s underlying intentional conduct that happened to make the individual too ill to attend a hearing, was no less blameworthy than that of an employee who intentionally engages in conduct that results in his or her incarceration.) As to the employee’s failure to have contacted the hearing office, the court held that that failure, given that the employee had opportunity to call, established that his nonappearance was inexcusable (“common sense and good manners dictate that a person not be excused from attending an obligation that one cannot attend but which one knows in advance one cannot attend and from which one fails to excuse oneself in advance”).
 


Please note that this is a summary prepared by staff of the commission, not a verbatim reproduction of the court decision.

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