Williams ex rel. Townsend v. Colvin

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Pamela Townsend applied for social security disability benefits and supplemental security income in February 2003. She was 44 years old and claimed she’d become incapable of full-time gainful employment in May 2002 when she had stopped working as a result of a cascade of physical and psychiatric ailments. In January 2012 an administrative law judge decided that she had indeed become totally disabled, but not until November 2008. By the time that decision was rendered she had died (of pulmonary diseases apparently unrelated to the ailments alleged to have made her totally…