Justia Civil Rights Opinion Summaries

While working an IT position at Enterprise Services LLC, Plaintiff said he was discriminated against because he has disability—an arthritic big toe. The company says the issues arose because Plaintiff didn’t work well with others, and actually, didn’t work much at all. Plaintiff says the issues arose because of his alleged disability. After he was fired, he brought claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act asserting that Enterprise Services discriminated against him because of his toe and retaliated against him for seeking toe-related accommodations. For the retaliation claim, the district court held that Enterprise Services’ only potentially retaliatory act was firing Plaintiff and allowed him to take that claim to trial. But Enterprise Services moved to strike Plaintiff’s jury-trial demand. The district court granted the motion. Following the bench trial, the district court entered judgment for Enterprise Services on the remaining claim because Plaintiff failed to prove he was fired because he asked for disability accommodations.   The Fourth Circuit affirmed. First, while the district court did cite an outdated EEOC regulation when determining he is not disabled within the meaning of the ADA, he is not disabled under any reasonable reading of the ADA. So that disposes of every claim except retaliation. Second, Burlington Northern makes clear that only “significant” harm to an employee constitutes retaliatory adverse action. And only his termination met that threshold. Third, a straightforward reading of Section 1981a(a)(2) shows that an ADA-retaliation plaintiff is not entitled to legal damages and, therefore not guaranteed a jury trial by the Seventh Amendment. View "Jeffrey Israelitt v. Enterprise Services LLC" on Justia Law

Cenikor Foundation brought an interlocutory appeal challenging the district court’s determination that collective action of its drug rehabilitation patients may proceed under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA” or “the Act”).  Cenikor argued that the district court applied the wrong legal standard to determine whether Cenikor’s patients were FLSA “employees.” Appellees argue that the district court properly applied binding Supreme Court precedent to the facts of this case in finding that the employment question may be decided on a collective-wide basis.   The Fourth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that because the district court utilized Alamo in reaching its decision, it relied on the appropriate legal standard. Its threshold determination that the rehabilitation patients constitute “employees” under the Act because they worked in expectation of compensation was not an abuse of discretion. Further, the court wrote that the district court needed to consider the evidence relating to this threshold question in order to determine whether the economic-realities test could be applied on a collective basis. The court wrote that the district court properly did so based on ample evidence in the record from preliminary discovery. View "Klick v. Cenikor Foundation" on Justia Law

Appellant, a former employee of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (“ODNI”), asserts that ODNI violated the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (“FMLA”),by delaying her leave request and not hiring her for a permanent position. The district court determined that Appellant failed to meet her burden of proof to demonstrate that she was not selected for the permanent position “by reason of” ODNI’s FMLA interference.   The Fourth Circuit affirmed. The court concluded that t the record supports the district court’s finding that Appellant’s non-selection for the permanent position was the result of the hiring official’s poor impression of Appellant as a prospective employee and Appellant’s attendance problems prior to the FMLA interference. View "Hannah P. v. Avril Haines" on Justia Law

The First Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part the order of the district court in the underlying action originally brought by Peter Marcus against the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL), where Marcus was formerly employed, holding that the district court erred in part.In the underlying amended complaint, Marcus and his co-plaintiffs sought unpaid overtime wages under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA), 29 U.S.C. 207(a), and Marcus asserted that he was wrongfully discriminated and retaliated against for requesting his claimed pay. The district court entered summary judgment for certain plaintiffs and, as to Marcus's retaliation claim, entered summary judgment for ACBL. The First Circuit reversed in part and remanded the case, holding that the district court (1) erred in denying Plaintiffs' motion to substitute a party; (2) correctly granted judgment in favor of ACBL on Marcus's retaliation claim; (3) erred in granting judgment with respect to the FSLA overtime claims of certain plaintiffs; and (4) otherwise did not err. View "Marcus v. American Contract Bridge League" on Justia Law

Plaintiff worked for the City of Clarendon, Arkansas, as a full-time police officer. After he was terminated, he sued the City, then-Chief of Police Laura Rash, and then-Clarendon Mayor James L. Stinson, alleging a violation of the Arkansas Whistle-Blower Act and retaliation for the exercise of his free speech rights. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants on the free speech claim, and the case proceeded to trial on the whistleblower claim. The jury returned a verdict for Defendants. Plaintiff appealed, arguing the district court erred in its pre-trial discovery rulings, its grant of summary judgment to the defendants, and its denial of his motion for a new trial.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that at summary judgment, there was no evidence that Plaintiff sought to convey that message when he gave the video to Deputy Thorne. Instead, the record showed that Plaintiff asserted the opposite, telling Whitcomb and Times that he was trying to “protect” them and expressly denying any intent to give the video to Thorne for investigatory purposes. The district court did not err in granting summary judgment on Plaintiff’s free speech claim. View "John Marlow v. City of Clarendon" on Justia Law

The Church of St. Theresa (St. Theresa’s) owned and operated the St. Theresa School. St. Theresa’s terminated art teacher and toddler room caregiver Victoria Crisitello for violating the terms of her employment agreement. That agreement required employees to abide by the teachings of the Catholic Church and forbade employees from engaging in premarital sex; Crisitello, who was unmarried, had become pregnant. In response to her firing, Crisitello filed a complaint against St. Theresa’s alleging employment discrimination in violation of the Law Against Discrimination (LAD), based on pregnancy and marital status. St. Theresa’s countered that its decision to terminate Crisitello was protected by both the First Amendment and the LAD. The New Jersey Supreme Court held: (1) the “religious tenets” exception of N.J.S.A. 10:5-12(a) was an affirmative defense available to a religious entity when confronted with a claim of employment discrimination; and (2) the uncontroverted fact was that St. Theresa’s followed the religious tenets of the Catholic Church in terminating Crisitello. The Court thus concluded St. Theresa’s was entitled to summary judgment and that the trial court correctly dismissed the complaint with prejudice. View "Crisitello v. St. Theresa School" on Justia Law

Petitioner is a former employee of International Business Machines Corporation (“IBM”) who signed a separation agreement requiring confidential arbitration of any claims arising from her termination. Petitioner arbitrated an age-discrimination claim against IBM and won. She then filed a petition in federal court under the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) to confirm the award, attaching it to the petition under seal but simultaneously moving to unseal it. Shortly after she filed the petition, IBM paid the award in full. The district court granted Petitioner’s petition to confirm the award and her motion to unseal. On appeal, IBM argued that (1) the petition to confirm became moot once IBM paid the award, and (2) the district court erred in unsealing the confidential award.   The Second Circuit vacated the district court’s confirmation of the award and remanded with instructions to dismiss the petition as moot. The court reversed the district court’s grant of the motion to unseal. The court explained that Petitioner’s petition to confirm her purely monetary award became moot when IBM paid the award in full because there remained no “concrete” interest in enforcement of the award to maintain a case or controversy under Article III. Second, any presumption of public access to judicial documents is outweighed by the importance of confidentiality under the FAA and the impropriety of Petitioner’s effort to evade the confidentiality provision in her arbitration agreement. View "Stafford v. Int'l Bus. Machs. Corp." on Justia Law

Plaintiff, a former employee, sued on behalf of herself and similarly situated employees, claiming that St. Luke’s violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (“FLSA”) overtime provisions by failing to fully compensate employees for work performed. She also brought an unjust-enrichment claim under state law. The district court certified two classes with different lookback periods: (1) an FLSA collective comprised of employees who worked for St. Luke’s between September 2016 and September 2018, 1 and (2) an unjust-enrichment class comprised of all employees who worked for St. Luke’s in Missouri between April 2012 and September 2018. Houston also asserted individual claims, one under the Missouri Minimum Wage Law, and one for breach of her employment contract. The district court granted summary judgment to St. Luke’s on all claims.   The Eighth Circuit vacated and remanded. The court explained that Plaintiff has raised a genuine dispute that the rounding policy does not average out over time. The court explained that no matter how one slices the data, most employees and the employees as a whole fared worse under the rounding policy than had they been paid according to their exact time worked. Here, the rounding policy did both. It resulted in lost time for nearly two-thirds of employees, and those employees lost more time than was gained by their coworkers who benefited from rounding. The court concluded that the employees have raised a genuine dispute that the rounding policy, as applied, did not average out over time. The district court, therefore, erred in granting summary judgment on the FLSA and Missouri wage claims. View "Torri Houston v. St. Luke's Health System, Inc." on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed a Title VII action against her employer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI” or the “Bureau”) for allegedly taking retaliatory actions against her after she reported discrimination to the Bureau’s Equal Employment Office (“EEO”). The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the FBI on several of Ramos’s allegations, finding that the FBI’s actions were not materially adverse in violation of Title VII’s antiretaliation provision. The district court also denied Plaintiff’s  motion for leave to amend her complaint to add new allegations of retaliation.   The DC Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment with regard to the 2011 rescission of the offer to transfer to Unit 1B, but affirmed on all other grounds. The court explained that the Bureau provided a legitimate, nonretaliatory reason for the Unit Chief’s decision to make Plaintiff Backup Program Manager: concern for her well-being when she returned to work following medical leave and was still recovering from injuries. The Chief noted that the motive in looking to bring someone in was to give Plaintiff “a break” while she was on medical leave so that he would not “keep harassing her while she was on leave with work.” Then, when the Chief announced the reassignment after Plaintiff had returned from medical leave, he explained that he did not want to burden Plaintiff with a heavy workload as she was recovering from her injuries. As such, the court concluded that Plaintiff did not provide sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to conclude that her reassignments were retaliatory. View "Laura Ramos v. Merrick Garland (PUBLIC OPINION)" on Justia Law

Singmuongthong describes himself as a tan-colored, Asian man of Laotian national origin. He worked as a correctional officer at Sheridan from 1998-2013, when he became a lieutenant at Sheridan. In 2016, he was promoted and became assistant warden of operations at a new facility, Kewanee. Singmuongthong received a five percent increase in his salary. Kewanee’s warden, Williams, was investigated in 2018 for inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature with subordinate staff and was terminated. That investigation also concluded that Singmuongthong had difficulty making good administrative decisions, had failed to report inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature, and spent too much time at bars with subordinate staff. Singmuongthong informed the regional deputy chief, Funk, that he was interested in the warden position. He was not chosen for the position because of his relationship with Williams and concerns about his judgment. Following a subsequent investigation of a separate allegation of sexual harassment, Singmuongthong was terminated from employment.Singmuongthong alleged discrimination based on his race, color, and national origin, and retaliation under 42 U.S.C. 1981. The district court granted the defendants summary judgment. Singmuongthong appealed only his pay disparity and failure to promote claims. The Seventh Circuit affirmed, rejecting a claim of pretext. View "Singmuongthong v. Bowen" on Justia Law