By Oliver Enquist
In Ellis v. Houston, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of five African American corrections officers who brought claims against five of their supervisors for race based harassment and retaliation. The appellate court ruled that the officers’ claims stated a cause of action and reversed a district court ruling that had dismissed all the allegations.
The officers alleged that they experienced demoralizing race based taunts and jokes while employed at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. The lawsuit asserted that not only did the supervisors permit these acts of racial discrimination, but they engaged in harassing the officers as well. After enduring such harassment for months, the African American officers reported it to authorities in the Nebraska prison system. Thereafter, officers claimed that the supervisors retaliated against them by increasing workloads and assigning them undesirable jobs. The plaintiffs eventually filed suit. The trial court threw out the suit, ruling that the officers’ work environment was not sufficiently hostile.
The Court of Appeals held that the court had not properly applied the test for harassment:
Factors which can demonstrate the magnitude of any harassment include “the frequency and severity of the discriminatory conduct, whether it is physically threatening or humiliating or only an offensive utterance, whether it unreasonably interferes with the employee’s work performance, physical proximity to the harasser, and the presence or absence of other people.”
The court found that at least one supervisor, Sergeant Miles, did make racially charged statements. The court found Miles engaged in “purposeful discrimination” by his own comments, as well as by his failure to act to correct the actions of his subordinates. As for the other supervisors, there was insufficient evidence of harassment to reinstate the claims against them.
The court also found adequate evidence existed to support the officers’ retaliation charges. The officers alleged that their files were “papered” and one officer was transferred in response to presenting these discrimination claims. The court ruled that these were “materially adverse employment actions sufficient to support a prima facie case of retaliation.”
Editor’s Note (Jim Cline): Clearly there were sufficient facts alleged that should have allowed the discrimination allegations to proceed to a trial for a fact-finding. The District Court’s initial dismissal without a trial may be surprising but not unusual. Plaintiff’s attorneys often complain that some federal district courts take a cursory look at discrimination cases and sometimes clear them from their dockets without adequate consideration.
Discrimination laws not only prohibit discrimination, those laws also make retaliation for the presentation of the initial claim unlawful as well.
