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| Monday, June 29, 2009 |
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Court sides with firefighters in Ricci case
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Court sides with firefighters in Ricci case
Harrison Korn X
Staff Reporter-V
Published Monday, June 29, 2009
The Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of 20 New Haven firefighters who claimed in a reverse discrimination case that they were denied promotion because of their race.
The Court's 5-4 ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano could potentially limit an employee's ability to bring a case against his or her employer when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination.
The ruling also overturns the decision that Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79, who has been nominated to serve on the Supreme court, upheld as an appeals court judge.
One Hispanic and 19 white firefighters first brought the case against the city of New Haven in 2004, claiming they were denied promotions to lieutenant and captain because of their race. The city chose not certify a 2003 promotion exam because the scores of the black firefighters were much lower than the scores of the white firefighters. As a result, no black firefighters would have been eligible for promotion.
The Court said that New Haven’s actions violated Title VII, which prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or national origin. The court said that since there was no “strong basis in evidence” that the test was discriminatory, not-job related, or that there were less discriminatory alternatives, the city could not throw out the results.
“Allowing employers to violate the disparate-treatment prohibition based on a mere good-faith fear of disparate-impact liability would encourage race-based action at the slightest hint of disparate impact,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
“We hold only that, under Title VII, before an employer can engage in intentional discrimination for the asserted purpose of avoiding or remedying an unintentional disparate impact, the employer must have a strong basis in evidence to believe it will be subject to disparate-impact liability if it fails to take the race-conscious, discriminatory action,” Kennedy wrote.
Alito, in a concurrence signed by Scalia and Thomas, claimed that the city of New Haven's concern about disparate impact was merely a politically motivated decision made by New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to placate his black supporters.
Throughout the ongoing court proceedings, the city argued that it had no choice but to throw out the test results to comply with Title VII since the test had a disparate impact. The plaintiffs — led by Frank Ricci, a dyslexic firefighter who says he studied 10 hours per day for the exam — argued that it was a fair, non-discriminatory test and that they scored higher because they studied harder.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg - in a dissenting opinion co-signed by justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens — argued that New Haven should have only been required to show that they had “reasonable cause” to suspect the test was discriminatory. Furthermore, she said that the test had enough deficiencies to “create at least a triable issue under a strong-basis-in-evidence standard.”
After a district judge summarily dismissed the case, a panel of three judges on 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court decision in a one paragraph ruling in February 2008. The panel, which included Sotomayor, was criticized by other judges on the 2nd Circuit for the brevity of its ruling in such a complicated case.
The narrow ruling Monday was largely expected. Four legal experts interviewed by the News earlier this year said they expected the decision to be a 5-4 vote, with Kennedy as the swing vote. |
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