Brown v. Ala. Dep't Of
| Decision Date | 23 February 2010 |
| Docket Number | No. 08-14371.,08-14371. |
| Parties | Geneva BROWN, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, et al., Defendants-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
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Dorman Walker, Balch & Bingham LLP, Montgomery, AL, Ed R. Haden David R. Boyd, Balch & Bingham, LLP Birmingham, AL, for Defendants-Appellants.
Robert L. Wiggins, Jr., Daivd R. Boyd Wiggins, Childs, Quinn & Pantazis, P.C., Birmingham, AL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
Before MARCUS, FAY and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges.
This appeal arises from a Title VII claim brought by African-American civil engineer Geneva Brown against her employer the Alabama Department of Transporta tion ("the Department").1 Brown claimed that the Department denied her nine separate promotions on account of her race, or for retaliatory reasons, between 2000 and 2005. Following a five-day trial, a jury sitting in the Northern District of Alabama entered a verdict in Brown's favor as to her claims of discrimination and retaliation, and awarded her backpay on the basis of each of the nine challenged promotions.
On appeal, the Department argues that the district court erred in denying its motion for judgment as a matter of law and remittitur. It claims that the evidence of discrimination and retaliation was insufficient with respect to all of the promotions, and that even if the evidence was sufficient as to some, the backpay award was excessive insofar as it took each of the promotions into account. The Department also challenges the terms of the district court's permanent injunction, which ordered that Brown be promoted to the position of Division Engineer for the Third Division and provided for other interim relief. The Department claims that the injunction failed adequately to specify the position that Brown would hold pending her promotion to the Third Division Engineer position, exceeded the scope of the district court's remedial powers under Title VII, and required the Department to violate Alabama law by placing Brown in a position for which she was legally unqualified.
After thorough review, we conclude that the evidence of discrimination and retaliation was sufficient to support only three ofthe nine challenged promotional decisions, and that the backpay award therefore must be recalculated. We also hold that the injunction, while clear in most respects, failed to specify adequately the interim position that Brown was to hold pending a vacancy in the Third Division Engineer position. Accordingly, we affirm in part, reverse in part, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
The relevant history of this case begins long before the promotional decisions challenged here by Geneva Brown, and even considerably before Brown joined the ranks of the Alabama Department of Transportation in 1977. It stretches back to at least June 1968, when the United States commenced a large civil rights action known as the Frazer litigation against six Alabama state agencies. See United States ex. rel. Mitchell v. Frazer ("Frazer I"), 317 F.Supp. 1079 (M.D.Ala.1970). Although not one of the original defendants the Department of Transportation was joined not long after the initial filing, along with every other state agency in Alabama save for the Department of Public Safety. See United States v. Frazer ("Frazer II"), Civ. No. 2709-N, 1976 WL 729 (M.D.Ala. Aug. 20, 1976).
As a prelude to Frazer, federal officials repeatedly but unsuccessfully had urged Alabama to adopt a regulation expressly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race. Frazer I, 317 F.Supp. at 1084-85. Alabama had fallen behind other states in doing so, id. at 1085, and indeed, its statewide hiring and promotion system vested in "the appointing officer... the right to reject an applicant because of his race." Id. With little appreciable progress in addressing discrimination, the federal government filed suit.
After reviewing a substantial corpus of evidence, the district court in Frazer found that the six state agencies named as defendants in the original complaint had engaged in extensive pattern-and-practice workplace discrimination against AfricanAmerican candidates on the basis of their race. Id. at 1086-90. The district court identified, inter alia, the following discriminatory practices: repeatedly passing over African-American candidates for open positions, usually without ever contacting or interviewing them, while giving white applicants with equal or inferior qualifications numerous contacts, interviews, and job offers, id. at 1986-87; placing AfricanAmerican candidates on the inactive part of the employment register from which candidates were drawn, without ever giving them notice of such placement or ever again certifying them for vacant positions, id. at 1087; enforcing a policy of keeping all African-American employees within certain clerical classifications, id. at 1088; and recruiting almost entirely from predominantly white high schools and colleges, to the exclusion of all but a few predominantly black institutions, id. at 1089.
The result of these practices, the district court found, was a staggeringly low number of African-Americans in the ranks of the six defendant agencies. Only one out of a thousand of the defendants' clerical employees was African-American—despite an abundance of qualified African-American candidates and a pressing need to fill clerical vacancies—and only 26 of 1, 104 professional or semi-professional employees were African-American. Id. at 1087. With the goal of remedying the disproportionately low numbers of African-Americans in the civil service ranks, the district court entered a broad injunction targetingeach of the identified discriminatory practices. Id. at 1090-93.
Six years later, following the joinder of nearly every state agency in Alabama, the district court reviewed additional evidence of discrimination—including evidence from the Department of Transportation—as well as indications that all of the defendants were violating the earlier injunction. Frazer II, 1976 WL 729, at *1. This time, the district court found that "systematic discrimination against black citizens of Alabama ha[d] been as extensive among the new defendants as it had been among the original defendants." Id. It also found that the State's use of employment tests bearing a questionable relationship to job qualifications had severely prejudiced African-American employees, and that "the new defendant state agencies ha[d] generally avoided compliance with the decrees in this case by examining job registers maintained by the Personnel Department of the State of Alabama and by requesting certificates of eligibility only at times when no blacks were available for certification." Id. at *4. On August 20, 1976, the district court entered a second sweeping injunction targeting the discriminatory practices identified in both the first case and its successor. Id. at *6-8.
Around this time, Geneva Brown was a student in the civil engineering program at the University of Alabama, where she eventually completed three and a half years towards her civil engineering degree before quitting the program when her mother became ill and died.2 She was hired by the Department of Transportation in 1977, directly on the heels of the second Frazer injunction. With the help of the Frazer orders, she became among the first African-Americans in the civil engineering line-of-promotion. Throughout her long tenure at the Department, she rose through all levels of the Engineering Assistant classification series and ultimately to the position of Civil Engineer in 1988, and of Civil Engineer Manager in 1998. But the discrimination that drove the Frazer litigation did not end with her hiring, and instead continued to severely hamper her efforts at promotion.
Brown became a class member in a second discrimination lawsuit filed in 1985 by Johnny Reynolds and other African-Americans alleging that the Department of Transportation continued to discriminate on the basis of race, in violation of the Frazer orders. She was an active and vocal participant in the Reynolds litigation, testifying in various proceedings on at least four occasions between 1992 and 2004. In 1994, the parties in Reynolds reached a partial settlement and entered into a consent decree providing for extensive injunctive relief.3 Brown, however, continued to experience difficulties in her effort to advance to positions in two upperlevel engineering classifications—the Civil Engineer Administrator ("CEA") and Civil Engineer Senior Administrator ("CESA"). She filed the Title VII discrimination and retaliation action underlying this appeal in 2003, and the cause was tried to a jury over three days in September 2006. Beyond the essential background to Brown's claims, which included much of the history of the Frazer and Reynolds litigation, the following relevant facts emerged at trial.
At least on paper, promotion at the Department follows a series of mandatory steps, essentially all of which were in place at the time of the events in question here. To fill vacancies within various employment classifications, the Alabama State Personnel Department ("SPD") maintains registers of employees who have demonstrated their qualification for the position typically in the form of a qualifying test score. From the appropriate register, SPD draws a list known as a Certificate of Eligibles ("Certificate"), which contains the top ten candidates ranked either in bands of similar scores or from the highest score to the lowest. The Certificate is sent to the Department, whose choice of candidates is limited to those...
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