Com. of Pa. v. Flaherty
| Citation | 983 F.2d 1267 |
| Decision Date | 20 January 1993 |
| Docket Number | No. 92-3031,92-3031 |
| Parties | 60 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 41,984 COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA and Guardians of Greater Pittsburgh, Inc., individually and on behalf of its members and on behalf of all others similarly situated; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--Pittsburgh Branch, individually and on behalf of its members and on behalf of all others similarly situated; National Organization for Women--Southwestern Pennsylvania Council of Chapters, individually and on behalf of its members and on behalf of all others similarly situated, and Donald Allen, Benjamin Ashe, Jerome Aziz, Richard Hurt, Adam Kinsel, Lynnwood Scott and Richard Stewart, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated; J. Terese Doyle, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated; Cheryl Edmonds, Rose Mitchum, Linda Robinson, Joanne Rowe, Deborah Smith and Gloria Vanda, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated; Harvey Adams, Mack Henderson, Theodore Saulsbury, and Charles Tarrant, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, Gladys Smith, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated v. Peter F. FLAHERTY, Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh and Acting Director of the Department of Public Safety of the City of Pittsburgh; Robert J. Coll, Superintendent of the City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Police; Stephen A. Glickman, President of the City of Pittsburgh Civil Service Commission; Albert Statti and Edward L. English, Members of the City of Pittsburgh Civil Service Commission; Melanie J. Smith, Secretary and Chief Examiner of the City of Pittsburgh Civil Service Commission; and City of Pittsburgh, all individually and in their official capacities v. COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, Fraternal Order of Police (Intervenor in D.C.). Michael C. SLATER v. CITY OF PITTSBURGH, a municipal corporation. Charles H. BOEHM; Paul G. Clark and Richard Usner, on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated v. Sophie MASLOFF, Mayor of the City of Pitt |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit) |
Thomas F. Halloran, Jr. (argued), Office of the Atty. Gen. of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, PA, for appellant.
Mary P. Portis, Portis & Associates Pittsburgh, PA, for appellee National Ass'n for the Advancement of Colored People, Pittsburgh Branch.
Samuel J. Cordes (argued), Ogg, Jones, DeSimone & Ignelzi, Pittsburgh, PA, for appellees Paul G. Clark and Richard Usner.
Robert B. Smith (argued), City of Pittsburgh, Dept. of Law, Pittsburgh, PA, for appellees Albert Statti, Edward L. English, Melanie J. Smith, City of Pittsburgh, Peter F. Flaherty, and Robert J. Coll.
Ronald D. Barber (argued), Strassburger, McKenna, Gutnick & Potter, Pittsburgh, PA, for appellees Daniel A. Dulski and Michael A. Benner.
Before: MANSMANN, ROTH and ROSENN, Circuit Judges.
In this appeal from a grant of summary judgment denying the Commonwealth's request for equitable relief and upholding the dissolution of a preliminary injunction aimed at remedying unlawful discrimination in the hiring practices of the Police Department for the City of Pittsburgh, we focus primarily on whether injunctive relief has continued justification in light of the Supreme Court's decision in Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976), which mandates that discriminatory intent be proven as an element of the prima facie standard for Constitution-based civil rights claims. This case is unusual because the preliminary injunction remained in effect for more than fifteen years, during which time no party sought to pursue the action on the merits or to dispose of the issue of permanent injunctive relief.
In the face of the original parties' apparent reluctance to pursue an adjudication of their claims on the merits, intervening defendants, police officer applicants who alleged harm as a result of the terms of the preliminary injunction, demanded adjudication on the merits and received a judgment in their favor which dissolved the preliminary injunction. This appeal itself purports only to seek restoration of the preliminary injunction until such time in the future as certain alleged injustices in the Pittsburgh Police Force's hiring procedures are remediated.
The unprecedented protraction of time during which the "preliminary" injunction has remained operative suggests to us that the request to restore it is de facto a request for a grant of a permanent injunction. The district court's order of summary judgment against the Commonwealth on the issue of police hiring procedures from which this appeal is taken in fact denies the Commonwealth's initial request for permanent injunctive relief prayed for in its 1975 complaint. We have reviewed the evidence in a light most favorable to the Commonwealth and determine that there is no genuine issue of material fact concerning the chief issue presented; indeed there is no evidence of discrimination, indirect or otherwise, which would support a determination that the City is purposefully and currently engaged in unlawful discrimination. Because we thus conclude that the district court properly denied permanent injunctive relief, we will affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment to the Intervenors.
We discuss separately the district court's assessment of Intervenors' attorney's fees against the Commonwealth and the City, in light of the jurisdictional question of whether an unquantified award is properly appealable under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 as a final decision of the district court.
Since this is an appeal from a final judgment affirming a grant of summary judgment, we have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1291. Where the judgment on the underlying merits of the case is final, the decision on the merits becomes immediately appealable, even where an award of attorney's fees remains unliquidated. Budinich v. Becton Dickinson and Co., 486 U.S. 196, 108 S.Ct. 1717, 100 L.Ed.2d 178 (1988). See also White v. New Hampshire Dept. of Employment Secur., 455 U.S. 445, 452, 102 S.Ct. 1162, 1166, 71 L.Ed.2d 325 (1982) (); West v. Keve, 721 F.2d 91, 93 (3d Cir.1983); In re Colon, 941 F.2d 242 (3d Cir.1991); Confer v. Custom Eng'g Co., 952 F.2d 41 (3d Cir.1991). The district court assumed jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331 and 1343.
We set forth the salient historical facts undisputed in the district court in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth.
In the hope of remediating the historical underrepresentation of African-Americans and females in the City of Pittsburgh Police Force, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania filed an action against the City in 1975 alleging unlawful discrimination in the hiring of police officers, in violation of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1983 and the 13th and 14th Amendments. Concluding that the City's reliance on an applicant's score on a written ranking exam had the effect of disproportionately eliminating minorities and women from the City's police force, the district court entered a preliminary injunction which prescribed a quota hiring system whereby for every white male hired by the City, the City was enjoined to hire one qualifying African-American male, one white female, and one African-American female. The preliminary injunction, which was to remain in effect only "until disposition for permanent injunctive relief or until further order of th[e] court," further mandated the City
to develop a broad-based system of competing qualifications of future applicants which measures a number of job-related qualifications and is free from the racial or sexual bias that results from the administration of the single written examination as the sole competitive criterion for appointment. 1
The district court did not make a finding of intentional discrimination, but based its finding of unconstitutional racial discrimination entirely upon evidence that African-Americans as a whole scored lower on the examination than white Americans, and were thus disparately impacted by the exam. With regard to women, the district court found that the gender disparity on the police force was not attributable to the exam, but was solely the result of a veteran's preference point award system, which adds ten points to the raw score of any applicant who is also a U.S. veteran. The court found that the veterans preference system had the practical effect of discriminating on the basis of "what is for all practical purposes a sex-related characteristic, military service" 2 and hence ordered that female applicants be removed from competition against male applicants by being ranked within a separate category and hired according to the one-for-one quota system.
The district court neither ordered the City to stop using the 1975 test, nor to develop a new one, postponing any findings regarding the validity of the exam, and ordering the City to perform a validation study after adequate data from actual experience with the exam became available. At issue is whether a content-validation of the exam performed two years later on the basis of the training success of the first class of police cadets taking the exam in 1975 is adequate to satisfy the demands of the injunction, or whether the disparate impact of the exam, absent the court-imposed quota system, would require a grant of permanent injunctive relief on the basis that the City's validation study was a sham to conceal unlawful discriminatory intent.
Because the adequacy of the validation procedure is an issue here, a chronology of the City's efforts and the arguments made on behalf of and against the City are material. In 1975, the City hired PSP Human Resource...
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