Mathis v. Phillips Chevrolet, Inc.

• Decision Date: 15 October 2001
• Docket Number: No. 00-1892,00-1892
• Citation: 269 F.3d 771
• Parties: (7th Cir. 2001) Anthony C. Mathis, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Phillips Chevrolet, Inc., Defendant-Appellant
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 771

269 F.3d 771 (7th Cir. 2001)

Anthony C. Mathis, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Phillips Chevrolet, Inc., Defendant-Appellant.

No. 00-1892

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit

Argued December 4, 2000

Decided October 15, 2001

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 97 C 2723--Warren K. Urbom, Judge. [Copyrighted Material Omitted] Before Flaum, Chief Judge, and Diane P. Wood and Williams, Circuit Judges.

Diane P. Wood, Circuit Judge.

Anthony Mathis is a 59-year-old African-American man with over 24 years of experience in car sales. Notwithstanding that background, when he applied for a job as a salesman at Phillips Chevrolet, Inc. ("Phillips"), Phillips never even interviewed him. Instead, it hired seven younger, white salespeople--a move that prompted Mathis to sue the dealership for age and race discrimination. A jury found for Phillips on the race discrimination claim, but it found for Mathis on the age discrimination claim and awarded him $50,000 in compensatory damages. The jury also found that the dealership's violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 29 U.S.C. § 621 et seq., was willful, and so the trial court assessed an additional $50,000 in liquidated damages. Phillips has appealed, arguing that the district court erred in excluding certain evidence and that the evidence did not justify sending the question of willfulness to the jury. We affirm the judgment of the district court.

I

According to Mathis's trial testimony, in May 1996, Mathis applied for a sales job at Phillips Chevrolet in response to a newspaper ad. No one at Phillips was available to interview him at the time he applied, and so he left his application with the cashier. A few weeks later he returned, not having heard from Phillips, and left a second application with the cashier. The application form asked for the date of his discharge from the military; Mathis indicated that he was discharged in May 1959. Mathis's theory at trial was that this information alerted Phillips to the fact that he was well over 40 years old. Phillips never interviewed Mathis for the sales position, but after he applied, it hired seven new salespeople, all younger than Mathis.

Although Phillips's managers testified that they never received Mathis's application, the jury did not believe them. Furthermore, Mathis presented evidence that suggested the managers were disposed to discriminate on the basis of age. Mathis established at trial that Jamie Pascarella, the general manager of Phillips and the person with ultimate hiring authority at the dealership, often noted the ages of employment applicants by hand on their applications, in a section of the application that he admittedly used to make notes of information he considered relevant to his hiring decision. Pascarella testified that he was not aware that it was illegal to consider age in making hiring decisions. A second Phillips manager, Henry Rhodes, admitted at trial that he looked for applicants who were "bright, young, and aggressive."

Phillips's basic point on appeal is that the jury's credibility determination was made on incomplete evidence, because of a key evidentiary ruling the district court made before the trial. Phillips had vigorously denied that it had ever received Mathis's application. Several Phillips managers who were involved in the hiring process testified that if they had seen Mathis's application, they would have interviewed him. Phillips's theory of the case was that either Mathis was lying about having dropped off applications with a Phillips cashier, or, if Mathis was not lying, then the applications had somehow been misplaced before anyone with hiring authority saw them.

In order to bolster its theory, Phillips tried to introduce evidence that Mathis had sued at least six other car dealerships for discrimination after they failed to hire him during roughly the same time period as his application to Phillips. According to an offer of proof Phillips made just before the trial began, there were significant irregularities in Mathis's applications at these other dealerships. In one case, when the dealership offered Mathis an interview, Mathis left and never returned. In three other cases, the dealership alleged that Mathis filled out an application but took it home with him and never submitted it. In other cases Mathis lied on his applications. According to Phillips, although Mathis had worked as a car salesman for many years, his career had deteriorated in recent years. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, Mathis's sales had diminished considerably, and he had become increasingly belligerent and even violent towards co-workers. His last several jobs had been short-lived, and none of his former employers was willing to act as a reference.

It was Phillips's theory that Mathis blamed his misfortunes on a conspiracy among Chicago-area car dealerships and that, as a result, Mathis had set out to harass members of the Chicago Automobile Trade Association by manufacturing false discrimination claims against them. As part of his plan, Phillips argued, Mathis took a Phillips application home and filled it out, but never returned the completed application to Phillips. After several weeks, he filed this discrimination claim, using a copy of the supposed application as evidence that he applied to Phillips but was not interviewed. Phillips sought to introduce evidence of Mathis's improper applications and ensuing lawsuits against other dealerships to show that the supposed applications to Phillips were part of Mathis's plan or scheme to attack car dealerships.

In response to Phillips's pretrial offer of proof and Mathis's motion in limine to exclude this evidence, the district court found that Phillips's evidence of the other lawsuits seemed to be merely "an effort to show bad character on the part of the plaintiff." Noting that the parties were not there to judge Mathis's motive for filing the lawsuit, the court held that the evidence would not be admitted to show that Mathis was litigious or that he had a "campaign against car dealerships," although the court did allow Phillips to introduce the lies on Mathis's other applications for the purpose of attacking his credibility on cross-examination. After the judge's pre-trial ruling, Phillips did not offer (or try to offer) any evidence of the prior lawsuits during the trial. After a three-day trial, the jury found for Mathis on his age discrimination claim and awarded $50,000 in compensatory damages. In answers to special interrogatories, the jury found that Mathis had applied to Phillips and that Phillips's violation of the ADEA was willful.

II

Phillips's primary argument on appeal is that the district court erred in excluding the evidence of Mathis's lawsuits against other car dealerships. As an initial matter, we must determine whether Phillips properly preserved this issue for appeal. Although Phillips brought its evidence of Mathis's other lawsuits to the attention of the court in various pre-trial motions, it did not seek to introduce the evidence at trial. In Wilson v. Williams, 182 F.3d 562, 565- 67 (7th Cir. 1999) (en banc), we held that, although a district court judge's "definitive" pre-trial ruling on the admissibility of evidence adequately preserves the issue for appeal, if the district court indicates that a final ruling must await developments at trial, then the party must offer the evidence at trial in order to preserve the issue for appeal. Following that holding, Mathis argues that the district court in this case never made a definitive pre-trial ruling on the admissibility of testimony about his applications to and lawsuits against other car dealerships. It is true that the district court's first pre-trial ruling on this question denied Mathis's motion in limine to exclude the evidence. At that time, the district court ordered that specific rulings on the admissibility of the evidence would have to await an offer of proof at trial. If this were all that had happened, we would agree with Mathis that the district court never made a definitive ruling on the admissibility of Phillips's proffered evidence.

Other indicia, however, point to the conclusion that the district court had made up its mind not to admit the evidence--at least not for the purposes for which Phillips wanted it admitted. Even in its order denying Mathis's motion in limine, the district court stated that "[i]f the proposed evidence is designed primarily to show that the plaintiff is a litigious person or has a campaign against car dealerships, I shall forbid the use of that testimony." Phillips raised this potential use for the evidence again on the morning of the trial by presenting the district court with a lengthy offer of proof detailing the evidence and stating Phillips's belief that it was admissible as evidence of "plaintiff's intent, motive, scheme, plan, design, bias, and motivation for attacking the automobile industry." In ruling on this portion of the offer of proof, the district court stated: "[I]t gives every impression of being an effort to show bad character on the part of the plaintiff. And the rules clearly specifically prohibit that. . . . Although [defense counsel] argues that Phillips Chevrolet is just one in a long line of victims, that's not sufficient to bring into...