Venters v. City of Delphi
| Decision Date | 19 August 1997 |
| Docket Number | No. 96-1355,96-1355 |
| Citation | 1997 WL 471341,123 F.3d 956 |
| Parties | 74 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 1095, 149 A.L.R. Fed. 727, 71 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 44,937, 38 Fed.R.Serv.3d 364 Jennifer VENTERS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF DELPHI and Larry Ives, Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
James V. McGlone, Laura L. Bowker (argued), Stuart & Branigin, Lafayette, IN, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
Gary K. Matthews (argued), Enslen, Enslen & Matthews, Hammond, IN, Robert G. Vann, Hodges & Davis, Merrillville, IN, for City of Delphi.
Gary Matthews, Enslen, Enslen & Matthews, Hammond, IN, John C. Ruckelshaus, Ruckelshaus, Roland, Hasbrook & O'Connor, Indianapolis, IN, Robert G. Vann, Hodges & Davis, Merrillville, IN, for Larry Ives.
Before BAUER, ROVNER, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.
After she was fired from her position as a radio dispatcher for the police department of Delphi, Indiana, Jennifer Venters sued the city and its Police Chief Larry Ives on the grounds that the discharge violated her rights to freedom of speech, religion, and association under the First Amendment, and that the discharge as well as the treatment she had endured during her employment with the city amounted to religious discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended. The district court entered summary judgment against Venters on all of her claims. The court determined that Venters' free speech claim was barred by the statute of limitations, and that her freedom of association claim did not involve a type of association that was constitutionally protected. The court further held that Venters had failed to point to any conduct on her part that would qualify as the exercise of a religious belief entitled to First Amendment protection, thus precluding her freedom of religion claim as well. Finally, the court determined that her Title VII claim was also foreclosed because Venters never informed Ives of her religious beliefs and did not request that those beliefs be accommodated. On appeal, Venters has challenged the district court's judgment only with respect to her freedom of speech, religion, and Title VII claims. For the reasons that follow, we affirm the judgment in part and reverse in part.
We review de novo the grant of summary judgment in defendants' favor, construing the evidence in the light most favorable to Venters and according her the benefit of all reasonable inferences that may be drawn from it. Cliff v. Board of School Comm'rs of Indianapolis, 42 F.3d 403, 408 (7th Cir.1994); Dey v. Colt Const. & Dev. Co., 28 F.3d 1446, 1453 (7th Cir.1994). Although Ives and the City of Delphi bear the initial burden of demonstrating that there is no genuine issue of material fact requiring trial, once they have done so, the burden shifts to Venters to point to evidence in the record that would allow a rational trier of fact to find in her favor on a material question. Cliff, 42 F.3d at 408. As the case law uniformly emphasizes, in the absence of evidence presenting a factual issue on a material question, Ives and the city are entitled to summary judgment. E.g., id. at 409. Yet in examining the evidence presented by Venters, we must keep in mind that summary judgment is proper only if Ives and the City of Delphi "would have been entitled to a directed verdict had the record before the court been that of a trial--in other words, only if judgment as a matter of law would have been appropriate because no reasonable jury could have returned a verdict for the plaintiff." Fuka v. Thomson Consumer Elecs., 82 F.3d 1397, 1402 (7th Cir.1996); see Dey, 28 F.3d at 1453.
Consistent with these principles, the factual summary that follows reflects a reading of the record uniformly favorable to Venters. See, e.g., Auston v. Schubnell, 116 F.3d 251, 252 (7th Cir.1997), citing Schmidt v. Methodist Hosp. of Indiana, Inc., 89 F.3d 342, 344 (7th Cir.1996); see also Visser v. Packer Eng'g Assocs., Inc., 924 F.2d 655, 656 (7th Cir.1991) (en banc). Needless to say, it remains for a jury (which Venters has requested) to decide whether and to what extent her account of events is accurate.
Venters was employed by the City of Delphi as a radio dispatcher from March 1986 until her dismissal by Police Chief Ives on October 20, 1994. Venters was hired during the tenure of former Mayor Carolyn Wagner and served under the direction of former Police Chief Rolland Richard Roe, who left the Delphi police department when a new mayor took office in January 1992. Immediately prior to leaving his post in December 1991, Roe promoted Venters to the position of head dispatcher. As a radio dispatcher, Venters' duties included answering emergency calls that came to the police station by telephone or police radio, then dispatching the appropriate response. This could include alerting the police or the fire department to the call and directing an ambulance to the scene of an injury, and providing emergency teams with the information they needed to respond effectively. In addition, Venters was responsible for monitoring alarms, logging her calls, and aiding members of the public who came to the police station for assistance. She described herself as "the link between the public and the law enforcement officers," and acknowledged that if she were ineffective in taking calls and dispatching the proper response team to an emergency, lives could be lost.
In June 1992, approximately six months after taking office, Mayor Thomas S. Deiwert chose Ives as a permanent replacement for the former police chief. From the beginning of his tenure, Ives made it clear to Venters that he was a born-again Christian who believed that his decisions as police chief should be guided by the principles of his faith, and that he had been sent by God to Delphi to save as many people from damnation as he could. In his conversations with Venters, all of which occurred at work while Venters was on duty, Ives continuously interjected religious observations and quotations from the Bible, and spoke to Venters about her salvation in a manner that led her to conclude that Ives considered her immoral. Specific examples of statements of this nature that Ives made to Venters include: (1) that to be a good employee, a person had to be spiritually whole, and to be spiritually whole, a person had to be saved; (2) that Venters needed to pay attention when people were ministering to her because a person had a limited number of chances in their lifetime to accept God and be saved, and that Venters might be running out of chances; (3) that all individuals were surrounded by spirits, and that Venters' "positive spirits" were doing battle with her "negative spirits;" (4) that if Venters were to attend Ives' church, the Assembly of God, she might feel the "altar call" and be saved; (5) that the police station was "God's house," and that if Venters were unwilling to play by God's rules Ives would "trade" her. At certain points, Ives criticized Venters for living with another single woman, and asserted that she had set a bad moral example for the other woman's teenaged son. Ives also warned Venters that, because she was a single woman, it was inappropriate for her to receive visits from police officers who were married, including those who were separated from their wives. Ives further inquired whether there was any truth to the rumors that Venters had entertained the police officers who visited her home with sexually explicit videos and other pornographic materials.
In an effort to save her soul, Ives provided Venters with a copy of the Bible and other religious materials, and called her attention to a religious videotape entitled "Hell's Fire and Heaven's Gate," which Ives had placed with the police department's training materials. Interspersed with these religious lectures were numerous references to Venters' status as an at-will employee who, as Ives reminded her, could be dismissed at any time. Although Venters considered these religious lectures unwelcome, she was afraid to express her desire to be left to her own religious views, and at times even tried to appear interested in Ives' conversation and to ask questions about his faith in order to placate him. Venters testified that she refrained from making her religious views known to Ives because she believed that if she had contradicted Ives or asked him to stop lecturing her, she would have risked being discharged from her job.
Venters' first job-related (as opposed to religious) conflict with Ives and Diewert occurred soon after Diewert took office, and involved Venters' opposition to a plan to convert to a system of centralized dispatching between the City of Delphi police department and the Carroll County Sheriff's Department. Both Diewert and Ives were strong proponents of the plan, and repeatedly cautioned Venters not to speak to members of the city council about her views concerning the feasibility of converting to the centralized system. Venters nevertheless did so, speaking to council members at their homes or in other private settings. In late September 1992, the proposal came up for a vote before the city council. At a council meeting held before the vote, Diewert and Ives spoke in favor of the proposal, and Venters joined Officer Brook McCain, a police officer who had been designated to present the views of his fellow officers, to argue against the plan. The proposal was ultimately defeated, a result which apparently angered Ives. Ives testified in his deposition that although he did not regard Venters' actions as being a violation of departmental procedure, strictly speaking, he did believe that her decision to "break the chain of command" and speak privately to members of the city council about centralized dispatching was highly discourteous.
Approximately two weeks after the city council voted against adopting the centralized dispatching...
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