Williams v. Pharmacia Opthalmics, Inc.

• Decision Date: 01 April 1996
• Docket Number: No. 3:94-CV-653RM.,3:94-CV-653RM.
• Citation: 926 F. Supp. 791
• Parties: Evelyn WILLIAMS, Plaintiff, v. PHARMACIA OPTHALMICS, INC., Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Indiana

926 F. Supp. 791

Evelyn WILLIAMS, Plaintiff, v. PHARMACIA OPTHALMICS, INC., Defendant.

No. 3:94-CV-653RM.

United States District Court, N.D. Indiana, South Bend Division.

April 1, 1996.

Tamara L. Renner, Banik and Renner, Elkhart, IN, John C. Hamilton, Doran Blackmond Ready Hamilton and Williams, South Bend, IN, for plaintiff.

Thomas J. Brunner, Jr., Paul J. Peralta, Kevin D. O'Rear, Kari A. Gallagher, Baker and Daniels, South Bend, IN, for defendant.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

MILLER, District Judge.

Evelyn Williams worked as an opthalmics sales person for Pharmacia Opthalmics, Inc. from 1985 to August 1994. In 1993, despite her earlier expressions of interest in promotion and her regional sales manager's recommendation, Pharmacia interviewed only men for, and promoted one of the men to, a regional sales manager vacancy. Early in 1994, Ms. Williams made an inquiry within Pharmacia based on her perception that male sales people were being paid more than female sales people. Shortly after her inquiry, she was presented with a highly critical performance review that contained unreasonably demanding standards for achievement. She worked the balance of her time with Pharmacia with those unreasonable requirements hanging over her.

On March 7, a jury found that Ms. Williams's sex was a motivating factor in Pharmacia's decision not to interview her for the regional manager's position and in Pharmacia's later decision to terminate her employment. The jury also found that although Ms. Williams did not prove a violation of the Equal Pay Act, her inquiry into pay disparities also was a motivating factor in Pharmacia's decision to terminate her employment. By agreement of the parties, the jury was not asked to determine issues of back pay or front pay. The jury awarded Ms. Williams compensatory damages in the amount of $500,000.00, half of which reflected lost future earning ability. The jury also awarded Ms. Williams $750,000.00 in punitive damages. The case is now before the court for modification of the verdict and determination of equitable relief prior to entry of verdict.

Following the jury's verdict, the court afforded the parties until March 20 to submit briefs on the remaining issues. Ms. Williams tendered her brief a day late; her motion for leave to file her brief late pends. Pharmacia's motion to conform the damage award with 42 U.S.C. § 1981a(B)(3) also pends. The trial and post-trial briefs also place before the court issues concerning the amount of back pay to be awarded, whether Pharmacia should be ordered to reinstate Ms. Williams as an employee, whether front pay is a form of relief permissible in a sex discrimination case, and the amount of any front pay award.

The court grants Ms. Williams's motion to file her brief late, and turns to the remaining motions and issues.

1. Reduction of the Jury Award

Pharmacia had between 700 and 800 employees in the two years immediately before Ms. Williams's discharge. 42 U.S.C. § 1981a(b)(3)(D) provides:

The sum of the amount of compensatory damages awarded under this section for future pecuniary losses, emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other nonpecuniary losses, and the amount of punitive damages awarded under this section, shall not exceed, for each complaining party —

* * * * * *

(D) in the case of a respondent who has more than 500 employees in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar, $300,000.

The jury's entire award falls within the limits set forth in this statute. See Final Instruction No. 15. Both the compensatory damage award and the punitive damage award exceed the combined limit. Accordingly, Ms. Williams's verdict must be reduced from a combined $1,250,000.00 to $300,000.00, although she may recover additional sums for back pay and, perhaps, for front pay.

Ms. Williams does not dispute that her verdict must be pared, but she vehemently disputes the propriety of remolding it as Pharmacia suggests — by maintaining the jury's proportional division of compensatory damages (40%) and punitive damages (60%), and so awarding her $80,000.00 in compensatory damages and $120,000.00 in punitive damages. The court agrees with Ms. Williams on this point. The case Pharmacia cites in support of its proposal offers no support; in U.S. E.E.O.C. v. AIC Sec. Investigations, Ltd., 823 F.Supp. 571, 577-579 (N.D.Ill.1993), aff'd in part and rev'd in part 55 F.3d 1276 (7th Cir.1995), the court was concerned with allocation of an award between defendants rather than between categories of damages, and with the excessiveness of the jury's award of punitive damages. Indeed, rather than preserving the jury's allocation, the district court's modification of the verdict reduced the ratio of punitive damages to compensatory damages from 10:1 to 3:1. Neither the district court's action nor the court of appeals' ensuing holding that damages could not be assessed against the individual defendant supports Pharmacia's proposal.

The court does not embrace Ms. Williams's gratuitous implication of malice to Pharmacia's proposal on the method of handling an issue not yet decided within this circuit. Even Ms. Williams concedes that her verdict must be modified, and no controlling precedent instructs how that should be done. Pharmacia has tendered one reasonable approach, but has not persuaded the court that its formula is the most reasonable. The availability of compensatory damages apart from back and front pay demonstrates Congressional recognition that discriminatory employment practices inflict injuries beyond mere loss of a paycheck or reduction in wages and benefits, and Congressional intent that victims of employment discrimination should be compensated for those non-pecuniary injuries. The availability of punitive damages discloses Congressional intent that juries be permitted to punish particularly egregious instances of discrimination, but the "cap" on damages bespeaks a coincident intent to limit that punishment when, as here, substantial non-wage injuries have been proven. Compensation is the primary purpose of the new remedies provided by the 1991 Act, and the jury's award should be applied first for that purpose. The court will cap the compensatory damages pursuant to the statutory limit, leaving no room for punitive damages. See also Hogan v. Bangor and Aroostook R.R. Co., 61 F.3d 1034, 1037 (1st Cir.1995) (reaching the same result, but doing so to obviate the need to consider the propriety of the punitive damage award).

Accordingly, the court reduces the compensatory award from $500,000.00 to $300,000.00, and vacates the punitive damages award. The court does so without prejudice to Ms. Williams's right to seek full or partial reinstatement of the punitive damages award in the event the compensatory damages award is later reduced, for any reason, to a sum below $300,000.00.

2. Back Pay

Ms. Williams seeks an award of back pay, and Pharmacia's post-trial brief does not challenge her right to such an award. While the two testifying economists disagreed over inferences to be drawn from the rankings Pharmacia periodically issued to employees, they had only one essential area of disagreement with respect to the calculation of damages: Dr. Roger Skurski based his calculations on the assumption that Ms. Williams would find a new job within a few months, but that earnings in her new job would reflect that of the average woman of her age and education; Dr. Joan Haworth assumed that Ms. Williams would be out of work longer, but ultimately would find a job in which her earnings would be comparable to what she was making with Pharmacia. Neither projection has proven correct to date. Ms. Williams has found employment as an independent representative for several pharmaceutical companies, but she has yet to make a profit in that work. The evidence introduced at trial did not suggest appreciable income in comparison to expenses that would not have been reimbursed had she continued to work at Pharmacia.

Accordingly, the wages Ms. Williams lost between her termination and trial were higher than her own expert projected, since Dr. Skurski assumed she would find moderate-paying employment by the time of trial; despite her efforts to find work comparable to her work with Pharmacia, she has found no such work, and the court is not persuaded that she has failed to make reasonable efforts to mitigate her damages. When projected income is removed from Dr. Skurski's projections, the court finds that Ms. Williams lost wages and benefits in the sum of $180,330.00 between her August 10, 1994 termination and the time of trial in March 1996.

This figure may be lower than Ms. Williams's actual damages. The jury found that Pharmacia violated her civil rights when it chose not to interview her for Mike Baker's regional manager position when Mr. Baker vacated it nearly a year earlier. On a failure to interview claim, the court might evaluate the likelihood that Ms. Williams would have gotten the job (rather than simply the interview) and multiply that probability against the difference between what she earned as a sales representative and what she would have earned as a regional manager. See Doll v. Brown, 75 F.3d 1200, 1205-1206 (7th Cir.1996). The record does not disclose the regional manager's pay, however, so the court cannot compute the wage differential, leaving no reason to estimate the likelihood that Evelyn Williams would have succeeded Mike Baker as regional manager had she not been female.

Ms. Williams is entitled to $180,330.00 in lost wages and benefits, in addition to her statutorily-limited compensatory and punitive damages.

3. Reinstatement

Ms. Williams seeks reinstatement to her position as an opthalmics sales representative for Pharmacia.¹ Reinstatement to the former position is a permissible remedy for an employee whose gender played a part in her discharge. Hennessy v. Penril Datacomm...