Wrenn v. Gould
| Decision Date | 09 January 1987 |
| Docket Number | 85-3315,Nos. 85-3285,s. 85-3285 |
| Parties | 42 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 1133, 42 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 36,803 Curtis L. WRENN, Plaintiff-Appellant, Cross-Appellee, v. Sylvester M. GOULD, Jr., Individually and as President, Cordelia Martin Health Center; Neighborhood Health Association of Toledo, Inc., d/b/a Cordelia Martin Health Center, Defendants-Appellees, Cross-Appellants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit |
Curtis Wrenn, pro se.
Tybo Alan Wilhelms, Bugbee & Conkle, Toledo, Ohio, for defendants-appellees, cross-appellants.
Before KRUPANSKY, NELSON and RYAN, Circuit Judges.
This is a civil rights action in which the plaintiff, Curtis L. Wrenn, seeks damages from the Neighborhood Health Association of Toledo, Inc., d/b/a Cordelia Martin Health Center (the Center), a publicly funded health care facility serving the indigent of Toledo, Ohio, and its President, Sylvester M. Gould, Jr. The district court dismissed the Title VI (42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000d et seq.) claim against the Center, and all of the claims, Title VI and Title VII, against Gould individually, and entered judgment in favor of the Center on plaintiff's Title VII (42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000e-3) retaliation claim.
Wrenn appeals all of those dispositions, and the Center cross-appeals the district court's refusal to award it attorney fees following its successful defense of the Title VII retaliation claim. It also seeks attorney fees for its defense of this appeal.
The litigation derives from Wrenn's unsuccessful effort to be hired as executive director of the Center. The issues before us are whether Wrenn proved that he was rejected for the executive director's position in retaliation for having filed an earlier civil rights claim against a previous employer, and whether the Center is entitled to attorney fees on the theory that the plaintiff's suit and appeal are groundless. Because we answer both questions in the negative, we affirm the decision of the district court.
The Center is a not-for-profit corporation providing health care for the ambulatory poor of Toledo, Ohio. It is governed by a board of trustees consisting of twenty-four volunteers. Sylvester Gould, the individual defendant, was the president of the board.
In 1981, the Center sought to fill its vacant executive director position. The Center created a search committee to screen applications and interview qualified candidates. In order to reduce the number of clearly unqualified applicants, the committee published "required qualifications" in an advertisement soliciting applicants for the position. Two of the listed qualifications were that the applicant have earned a master's degree in public health, hospital administration, or business administration, and that the applicant have five years' "progressive management experience." Wrenn was the only individual applying for the position who had earned a master's degree in one of the required fields. He did not have five years' progressive management experience.
Wrenn was one of approximately nine applicants granted an interview with the search committee. During his interview, Wrenn volunteered that he had been discharged from his position with the Toledo Mental Health Care Center and was currently litigating that dispute with the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Retardation. During the hour-long interview, the interviewers questioned Wrenn for five to ten minutes about whether Wrenn could effectively solicit funding on behalf of the Center from the state while suing it. Wrenn answered that his lawsuit would be no obstacle to securing state funding for the Center. The members of the search committee testified that they were satisfied with his answers, asked no more questions concerning the litigation, and did not raise the subject in their later conference when discussing Wrenn's application.
Upon completion of the nine or so interviews, the Center extended an offer to the person they regarded as most qualified, Vanu Bagchi; however, the Center could not meet Bagchi's financial requirements and the offer was rejected. The position was then offered to the number two candidate, a "gentleman from Cleveland," whose name no one could recall. This gentleman also turned down the offer.
The Center's third choice was Barbara L. Hill. Hill had been the assistant to the former executive director, R. Morrison Borders. When Borders resigned, Ms. Hill became the acting executive director. Borders highly recommended Ms. Hill for the permanent position of executive director, and her former employer, Hough-Norwood Family Health Care Center, gave her a glowing recommendation. Further, the staff of the Center petitioned the board to give the position to Ms. Hill, stating:
According to the testimony, Ms. Hill also had the following circumstances commending her appointment as executive director: Her appointment would boost employee morale greatly, while morale had been a major problem at the Center; she had been performing as acting executive director satisfactorily and required no assistant, thereby saving the Center the expense of having an administrative assistant; she had been working on the renovation of the Center, and a change in executive directors might disrupt that work; she would require no training or "break-in" time; she had prepared the grant application for the Center's future funding, and had brought the Center's performance indicators into compliance with federal requirements; and she had established extensive and positive working relationships with the federal and state officials responsible for the Center's future funding.
Ms. Hill was given the position and Wrenn was notified that Ms. Hill had been hired because the Center felt she best met their needs at that time. Shortly thereafter the Center, spurred by an anonymous letter they received, began an investigation into Ms. Hill's credentials. The Center dismissed her when they discovered she had misrepresented her educational attainments.
Claiming that the Center and its president, Sylvester Gould, had discriminated against him in this hiring process, and having exhausted the available administrative remedies, 1 Wrenn filed two suits against defendants. One of the lawsuits advanced an unlawful age discrimination claim. Wrenn voluntarily dismissed that suit when faced with the fact Hill was older than he. 2
The other lawsuit, the one before us, proceeded to trial. One of the original claims in the complaint was under Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by a recipient of federal grants where a primary objective of the federal financial assistance is to provide employment. 42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000d-3; Moxley v. Vernot, 555 F.Supp. 554, 557-58 (S.D.Ohio 1982); see also Valentine v. Smith, 654 F.2d 503, 511-12 (8th Cir.1981), cert. denied, 454 U.S. 1124, 102 S.Ct. 972, 71 L.Ed.2d 111 (1981); Trageser v. Libbie Rehabilitation Center, Inc., 590 F.2d 87 (4th Cir.1978), cert. denied, 442 U.S. 947, 99 S.Ct. 2895, 61 L.Ed.2d 318 (1979).
On the strength of the uncontradicted affidavit of the Center's newest executive director, Althea Baldwin, which stated that the Center does not have a primary purpose of providing employment, plaintiff's counsel conceded that "defendants' motion [to dismiss plaintiff's Title VI claim] is well taken and should be granted." The court entered judgment accordingly. Wrenn appeals that judgment.
Another of plaintiff's claims was that he had been the victim of racial discrimination in employment in violation of 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1981 when his application for executive director was rejected and Ms. Hill was hired. Upon discovering that Ms. Hill was, like Wrenn, black, Wrenn dismissed this claim as well.
At the conclusion of trial, plaintiff's counsel also consented to dismissal of all claims against Sylvester Gould. The district court inquired of plaintiff's counsel whether he joined in the motion to dismiss the several claims against Gould. Plaintiff's counsel stated unequivocally that although he had not done so earlier, "We would join in that," thus limiting the case to the corporation. Wrenn now appeals this dismissal.
In view of the foregoing, only Wrenn's Title VII (42 U.S.C. Sec. 2000e-3(a)) retaliation claim was litigated. The retaliation claim is based upon the theory that the Center refused to hire Wrenn in retaliation for the racial discrimination action he previously filed against the Toledo Mental Health Center after he was dismissed from its employ.
At the conclusion of the bench trial, the district court prepared carefully written and fully reasoned findings of fact and conclusions of law in which it held, inter alia, that although the plaintiff had established a prima facie case of discriminatory retaliation, the defendant had rebutted plaintiff's prima facie case by "providing ... evidence" of nondiscriminatory reasons for hiring Ms. Hill instead of plaintiff, and thus the plaintiff had failed to carry his burden of showing such non-discriminatory reasons to be pretextual. The court thereupon entered judgment for the defendant. Finding that "plaintiff's commencement of and prosecution of this cause was not 'frivolous, unreasonable or without foundation'," the court declined to award attorney fees to the defendant.
There followed the plaintiffs' appeal and the defendants' cross-appeal.
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