Landmark Sex Bias Judgment Tossed Out : Workplace: In a surprise move, an L.A. judge has ordered a new trial in a case against Texaco that had resulted in a record damage award.
In a decision upsetting the largest single award in a sex discrimination case, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ordered a new trial on charges brought against Texaco by long-time employee Janella Sue Martin.
The judge’s ruling essentially throws out last year’s jury verdict in Martin’s favor, the jury’s award of $20.3 million in damages and the judge’s own decision, made earlier this year, that Texaco must promote Martin.
In his ruling last Friday, Judge Ronald E. Cappai said the award was “so disproportionate . . . that it constitutes a manifest injustice and shocks the conscience of this court.”
Martin, now 49 and a credit supervisor, has worked for Texaco for more than 26 years. In her 7-year-old suit, she said she agreed to move to Los Angeles from Houston in 1984 because Texaco promised to promote her to manager of credit. She set up the Los Angeles credit department, but while she was on vacation, Texaco transferred a man from Houston to become her boss.
The jury decided that Martin should be paid $2.65 million in compensation--a figure her attorney expected to be doubled under terms regarding “fraudulent inducement”--and imposed punitive damages against Texaco of $15 million.
In February, Cappai ruled that Martin should be promoted by two job grade levels. That order was to take effect this week. The judge’s ruling on Friday that the issue of Martin’s promotion must also be retried “was a shock,” said Martin on Monday. “The judge had already issued the order for the promotion, and he rescinded his own order. He substituted his opinion for that of the jury.”
Notice of the ruling stunned many in the civil rights and sex discrimination arena. The Martin case and its huge award had been viewed as a landmark and had, said observers, already influenced other sex discrimination cases in California.
“This was one of the first verdicts that really sent a message that discrimination against women or minority men was going to be too expensive to justify as the cost of doing business,” said a stunned Ann Ronce, co-editor of the Glass Ceiling, a publication focusing on employment discrimination.
Abby Leibman, an attorney with the California Women’s Law Center, said: “You need an award significant enough that very large companies will actually pay attention. . . . Sometimes smaller damage awards are looked upon as a fine, and companies will just keep (discriminating). This award said it is not a fine. But if you take away this jury’s verdict, you take away the impact.”
Judge Cappai said last week that Martin’s total damages were no more than $150,000.
Attorney Lee T. Paterson of the firm Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal said corporate America has been paying attention to issues of sex discrimination and sexual harassment for a long time and the real message of the Martin case was that a “rogue jury . . . went wild.”
Paterson, who defends large companies in employment cases, said he expected the court to make a move to reduce the award because it was “so far beyond the average” of similar cases. However, he said it was unusual for the judge to order a new trial at this point in the process.
“I’m more than a little puzzled by the ruling myself,” Martin’s attorney, Dan Stormer of the firm of Hadsell & Stormer, said Monday.
