so the day which is causing number seventeen day six six zero six four four eva coleman versus mississippi department of marine resources may please the court my name is k persons i'm here today on behalf of the coleman that you want in this case it's my privilege to represent miss coleman who is a daughter of a yugoslavian immigrant boat builder who brought herself up from meager beginnings into the position of the first female fish hatchery manager in the mississippi state agency in its history she worked for years twenty five years total before her terminations that we're talking about here today in october of two thousand and fourteen she worked initially for the department of fisheries and wildlife and that's where she served for fifteen years as the lime and fish hatchery manager before april two thousand and seven william walker who was at that point the executive director of the department of marine resources assured by mr walker that she remained doing the same job essentially but that she would have to move from the fish hatchery she actually lived there was a crowd to live on site and had done so for fifteen years he assured her that she would be able to continue her work in her career and therefore agreed to his request that she voluntarily accept that reassignment so that's what she did unfortunately what happened next was not at all what was promised and i digress a moment to inform the court that william walker is one of the same william walker who later after  terminations pled guilty to and received a federal prison sentence of five years and fines of over half a million dollars in connection with his mismanagement criminal mismanagement of the department of marines resources mrs coleman under dr walker's supervision found herself in great under attack by his chief of staff josie eagle that i will get to the issue of at least with respect to discrimination claims temporal proximity is of course the most common ground on which there's an inference of a pretext and i'm talking of course about the d m ours professed reason for terminating ms coleman was based on the legislature's passage of what i would refer to just because of the simpler title a senate bill twenty five seventy nine which basically gave the d m our permission to terminate individuals within that organization for a six month  terminations there were eleven men five women who were terminated so how does this coleman fall into some special classes as being treated differently well with respect to  involve a pattern of antagonistic and we would suggest disparate treatment based on improper grounds in violation of title seven these would include would not give mrs coleman the supplies equipment or assistance she needed he locked her out of her office but again he was not there at the time of her terminations yes you're correct your honor however miss coleman had a mental breakdown as a result of this whole scenario beginning in two thousand and seven and in fact was on extended medical leave for a year came back to work in two thousand and eight it was placed by the agency into an amorphous position at the headquarters of the m r we're also had it her own workplace problems i think the record reflects that she had problems with her coworkers include including cursing at  coworkers yelling at a number of her colleagues so it seems like the entire workplace that was kind of dysfunctional your honor and is in the brief but miss coleman did experience  conflict especially with some coworkers who resented the fact understandably so that she had been placed at the order of an employee appeals court judge she agreed these actions that i talked about the judge i represented her at that hearing the judge stopped the hearing after he heard the nuff evidence and holly said miss coleman you know you maybe been a little too feisty with mr ziegler she's a bigger larger than life person i wish she was able to come with me here today but he says i can see that you're experienced and valuable and you know good marine fisheries scientists she's also sort of public manager under the state's qualifications system and he told the m r you can find this lady a job and so what they did was put her in this amorphous trip ticket operation which set her next to people making far less than she was because they couldn't lower salary at the judge after the judge's ruling basically they use the six month window of opportunity to say they were common out here and we don't have to give her civil service protections like she had when she questioned our prior actions now i realize there is a difference i mean at the extent of extensive time frame different than what normally is seen in these the civil service protection wasn't that the result of the senate bill you talked about well that was how they did it that's how they were able to do it but i mean this was an act of a state legislature it was an act of the state legislature  supreme court is logan in case i get to the site said that there's an exception for the general rule that that these legislative suspensions of civil service protections we're talking about a person i think that's what d l r would argue but the supreme court in logan which is four fifty five u s for twenty two at four thirty three says exceptions to that general rule and you're talking i know about as long there's a group of people involved that this is a permissible constitutional action they cannot be used if the individual citizen is is damaged by that action in a wholly arbitrary or a rational manner how it was never true eleven me and four other women were also terminated your honor it was it was an opportunity that the m r se upon she was the very last one removed to read the difference if she was the first well it certainly in my mind would would indicate that a little more rational basis if that's what they were really thinking about who they are really after they would have gotten her first with well except that two weeks before this terminations she went to a hearing on these claims for th mental breakdown that was job related bringing all of those issues from two thousand and seven forward into more current cognition or whatever the correct word is so that two weeks after that hearing where they had to settle the case she's out the door it i think there is taken if you take all the evidence of record in this case i think you see that number one there is an inference a pretext and that the person they say replaced ms coleman is a contract worker who has no academic qualifications not a fisheries scientist see someone that ms cohen helped had helping her collect the trip tickets which is basically notations from fishermen about what they caught the the m r scientists used to project like how many red snapper you think how long did she work at the job collecting trip tickets from the point when she was brought back to work and according to the judge's instructions and her medical leave was up in two thousand and eight i'm sorry two thousand and nine june two thousand and nine so five years she's working there's you know there is these issues with coworkers who you know basically m well to take your i want to make sure i understand miss coleman had mutual conflict at her job with supervisors those supervisors then left and then the senate passes a bill which allows the agency to be reorganize and she doesn't have civil service protection so under new management under the protection of a senate she is removed not by herself but along with eleven other men and four other women several years later again under new management and her contention is that she was somehow picked on treated differently during these intervening years intervening manager and again under the protection of the senate bill which was designed for the purpose of reorganizing this agency your own or my response to that would be if the record is looked at as a whole as a whole which according to this article for all the evan is most be looked at there is a clear and our position a clear pattern of antagonistic and disparate treatment of ms coleman that goes beyond dr walker's tenure he went to prison essentially the same year that she was terminated a few months later he pled guilty i know that's a that's a good whipping post for you but again he wasn't there making the decision to terminate or correct you're correct your honor however in the and here's another  to me very difficult term the cat's paw theory that the supreme court and a bunch of scholars have written about it something about you know the cat throwing just blows in the fire and then something else in the food or something i don't understand it but all i know now is it means that the person who makes the ultimate decision if it's based or reflects walker communicated after he left with these new people who came in and got him up to speed on your client and her problems well that he had with joe jewel who was the supervisor of ms coleman was there the entire time his deposition is he does claim that he didn't know anything about all that to me if you look at the all the evidence that's ridiculous he he knew you know i think there were three others and i case those people were all employees in a particular research and development department that was abolished there's another case and a mommy or something like that i may have a name sounds like a being or something but it's a close pronunciation he was a member of a finite or part of the organization university of texas pan america or university of texas brownsville that was completely wiped out here the legislature said you take whatever actions you need to take to fix all those criminal wrongdoing mismanagement ms coleman was one of the first adversaries of dr walker she had her elimination has no rational relationship good morning you're honest and may it please the court there are four issues set forth and it's coleman's brief and i will go through those saintly if there are any questions certainly we might be here a little longer but i don't want this but using twenty minutes the first issue is title seven discrimination judge corowa correctly found that first miss coleman failed to meet her promise they should burden in this  matter the problem for her was the fourth prong of mcdonnell douglas standard which is showing that she was replaced by someone outside of a protected class the undisputed evidence in this matter your honor shows that once miss coleman's employment was terminated she was replaced by a lady named nineteen ross referred to by miss coleman in her deposition as dean who was a lady who was in fact several years older than her and who had been working with her on the trip ticket program for an unspecified amount of time prior to miss co terminations now it depends on where you look in the record as to what miss coleman says about misty you know she says that i helped train her she calls her across to the old lady says that we have lots of problems with  her and we're trying to get rid of her she says that her deposition one point but then later she goes on to say this is one of the many reasons for her terminations she proffers but she says and this is on page two seventy four of the record somebody was trying to save ross so they fired me in then she infers that miss dini was connected somehow down the coast through the shrimping industry so that's that's one theory that miss coleman offered us during her deposition that th i don't know what those are for that's something that they were doing there and then basically collecting these trip tickets from around the coastal area and providing them to others for analysis she says many times that this was menial work and she was overpaid for what she was doing and she had to find things to do she says the job jewel who is depending on where you read in her deposition is either hero or the devil but she says that joe jewel was finding things for her he did the record indicates that she was playing her  four because she has to show that she was replaced she was someone in a protected class right so that was the first reason for the judge's ruling against her on the discrimination claim the second it's not listed as an issue in the brief but miss coleman sort of bootstraps this due process argument to the determination argument and says that the reason for house built or senate bill twenty seven fifty nine was to get rid of these criminals and it as judgment says that's been a bit of a whipping post in this case from the district court moving forward the how of the senate bill as we point out in our brief is the exact same language that was used when d m or was first instituted back in one nine hundred ninety four and it's basically a time that they brought jamie miller in after all these issues that occurred with dr walker and his administration they brought and he met with senator bryce wade into this was actually cited by miss coleman and placed in the record there was an article where senator bryce wiggins met with johnny miller and he said i'm needs i need some flexibility to clean this place up we've got a lot of a lot of red tape we've got a lot of a lot of fact that i can trim here and so the bill was not just to address criminal actions by walker and the clean out anybody who may have been engaged in criminal activity with him there's no allegation there's certainly no evidence that any of the sixteen people terminated as a result of that bill were related in any way to walker's alleged schemes in the problems that that he faced and for which he was sentenced so to say that  the only purpose for that bill was to clean out criminals is just an act or it is not supported by the record one of the things that i was concerned about that raised my eyebrows was the claim of retaliation  later she's terminated could you address the retaliation issue absolutely your own and then very much to the court and candor it was actually a couple of weeks so a matter of weeks between these the actual payment and conclusion of her worker's comp lying and her honor this is a pile seven retaliation klein and in order for the plaintiff to make a case for title seven retaliation she has to show that she spoke out against or filed some action of participated in some proceeding which was addressing something prohibited by title seven so that would be based on her in her case her or her gender the worker's comp claim doesn't doesn't satisfy that a furthermore the worker's comp claims fall back in two thousand and eight so to say that and after they file that claim she took a year off of work and then she came back and they gave her another job making the same amount of money and allowed to play or torin do or knitting for five b proceeding was not about her losing her job it was about three written reprimands being placed in a file now in canada the court i don't know what the mississippi there are group one group to group three offenses and you have to have two group to use in a year one group three in order to be terminated i believe these are all group one offenses but i can't attest to that but this was not about her being terminated and there was no her job was not on the line during that proceeding but when you've paid out the money that's when the worker's comp claims going to be back on people's mind that was not raised in this case for sure and it was not an issue before judge roll at the a b proceeding and i'm sorry for this sidebar here but but but the a b perceiving the judge was just addressing these three reprimands and he heard evidence and he said you know it was things like a king solomon sort of decision he said she's been insubordinate but she's she's been with the agency a long time skilled worker you know just let's just go with one reprimand he didn't say in his order give her a job give this lady a job that's nowhere in the record other than miss coleman's recollection of what happened so that that's and that's not what occurred but going back to the issue for tally ation this was it this worker's comp proceeding had occurred in two thousand and eight with a pride ministration i think she was ultimately paid around three thousand dollars on the worker's comp line so to say that they turned around to decide to fire her because of that seems a someone had borrowed a cart that she used in her office to try to one of the four wheel cars to drive things around the office somebody barred to move party favors and drinks and things and she hit the roof and she person people out including mr dini and  and it was that sort of disruptive behavior that led to joe jewel telling jamie miller the executive director we can do this more efficiently without muskoka and that's what they decided to do so the retaliation claim fails first because there is no title seven retaliation here and second because that issue the department had a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason for terminations aside from the worker comp claim that have been pending for six years but the reason wasn't the cart incident with me that's not the reason well that's the offer that that agency offered at the time well the reason the agent the age they didn't offer a reason when she was it was under no obligation to do so joe jewel was asked about this in his deposition and he talked about you know she was a nice lady she did some good war but we had a lot of problems in the office and he had some of those things i'm not really i don't think they need to be brought up but there were some some inappropriate conduct in the office and he says he talked about this issue with the cart and he said after all that you know i was asked that you know what before before the october tenth or whatever the deadline was on the twenty seven fifty nine do we need to do any housekeeping and he told johnny miller the executive director we can run the trip ticket office more efficiently without miss coleman so you know it it wasn't it was never said we're firing you because of this incident because they don't have to do that but those things i believe have to be considered and i guess that maybe i misunderstood i thought they just i thought it was simply would doing it because we're reorganizing and we can do this core effici time but the context of believes important as to what was going on with her and why they might have said well you know we've we've we've carried this on long enough it's time to move on the other two claims and i don't believe that these were generally employment claims are not appropriate for intentional infliction of emotional distress claims but in any event judge determined that the actions of the department were not outrageous and malicious and unreasonable such as to mississippi toward the minority view on this issue of whether or not a claim for duty of good faith very dealing can exist in a in the employment context mississippi has is not followed that they have recognized that that is a minimum and minority position but they to two thousand and seven and go forward with a series give me one specific incident that would well that skews matt and go it obviously the fact that a twenty five year old veteran of of fide public manager expert seasoned fisheries specialist it's the you know hit the story without any civil service protections that she's had for twenty five years and basically without even the courtesy of allotting her back her own things so to be clear your evidence of intentional infliction of emotional distress is her far and her use and that it is the use of what may well be a legitimate legislative intent to what mr may describe as claimed this place up has no weschler no relationship to my client's term and i should so you are telling this court  your client's claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress is based up on the agency's use of a valid mississippi supreme law allowing for her termination without civil service protections which they well knew she would use and had successfully used to fend off a terminations effort back in two thousand and in the initial two thousand and seven and i period mr  many correctly points out there were three reprimands they tried to tell this judge we can fire her now because we have three reprimands if you read his order which he quoted the site i didn't write it down but i can give it to you if you give me a second says they're one this is one this is one action there aren't any three violations that were trying to fire her then and they didn't they weren't successful because of civil service protections so what we hear comes she was struck but she was part of a group i believe it was was it fifteen or sixteen people and as you told me earlier if she was targeted she wasn't a first when they went after you told me she was the last she was the last because that's when this worker's comp settlement it wasn't the payment of the money it was the settlement that joe jewel came to the hearing i was present myself joe jewell the same manager that two weeks later as mr my prickly points out s district if you take this evidence so what which i'm confused was she terminated because she was targeted because they've been they were trying to get her out all along or was she terminated because of this worker's comp s both your honor is this it's a pattern in this court has said in these kinds of cases you have to look at all the evidence you know you can take make little issues and say well she was replaced by somebody you know older a female older we have to go further than that look at the paul vacations a person is not a fish has no academic trying she couldn't be doing the job that mr coleman did she could do the collecting the trip ticket part of it in the record shows that but joe jewel goes into great detail in his deposition saying you know this is a one of the most important management things we have to determine how many red snapper you can get to this very important th scientists have to make the analysis mr daney is a contract part time worker she's not of the matter shows it's a bad decision from the interest of the agency it doesn't show that it's motivated by saks if they were placed with  woman that and that's why that's why you have to show that she was replaced by someone different sex to show that it's based on gender discrimination but your honor if i may in the in the deposition of mr jewel he goes into great detail about three or four or five male scientist who are doing that work not miss the many male scientific you're saying affectively she was replaced by a male correct even though of ok even though they did hire the woman for the correct the fish get to go get the tickets well that doesn't take a and just and in some way i would just say that the if you look at the total record senate bill twenty five seventy nine was supposed to be used by the m r to clean this place up over comm