Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-almd-2_12-cv-00279/USCOURTS-almd-2_12-cv-00279-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 42:2000e Job Discrimination (Employment)

---

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF ALABAMA

NORTHERN DIVISION

THOMAS W. HOLMES, )

)

Plaintiff, )

)

v. ) CASE NO. 2:12-CV-279-WKW

) [WO]

THE ALABAMA BOARD OF )

PARDONS AND PAROLES, et al., )

)

Defendants. )

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

Plaintiff Thomas W. Holmes brings this employment discrimination action

against the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles and eight of its employees:

William W. Wynne, Jr.; Robert P. Longshore; Clifford Walker; Cynthia Dillard; Phil

Bryant; Eddie Cook, Jr.; Jim Begley; and Phillip McIntosh. The matter comes before

the court on Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss (Doc. # 43), which is fully briefed (Docs.

# 46, 47). For reasons that follow, the motion is due to be granted in part and denied

in part.

I. JURISDICTION AND VENUE

Subject matter jurisdiction over this action is exercised pursuant to 28 U.S.C.

§§ 1331, 1343, and 1367. The parties do not contest personal jurisdiction or venue. 

Questions of sovereign immunity are discussed below.

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II. FACTUAL BACKGROUND1

Mr. Holmes has been a probation officer for over a decade. He is good at his

job, and he has won awards for his consistently above-average performance. One

might expect that Mr. Holmes would have been promoted by now, but he still

occupies the same entry-level position he was hired for in 2001. 

According to Mr. Holmes, the problem is discrimination: He is a 52-year-old,

white male working at an agency where the promotions go to younger employees,

minorities, and females. Further, Mr. Holmes says the Board facilitates that pattern

of intentional discrimination by helping favored groups cheat on their promotional

exams. 

Mr. Holmes claims he has been a victimofthis discrimination eversince he was

first eligible for promotion in 2009. Although ranked highly in the state’s promotion

register in 2010, Mr. Holmes was repeatedly passed over for promotions that went to

younger employees, minorities, and females. And in 2011, two African-American

males and a white female were promoted to supervisors, even though Mr. Holmes was

better qualified for those jobs.

In July 2011, Mr. Holmes complained to the Board about this discrimination,

but to no avail. That August, he filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal

1

 These facts are the allegations of the complaint, accepted as true for present purposes.

2

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Employment Opportunity Commission. On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Holmes received

notice of his right to sue, and on March 28, 2012, he filed suit in this court. His case

comes before the court on Defendants’ motion to dismiss. (Doc. # 43.)

III. STANDARD OF REVIEW

A Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss tests the sufficiency of the complaint against

the legal standard set forth in Rule 8: “a short and plain statement of the claim

showing that the pleader is entitled to relief,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2). When

evaluating a motion to dismiss pursuant to Rule 12(b)(6), the court must take “the

factual allegations in the complaint as true and construe them in the light most

favorable to the plaintiff.” Pielage v. McConnell, 516 F.3d 1282, 1284 (11th Cir.

2008). However, “the tenet that a court must accept as true all of the allegations

contained in a complaint is inapplicable to legal conclusions.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556

U.S. 662, 663 (2009).

“To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual

matter, accepted as true, to ‘state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.’” Iqbal,

556 U.S. at 678 (quoting Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 570 (2007)). 

“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief [is]

 . . . a context-specific task that requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial

experience and common sense.” Id. at 663 (alteration in original) (citation omitted).

3

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“[F]acial plausibility” exists “when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the

court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct

alleged.” Id. (citing Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556). The standard also “calls for enough

fact to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence” of the claim. 

Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556. While the complaint need not set out “detailed factual

allegations,” it must provide sufficient factual amplification “to raise a right to relief

above the speculative level.” Id. at 555.

IV. DISCUSSION

In his shotgun complaint, Mr. Holmes leveled six counts of wrongdoing against

nine defendants. Defendants returned fire with a fifty-eight page brief arguing in

painstaking detail why every last one of Mr. Holmes’s claims should be thrown out 

– at the expense of concisely explaining the obvious flaws that mandate dismissal of

most of Mr. Holmes’s claims. The result is a maze of allegations, adverbs, and

incorporations by reference that buries a simple case under a heap of unnecessary

parties and unfounded contentions.

It would be well within the court’s discretion to strike Mr. Holmes’s complaint,

which commits the “cardinal sin” of shotgun pleading, and require him to properly

plead his case. See Weissman v. Nat’l Ass’n of Sec. Dealers, Inc., 500 F.3d 1293,

1311 (11th Cir. 2007) (defining the cardinal sin of shotgun pleading); Magluta v.

4

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Samples, 256 F.3d 1282, 1284 (11th Cir. 2001) (refusing to consider an appeal from

dismissal of a shotgun complaint until it was repleaded in compliance with Rule 8). 

But here there is nothing to gain from delay, so the better course is to “take a firm

hand and whittle [this case] down to the few triable claims, casting aside the many

non-triable ones through dismissals where there is failure to state a claim.” Chapman

v. AI Transport, 229 F.3d 1012, 1027 (11th Cir. 2000). At its heart, this case is

nothing more than a Title VII claim against the Board. As the following discussion

will show, all the other claims and parties are due to be dismissed.

A. All but one of Mr. Holmes’s claims are due to be dismissed.

1. The Board is immune from suit on the § 1983 and age-discrimination

claims.

Under the Eleventh Amendment, this court lacks jurisdiction to entertain Mr.

Holmes’s claims against the Board under § 1983,2 see Stroud v. McIntosh, No 2:11-

cv-6-MEF, 2011 WL 6838046, at *2–3 (M.D. Ala. Dec. 29, 2011),3

 and the Age

2

 Although the amended complaint lists Mr. Holmes’s § 1981 and § 1983 claims in

different counts, they are in reality two aspects of the same cause of action: § 1981 defines a set

of substantive rights, and § 1983 provides a remedy for their violation. Jones v. Fulton Cnty.,

Ga., 446 F. App’x. 187, 189 n.1 (11th Cir. 2011). As a result, Mr. Holmes’s claim for violations

of § 1981 merges into his claim for relief under § 1983, and the two counts are considered

together. Accordingly, because § 1981 does not provide an independent ground for relief, Count

I is due to be dismissed.

3

 Judge Fuller’s well-reasoned opinion in Stroud explains the Board’s immunity in

greater detail. That decision involved a nearly identical Title VII claim against the Board

brought by a plaintiff represented by Mr. Holmes’s counsel.

5

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Discrimination in Employment Act, id. at *3. Nor has Mr. Holmes cited any authority

suggesting the Board is not immune from his state-law age-discrimination claim,

which would not be allowed even in Alabama state courts, see Buchanan v. Alabama

Dept. of Public Health, 1:05-cv-170-SRW, 2006 WL 2989215, at *3 (M.D. Ala. 2006

Oct. 18, 2006) (dismissing Alabama Age Discrimination in Employment Act claim

against a state agency for lack of jurisdiction). As Mr. Holmes points out, Congress

has authority to abrogate Eleventh Amendment immunity in appropriate

circumstances. (The Board is subject to suit on Title VII claims, for example.) But

Congress has not done so to allow claims under § 1983 or the age-discrimination

statutes, so the Board is entitled to Eleventh Amendment immunity on Counts I, III,

and IV.

2. The individual Defendants cannot be liable under Title VII or the agediscrimination statutes.

Mr. Holmes also brings claims against the individual Defendants under Title

VII and the state and federal age-discrimination statutes. Those statutes, however,

create causes of action against employers, not individuals. See Smith v. Lomax, 45

F.3d 402, 403 n.4 (11th Cir.1995) (noting individuals “cannot be liable under the

ADEA or Title VII”); Ala. Code 1975 § 25-1-21 (plain language applies only to

discrimination by an “employer, employment agency, or labor organization”).

6

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Therefore, the individual Defendants, who are not Mr. Holmes’s employers, are

entitled to dismissal on Counts II, IV, and V.

3. Mr. Holmes has not pleaded facts sufficient to support his claims

under § 1983 against the individual Defendants.

Although Mr. Holmes accuses Defendants of collectively violating his

constitutional and statutory rights, his complaint does not contain a single factual

allegation aimed at any particular person. Instead, the complaint is rife with

generalizations like “Defendants . . . offered promotions available . . . to Probation and

Parole Officers who were African-American, Hispanic, female, and/or younger than

forty years of age” (Doc. # 41 ¶ 18), and “. . . younger, African-American, and/or

female employees have been wrongfully assisted by the Defendants” (Doc. # 41 ¶ 21). 

Nowhere in the complaint does Mr. Holmes accuse any one of the individual

Defendants of taking any particular action. 

The complaint’s blanket allegations do not put any of the individual Defendants

on notice of the basis of Mr. Holmes’s claims against them. Although the Iqbal and

Twombly decisions changed the landscape of notice pleading, they did not change the

base requirement that a complaint must “give the defendant fair notice of what the .

. . claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.” Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555

(quotations omitted, omission in original). But through indiscriminate use of the term

7

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Defendants, Mr. Holmes’s amended complaint fails to do so. Every Defendant is

accused of refusing to promote Mr. Holmes (Doc. # 41, ¶¶ 18, 37), but the amended

complaint does not indicate who among the Defendants had the authority to promote

him or was even involved in such decisions. Nor does the amended complaint

indicate which of them helped minority, female, and younger employees succeed on

their promotional tests while white males like Mr. Holmes were left to fend for

themselves.

Because Mr. Holmes does not identify what alleged conduct is attributable to

which of the individual Defendants, his right to relief from any one of them is

speculative. Accordingly, Mr. Holmes’s complaint fails to adequately plead a claim

for relief under § 1983 against the individual Defendants.4

4. The individual Defendants are immune from suit on the wantonness

claim.

In Alabama, State-agent immunity protects employees of the state from

individual civil liability for conduct that includes, among other things, “exercising . . .

judgment in the administration of a department or agency of government, including

. . . hiring, firing, transferring, assigning, or supervising personnel.” Ex parte Butts,

775 So. 2d 173, 177–78 (Ala. 2000). Although there is an exception for particularly

4

 If appropriate, Mr. Holmes may move for leave to amend his complaint and cure this

deficiency by specifying whom he accuses of what.

8

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egregious conduct, “wanton misconduct . . . does not rise to the level of willfulness

and maliciousness necessary to put the State agent beyond . . . immunity.” Ex parte

Randall, 971 So. 2d 652, 664 (Ala. 2007). Accordingly, even if a cause of action for

wanton employment discrimination exists (a questionable assumption), the individual

Defendants cannot be liable for their allegedly wanton misconduct.

5. Mr. Holmes has not pleaded facts sufficient to support his claims for

hostile work environment and outrage.

Mr. Holmes’s claims for hostile work environment and outrage are due to be

dismissed for failure to “contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to state a

claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Iqbal, 556 U.S. at 678 (internal quotations

omitted). Mr. Holmes’s hostile-work-environment claim requires allegations of

workplace harassment “severe or pervasive enough to alter the terms and conditions

of [his] employment and create a hostile or abusive working environment.” Edwards

v. Prime, Inc., 602 F.3d 1276, 1300 (11th Cir. 2010). His outrage claim requires

allegations of conduct “so outrageous in character and so extreme in degree as to go

beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious and utterly

intolerable in a civilized society.” Little v. Robinson, 72 So. 3d 1168, 1172 (Ala.

2011). Accepting Mr. Holmes’s allegations as true, nothing in the amended complaint

suggests it is plausible he can meet either of those standards.

9

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B. Mr. Holmes’s Title VII claim against the Board survives.

Although most of Mr. Holmes’s claims are legally defective, the Title VII

failure-to-promote claim against the Board remains. Citing the lack of direct or

statistical evidence in the amended complaint, along with a purported failure to

present circumstantial evidence under the McDonnell Douglas framework, Defendants

argue Mr. Holmes has failed to state a claim under Title VII.

But Defendants are making summary judgment arguments to support their

motion to dismiss. For instance, the McDonnell Douglas framework, which

Defendants discuss at length, “is an evidentiary standard, not a pleading requirement,” 

Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., 534 U.S. 506, 510 (2002), and thus has no place in a

motion to dismiss. In fact, all but one of the cases to which Defendants cite to argue

Mr. Holmes has not stated a claim under Title VII were decisions on summary

judgment, not motions to dismiss. (See Doc. # 43, at 14–24 (citing twelve opinions

on summary judgment and one dealing with judgment as a matter of law).) It is

undoubtedly true that the bare facts Mr. Holmes alleged in his complaint would not

defeat summary judgment. But this case has not progressed so far, and Defendants’

arguments on the Title VII claim are largely irrelevant.

When the proper standard is applied, Mr. Holmes’s Title VII claim survives. 

The amended complaint states that Mr. Holmes is “a Caucasian male.” (Doc. # 41 ¶

10

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5.) It alleges that although Mr. Holmes “has been qualified and eligible for

promotion” for years, “he has been continually passed over in favor of younger,

African-American or Hispanic, and/or female officers with less experience.” (Doc.

# 41 ¶ 17.) To that end, Mr. Holmes cites at least three specific instances when lessqualified females and minorities were promoted instead of him. (Doc. # 41 ¶ 22.) 

Allegedly, those hiring decisions were “based upon his race and/or gender.” (Doc. #

41 ¶ 32). According to the United States Supreme Court, “a disparate-treatment

plaintiff must establish that the defendant had a discriminatory intent or motive for

taking a job-related action.” Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U.S. 557, 577 (2009) (internal

quotations omitted). The factual allegations of the amended complaint plausibly show

that the Board did just that. As a result, Mr. Holmes’s Title VII disparate-treatment

claim against the Board survives Defendants’ motion to dismiss. 

V. CONCLUSION

Accordingly, it is ORDERED that Defendants’ motion to dismiss (Doc. # 43)

is GRANTED in part and DENIED in part as follows:

(1) Plaintiff’s claims against the Board under § 1981, § 1983, the Age

Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Alabama Age

Discrimination in Employment Act (Counts I, III, and IV) are

DISMISSED with prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction;

11

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(2) Plaintiff’s hostile-work-environment claim against the Board in Count

V is DISMISSED for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be

granted;

(3) All of Plaintiff’s claims against the individual Defendants are

DISMISSED for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be

granted; and

(4) With regard to Plaintiff’s Title VII claim (Count II) against the Board,

Defendants’ motion is DENIED.

DONE this 17th day of January, 2013.

 /s/ W. Keith Watkins 

 CHIEF UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

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