Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca10-89-08033/USCOURTS-ca10-89-08033-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 

TENTH CIRCUIT 

FI LED 

U!lited States C~urt of Appeals 

Tenth Ci:ruit 

D:C 21 1990 

ROBERT L. HOECKER 

Clerk 

GAILS. JOHNSON, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

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No. 89-8033 

v. 

CELSIUS ENERGY COMPANY, 

Defendant-Appellee. 

(D.C. Civil No. C88-0227-B) 

(D. Wyo.) 

ORDER AND JUDGMENT* 

Before MOORE, SETH and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges. 

After examining the briefs and appellate record, this panel 

has determined unanimously that oral argument would not materially 

assist the determination of this appeal. See Fed. R. App. P. 

34(a); 10th Cir. R. 34.1.9. The cause is therefore ordered 

submitted without oral argument. 

Appellant Gail Johnson appeals from the district court's 

denial of her Title VII sex discrimination action brought under 42 

U.S.C. § 2000e-5 and from a jury verdict on a contract claim. 

Johnson challenges evidentiary rulings by the trial court which 

*This order and judgment has no precedential value and shall not 

be cited, or used by any court within the Tenth Circuit, except 

for purposes of establishing the doctrines of the law of the case, 

res judicata, or collateral estoppel. 10th Cir. R. 36.3. 

Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 1 
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• she claims were in error. Specifically, she asserts that the 

trial court wrongly excluded statistical evidence showing 

discrimination at her workplace; wrongly admitted hearsay 

evidence; and wrongly admitted the Equal Employment Opportunity 

Commission's (EEOC) decision finding that appellee Celsius Energy 

did not discriminate. Appellant claims the prejudice that 

resulted from the trial court's errors was significant and that a 

new trial is warranted. 

Appellee Celsius Energy, an oil and gas production company, 

employed Gail Johnson as a petroleum engineer between January 1982 

and June 1986 at its Rock Springs, Wyoming production facilities. 

Her work consisted of both fieldwork, which included testing and 

cleaning production wells, ·and office work, which included writing 

production reports, designing well-production programs and 

researching the production capacity of old wells. Johnson was the 

only female petroleum engineer in Rock Springs with Celsius. 

During her first two years with Celsius Johnson received 

performance ratings of "competent." This meant that she was doing 

average work for a person with her background. After two and a 

half years with the company Celsius promoted her from associate 

petroleum engineer to full petroleum engineer. In 1985, however, 

she received a "commendable minus" rating. 

During the summer of 1986, Celsius Energy was forced to 

terminate a number of staff positions due to the overall decline 

in the oil industry. Celsius let go four of the fourteen 

petroleum engineers it employed. The company based its decisions 

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Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 2 
on a point system designed by a Senior Vice President of the 

company and reviewed by numerous in-house and outside experts. 

The point system combined objective criteria measuring the length 

of service with the company, the employee's education and other 

work experience and the employee's job position with a subjective 

standard measuring job performance. 

Johnson was one of the four petroleum engineers released 

under the point system. Her short time with the company and lack 

of other work experience produced low scores in the objective 

categories. Her final performance ranking of "commendable minus", 

although disputed, also contributed to a low point score. Even 

though Johnson claimed at trial that her final rating was 

"commendable" not "commendable minus", this difference would still 

have placed her among the four petroleum engineers with the lowest 

scores and thus made no difference. 

Johnson brought suit in district court alleging both a Title 

VII sex discrimination and breach of an implied contract causes of 

action. The causes were tried together. In her complaint she 

alleged instances of sexual harassment at the workplace and sexual 

preferences in hiring. The district court dismissed these 

individual allegations and Johnson does not challenge the court's 

findings on appeal. The breach of contract claim was denied by a 

unanimous jury and a judgment was entered. The jury also returned 

an advisory verdict on the Title VII claim finding no 

discrimination. The judge adopted the advisory verdict of the 

jury and judgment was entered for the defendant. 

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Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 3 
All three of Johnson's arguments on appeal challenge 

evidentiary rulings of the trial court. It is well established 

that the decision to admit or exclude evidence is within the sound 

discretion of the trial judge and will not be reversed absent a 

clear abuse of discretion. C. A. Associates v. Dow Chemical 

Company, No. 89-1216, slip. op. at 8 (Nov. 16, 1990), __ F.2d 

__ (10th Cir.); Spulak v. K Mart Corp., 894 F.2d 1150, 1156 

(10th Cir.); McAlester v. United Air Lines, Inc., 851 F.2d 1249, 

1257 (10th Cir.). Our deference to the trial court's ruling is 

particularly great when the trial court is balancing the probative 

value of the· evidence against the potential prejudice under Fed. 

R. Evid. 403. "[I]f judicial self-restraint is ever desirable, it 

is when a Rule 403 analysis of a trial court is reviewed by an 

appellate tribunal." Wheeler v. John Deere Co., 862 F.2d 1404, 

1408 (10th Cir.) (quoting United States v. Glover, 842 F.2d 339, 

343 (6th Cir.)). We apply the abuse of discretion standard to 

each of appellant's contentions in turn. 

Johnson's first argument is that the trial court erred by 

excluding statistical evidence of the overall number of women 

employed at Celsius in the company's different divisions before 

and after the 1986 layoffs. Johnson sought to introduce this 

evidence in both a pretrial memorandum and at trial. The trial 

court, citing Fed. R. Evid. 401 and 403, repeatedly ruled that the 

relevance, if any, of the evidence in the form presented, was 

outweighed by its prejudicial nature, and that the data did not 

meet the basic standards for admission. 

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Although appellant correctly states the importance 

statistical analysis can play in a Title VII discrimination 

action,~ McAlester, 851 F.2d at 1258, the statistical evidence 

introduced must pass basic relevance thresholds. The Supreme 

Court, in a long line of cases, has established what statistical 

evidence can be so used. We review the trial court's decision to 

exclude appellant's numerical data in light of the Court's 

standards. 

The discrimination pled and argued by the appellant in the 

trial court was individual discrimination not a disparate impact 

claim involving an overall pattern of discrimination. Appellant's 

argument that she was attempting to introduce the numerical 

evidence to show a pattern of discrimination, brought for the 

first time on appeal, is not supported by the record. During the 

proceedings below, appellant argued that her specific discharge 

was discriminatory, not that Celsius was engaged in a general 

pattern of discriminatory activity. The Supreme Court has stated 

that statistical information is less relevant in an individual 

Title VII claim than in proving a pattern of discrimination. See 

Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, __ U.S. __ , 109 s. Ct. 2115. 

Thus, the trial court was correct in strictly scrutinizing the 

relevance of this information. 

The trial court's finding that the statistical evidence 

appellant sought to introduce was irrelevant and prejudicial 

follows from appellant's failure to compare her numerical evidence 

with an appropriate control group. In Hazelwood School District 

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< 

v. United States, 433 U.S. 299, the Supreme Court held that 

statistical information used in a Title VII action must be 

compared to a control group, defined not only in terms of a 

similar job position, but also in terms of geography, time frame, 

and other factors which might distort the figures. 

Johnson admitted at trial that she did not plan to compare 

the numbers she sought to introduce with a control group. As 

appellee notes, she provided no evidence of the number of women in 

similar positions in similar companies in locations such as Rock 

Springs. Appellant had to provide the jury with this information 

to allow them to make a valid comparison between Celsius and other 

similarly situated companies. Without this information, 

appellant's data was nothing more than "raw numbers." 

Moreover, appellant made no attempt in either her pretrial 

memorandum or her proffers at trial to explain the statistical 

evidence she sought to introduce or to link the low percentage of 

women employees at Celsius with the particular employment practice 

she was challenging. 

While numerical information on its face can paint a grim 

picture of an employer's hiring practices, caution must be taken 

to ensure that the picture painted is not grossly distorted. 

Requiring the party using the numbers to accompany the numbers 

with a precise explanation and comparisons prevents such a 

distortion. As the Supreme Court recently stated, the lack of 

such an explanation could "result in employers being potentially 

liable for 'the myriad of innocent causes that may have led to 

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Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 6 
statistical imbalances in the composition of their workforce.'" 

Wards Cove, __ U.S. at __ , 109 S. Ct. at 2125 (quoting Watson 

v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust, __ U.S. __ , 108 S. Ct. 2777, 

2787). The trial court faced with a set of "raw numbers" acted 

properly and well within its discretion in excluding appellant's 

statistical evidence. The trial court explained the defects to 

appellant in his several rulings on this issue. 

Appellant's second argument is that the trial court admitted 

hearsay evidence which Johnson claims sufficiently prejudiced her 

case to result in a new trial. Johnson's contention stems from 

the testimony of Mr. Nicholson, the Senior Vice President at 

Celsius responsible for designing and implementing the point 

system used to reduce Celsius' workforce. He testified that an 

unidentified EEOC employee reviewed the proposed point system and 

suggested two changes which were ultimately included. In response 

to a question about the system used, Nicholson stated: 

"We did make some minor modifications in the 

system. Again, we were still working -- or I 

was still working with Louie Caudillo from the 

corporation and Patricia Preston on them. We 

also had involved our legal department on what 

we were doing, and they had preliminarily 

approved it. 

"And Mr. Caudillo had a friend who worked for 

EEOC in Washington, D.C., and he wanted to run 

our system by his friend to see if he felt 

that there might be any problems with it where 

he was working in EEOC, would give us some 

ideas as to whether he felt our system was 

acceptable or not. And Mr. Caudillo's friend 

suggested to make two changes in that area." 

Rec. Vol. VIII at 188-189. Appellant's initial objection that the 

testimony was hearsay was sustained by the trial court. The 

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Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 7 
judge, however, allowed appellee to lay additional foundation to 

highlight the purpose of the testimony - namely to show how the 

point system was "fine-tuned." After hearing this evidence, the 

judge over the appellant's objection, admitted the EEOC's 

evidence. 

We review appellant's claim mindful of the need for deference 

to a trial court's ruling on a hearsay objection because the 

determination of whether evidence is hearsay rests so heavily on 

the particular facts of the case. See United States v. RodriguezPando, 841 F.2d 1014 (10th Cir.). In addition, reversal is only 

warranted if the evidence was admitted in error and the error 

resulted in prejudice to a substantial right. See United States 

v. Wolf, 839 F.2d 1387, 139.5 (10th Cir.) (citing Fed. R. Evid. 

103(a)(l)). 

After reviewing the record we are convinced the trial court 

acted properly in allowing this testimony into evidence. Appellee 

was not introducing the evidence for the truth of the matter 

asserted - that the EEOC somehow approved Celsius' point reduction 

plan. Rather, appellee was using this testimony to demonstrate 

the extensive development involved in creating the point reduction 

system. This was necessary to establish that the point reduction 

system was not designed to discriminate in any way against female 

employees. Considering the extensive testimony before the jury 

regarding the sufficiency of the point system, the admission of 

evidence making an indirect reference to an unidentified EEOC 

employee could not prejudice a substantial right. 

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Appellate Case: 89-8033 Document: 010110097319 Date Filed: 12/21/1990 Page: 8 
Johnson's third argument on appeal is that the trial court's 

decision to admit at trial the EEOC's administrative determination 

of her claim denied her of her right to a trial de novo. We 

disagree. 

The decision to admit prior EEOC determinations of a 

plaintiff's claim is within the discretion of the trial judge. 

See Nulf v. International Paper Co., 656 F.2d 553, 563 (10th 

Cir.). We will only find an abuse of discretion if the trial 

court's decision was not made independently of the EEOC's 

determination. See Whatley v. Skaggs Companies, Inc., 707 F.2d 

1129 (10th Cir.). 

From the record there is ample evidence that the proceedings 

before the trial court were conducted de novo and that the 

ultimate decision of the judge was independent of the EEOC's 

finding. Johnson was given the opportunity to present her case in 

full to both the judge and the jury. The trial court's findings 

of fact indicate that the trial testimony presented was thoroughly 

considered and weighed. 

Accordingly, the decision of the trial court is AFFIR.'P.IBD. 

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Entered for the Court 

Oliver Seth 

Circuit Judge 

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