Opinion ID: 764814
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Same Actor Instruction

Text: 27 Travelers principally argues on its cross-appeal that the district court erred in refusing to give what Travelers terms a same actor instruction an instruction to the effect that where the plaintiff is hired and fired by the same decisionmaker (especially within a short period of time) the jury may infer that the decisionmaker did not act with discriminatory animus. In particular, Travelers requested the following instruction: 28 In this case, you have heard undisputed evidence that Hal Dufault hired the plaintiff in to [sic] the LP & E Communications Unit in 1988 when she was 44 years old, and that Mr. Dufault also made the decision to terminate the plaintiff's employment in January of 1994 when she was 49 years old. On the basis of these undisputed facts that Mr. Dufault both hired the plaintiff and decided to terminate her employment, within a short time span of five years, you may infer that his decision to terminate her employment was not motivated by her age. 29 Although the district court refused to so instruct the jury, it later explained to the attorneys that it was perfectly appropriate for defense counsel to argue ... that there's an inference the jury can draw that there was no age discrimination because of that. In fact, defense counsel did take the opportunity in his closing argument to urge the jury to draw this inference. 7 30 The parties agree that we have previously recognized the availability of the same actor inference. In Grady v. Affiliated Cent., Inc., 130 F.3d 553 (2d Cir.1997), cert. denied --- U.S. ----, 119 S.Ct. 349, 142 L.Ed.2d 288 (1998), we affirmed a district court's grant of summary judgment for the defendant in an employment discrimination case. In the process, we made the following, pertinent observation: 31 Although each case must involve an examination of all the circumstances, some factors strongly suggest that invidious discrimination was unlikely. For example, when the person who made the decision to fire was the same person who made the decision to hire, it is difficult to impute to her an invidious motivation that would be inconsistent with the decision to hire. This is especially so when the firing has occurred only a short time after the hiring. 32 Id. at 560 (citations omitted). 8 We then proceeded to examine the record evidence and determined that it would not permit a reasonable factfinder to infer that the plaintiff was the victim of discrimination. One of many considerations that influenced that decision was the fact that the plaintiff had been hired and fired within eight days by the same individual. See id. at 561. 33 However, we did not have occasion in Grady to adopt a rule requiring district courts to instruct jurors on the availability of the same actor inference, and we decline to impose such a rule here. The district court properly permitted Travelers to urge the jurors to draw this commonsensical inference from the facts, and we see no reason why the jurors would have needed an instruction from the judge in order to consider doing so.