Opinion ID: 766480
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Testimony Regarding the March Guidelines

Text: 23 Barrett's 1983 and New York State constitutional claims are premised on his assertion that his employer took adverse actions against him in retaliation for his exercise of his First Amendment and New York State constitutional rights of free speech in connection with the Rodriguez dog-biting incident at the Orange County Jail. Barrett argues that to establish such a retaliation claim a plaintiff must show that his or her conduct was protected by the First Amendment and that the defendant's conduct was motivated by or substantially caused by the plaintiff's exercise of free speech. See Bernheim v. Litt, 79 F.3d 318, 324 (2d Cir. 1996). If a plaintiff meets this burden, Barrett asserts, the defendant can nonetheless avoid liability by showing that the adverse employment action would have been taken for legitimate reasons even in the absence of the defendant's allegedly improper motives. See Sagendorf-Teal v. County of Rensselaer, 100 F.3d 270, 274 (2d Cir. 1996). In order to prevail, Barrett says, he must therefore prove that the proffered neutral reason for the employment action was merely pretextual. See Howard v. Senkowski, 986 F.2d 24, 27 n.2 (2d Cir. 1993). 24 The district court erred, Barrett's argument continues, by preventing him from proving that the neutral reason offered by the Commission for his termination - that he violated the December guidelines - was a mere pretext. The court did so, he says, by preventing his lawyers from asking witnesses about the purpose of the March 1996 guidelines. Had they been able to do so, he says, he would have been able to show that the March guidelines were promulgated in response to a public disagreement between Barrett and former Commission Chair Poole regarding alleged human rights violations in the village of Kiryas Joel. According to Barrett, the March guidelines constituted an attempt by the Commission to retaliate against him for exercising his free-speech rights and the December guidelines were merely a continuation of this behavior. Barrett thus argues that testimony about the purpose of the March guidelines was essential to his pretext argument. 25 The district court was not persuaded by this line of reasoning and disallowed testimony regarding the March guidelines. The court found that Barrett's attempt to elicit testimony regarding his dispute with a former commissioner about a factually unrelated matter at least five months before the events that led to his termination was an enormous stretch, probing to find a new approach to [his] lawsuit. The court was well within its discretion in so ruling. 26 Even assuming this evidence was relevant, it was properly excluded. Under Fed. R. Evid. 403, relevant evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed... by considerations of... waste of time. Barrett's complaint and the trial it precipitated arose out of the Rodriguez dog-biting incident and the communications by Barrett regarding it. The court was not required to allow the trial to be diverted into an inquiry into an entirely different incident involving to a significant extent different people, places and events. The court's determination was neither arbitrary nor irrational, and was therefore well within the scope of its broad discretion over the admission of evidence. Perry v. Ethan Allen, Inc., 115 F.3d 143, 150 (2d Cir. 1997); see also Raskin v. Wyatt Co., 125 F.3d 55, 65-66 (2d Cir. 1997) (similar).