Opinion ID: 2994631
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Punitive Damages Against Booth

Text: Booth claims that the jury’s award of $25,000 against him was excessive, because there was insufficient evidence for it to find that he had the requisite scienter to support punitive damages. Unfortunately, he has done little to preserve this point properly. He never moved for judgment as a matter of law on punitive damages, nor did he move for a new trial after the jury returned its verdict and the trial court entered its order. Never having asked the district judge to fix this problem, it is too late in the day to ask us to do so. At least in this procedural posture, we find nothing reversible here. Under Kolstad v. American Dental Ass’n, 527 U.S. 526 (1999), a defendant must behave with malice or reckless indifference in order for a court to impose punitive damages on him. Id. at 535. The terms malice and reckless indifference pertain to the employer’s knowledge that it may be acting in violation of federal law, not its awareness that it is engaging in discrimination. Id. The Court specifically rejected an additional egregious misconduct requirement that the court of appeals had engrafted onto the statute. The events here took place in 1994, long after the law of sexual harassment had become well established by the Supreme Court. The jury could have found that Booth (the relevant actor here, since we are considering only the sec. 1983 theory) acted with malice or reckless indifference toward Molnar, particularly after she rejected his advances. Booth also attacks the amount of the award, $25,000, as grossly excessive. We realize that this is a significant amount of money for an individual, but as a matter of law $25,000 is not so far out of line that it must be reduced. We upheld a similar punitive damages award in Merriweather v. Family Dollar Stores of Indiana, 103 F.3d 576, 581 (7th Cir. 1996), another sexual harassment case. Assuming as we must that the jury believed Molnar’s account and not Booth’s, this award is not monstrously excessive.