Opinion ID: 1486808
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Demonstrating Pretext.

Text: Ms. Knight contends that the trial court improperly restricted her ability to question hospital witnesses about their reasons for eliminating her unit. As noted above, Georgetown maintained that it eliminated the unit because of financial pressures at the hospital and the prospect that the Red Cross would provide superior blood-collection services. Ms. Knight wanted to show that the second of these reasons was pretextual by questioning Dr. Sandler about the Red Cross's safety record in the Washington area. As for the first reason, she wanted to question a witness about the hospital's relationship with other components of Georgetown University to show that its financial troubles were far less significant than it claimed in light of the university's overall financial situation.
As a general principle, the trial court is entrusted with broad discretion in regulating the substance, form, and quantum of evidence which is to be presented to a jury. Hawkins v. United States, 461 A.2d 1025, 1033 (D.C.1983) (quoting ( William T.) Johnson v. United States, 452 A.2d 959, 960 (D.C.1982) (per curiam)). Likewise, as we recently observed, the evaluation and weighing of evidence for relevance and potential prejudice is quintessentially a discretionary function of the trial court, and we owe a great degree of deference to its decision. ( William A.) Johnson v. United States, 683 A.2d 1087, 1095 (D.C.1996) (en banc), cert. denied, 520 U.S. 1148, 117 S.Ct. 1323, 137 L.Ed.2d 484 (1997); see also Roundtree v. United States, 581 A.2d 315, 328 (D.C.1990) (evidentiary rulings on relevancy will be overturned only upon a showing of grave abuse). We must apply these general principles in the specific context of an employment-discrimination case, which involves a three-part allocation of proof. First, the plaintiff must establish a prima facie case of unlawful discrimination. See St. Mary's Honor Ctr. v.. Hicks, 509 U.S. 502, 506, 113 S.Ct. 2742, 125 L.Ed.2d 407 (1993) (citing, inter alia, McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 36 L.Ed.2d 668 (1973)); Arthur Young & Co. v. Sutherland, 631 A.2d 354, 361 (D.C.1993). [4] Once that has been done, a rebuttable presumption arises that the employer's conduct amounted to unlawful discrimination. Arthur Young, supra, 631 A.2d at 361. Second, the employer bears the burden of rebutting this presumption `by articulating some legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for the employment action at issue.' Id. (quoting Atlantic Richfield Co. v. District of Columbia Comm'n on Human Rights, 515 A.2d 1095, 1099 (D.C.1986)); see also St. Mary's, supra, 509 U.S. at 506-07, 113 S.Ct. 2742. Third, once the employer offers a nondiscriminatory reason, it becomes the employee's burden to demonstrate by a preponderance of the evidence that the reason is pretextual. See Arthur Young, 631 A.2d at 361; see also St. Mary's, supra, 509 U.S. at 507-08, 113 S.Ct. 2742. The employee must be afforded what has been termed a full and fair opportunity to show that the employer's stated nondiscriminatory reason for treating her as it did was actually a pretext for unlawful discrimination. See St. Mary's, supra, 509 U.S. at 507, 113 S.Ct. 2742; Texas Dep't of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 256, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981); McDonnell Douglas, supra, 411 U.S. at 805, 93 S.Ct. 1817. Although the burden of production may shift from the employee to the employer and back to the employee, the employee retains the ultimate burden of persuading the finder-of-fact that the employer acted with discriminatory animus. Blackman, supra note 4, 694 A.2d at 868. [5] The issue before us concerns the third step, that the plaintiff show the employer's stated reasons for the adverse action to be pretextual.
Dr. Sandler, who arranged the contracting of the hospital's blood-collection services to the Red Cross, was called by Ms. Knight in her case in chief and asked about a consent decree which mandated changes in the way the Red Cross collected and processed blood. Dr. Sandler acknowledged that he was aware of a consent decree, but before Ms. Knight could ask specific questions about it counsel for the defendants objected and, at a bench conference, requested a proffer of relevance. Ms. Knight represented that the consent decree arose from litigation over the quality and safety of the Red Cross's Washington-area blood-collection procedures, and maintained that this information was relevant to the hospital's explanation that transferring her unit's responsibilities to the Red Cross would improve the efficiency and quality of patient care. The trial court precluded questioning on the consent decree as remote and vastly outweighed by the distraction and the road down which we have to go to find out all about Red Cross blood collection procedures as compared with ... Georgetown's procedures. [6] The trial court similarly sustained an objection to Ms. Knight's question about Red Cross compliance with safety regulations when cross-examining Dr. Sandler during the defendants' case in chief. We cannot say that the trial court abused its discretion in ruling that the quality of Red Cross blood-collection procedures was too collateral to the central issue and that this employment-discrimination case might degenerate into a trial of the Red Cross's safety record. Indeed, in Smith v. Executive Club, Ltd., 458 A.2d 32, 42 (D.C. 1983), we reversed a trial court for failing to limit cross-examination sufficiently so as to prevent a trial within a trial on collateral issues. Although a plaintiff alleging racial discrimination in the workplace must be given a full and fair opportunity to prove that the employer's stated nondiscriminatory reasons are pretextual, the trial court is not deprived of its discretion over the manner in which the plaintiff proves his or her case. See Walker v. NationsBank of Fla. N.A., 53 F.3d 1548, 1553, 1554-55 (11th Cir.1995) (upholding trial court's exclusion, as more prejudicial than probative, of EEOC determination letter which was offered to show that employer's stated nondiscriminatory reason was pretextual). This particular stated reasonthat transferring the Transfusion Service Unit's responsibilities to the Red Cross would improve quality and efficiencycould reasonably be deemed a collateral issue under the circumstances and the trial court could restrict the scope of inquiry. Insofar as relevant to the claim of race discrimination, the ultimate discharge here was not so much the hospital's reorganization of its blood services and transfer of responsibilities to the Red Cross, but rather its subsequent alleged failure to provide Ms. Knight with comparable employment in another department, as the hospital managed to do for the two white nurses in the unit. Ms. Knight's complaint maintained that Georgetown discriminated not by closing the unit in the first place but by failing or refusing to employ [her] in a comparable position at GU Hospital after the reorganization and termination of the Transfusion Services as it did for the white nurses on the staff . . . . Thus, the fact finder would be most unlikely to conclude that Georgetown University discriminated against her on the basis of her race because it decided to contract with the Red Cross in the first place notwithstanding any safety concerns; the focus would be on the alleged discrimination that occurred in failing to place her in a supervisory nursing position elsewhere in the hospital after responsibility for her unit's services were assumed by other entities. [7]
Likewise, we find no error in the trial court's limitation of Ms. Knight's cross-examination of a witness concerning the hospital's financial relationship with the university. Mr. Dan Oldani, the hospital's chief operating officer, had testified on direct examination about the hospital's recent operating loss of $4 million and explained that the elimination of the Transfusion Services Unit was partially a response to financial pressures. On cross-examination, Ms. Knight asked about the hospital's net revenue and assetswhich ranged in the hundreds of millions of dollarsin an effort to show that the $4 million loss was relatively insignificant. Ms. Knight then elicited Mr. Oldani's acknowledgement that the hospital was one component of Georgetown University Medical Center, which was itself part of the entire university structure. When Ms. Knight proceeded to ask about other Georgetown institutions, counsel for the defendants objected. At a bench conference, the trial court expressed concern that the questioning on the university's net resources and assets beyond the hospital was relevant mainly to calculating punitive damages, which Ms. Knight had been precluded from seeking. Counsel for Ms. Knight explained that he was only going to try and make clear that the hospital is not a separately incorporated entity and doesn't have to be treated separately for accounting purposes. That was it. The trial court stated, All right, we're done with money, and sustained the objection. We see no abuse of discretion in this ruling. Ms. Knight adequately made her point that the hospital's income losses could be viewed in the perspective not only of the hospital's own assets and revenues but of the hospital as part of a medical center and a university as a whole, and thus cannot be said to have been deprived of a sufficiently full and fair opportunity to probe Georgetown's explanation that financial pressures required the elimination of her unit. Moreover, as with the safety of the Red Cross's blood-collection procedures, the financial situation of the hospital explained only why the unit was eliminated in the first place, not why Ms. Knight did not obtain alternative employment. Even Ms. Knight's complaint recognized that a purpose of the reorganization was to reduce costs. Her chief argument then, as now, was that once the reorganization was underway the hospital proceeded to treat the two white employees differently from the two African American employees. The accounting practices of the university would have little to say about Ms. Knight's theory of disparate treatment, and the trial court did not abuse its discretion in curbing Ms. Knight's further cross-examination on this point.