Opinion ID: 172099
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Prior Litigation Against PSCo

Text: Turner's first argument is easily disposed of on staleness grounds. In 1991, PSCo lost a sexual harassment lawsuit involving conduct at the Comanche Plant from 1980 to 1988. Hansel v. Pub. Serv. Co. of Colo., 778 F.Supp. 1126, 1133-34 (D.Colo.1991). This lawsuit, Turner claims, proves PSCo discriminated against her. In some instances, evidence that an employer's decision makers harbored a general bias against a protected class may support an inference that the decision makers were influenced by the bias in making a particular employment decision. See Ortiz v. Norton, 254 F.3d 889, 896 (10th Cir.2001). This does not mean, however, that evidence as to the prior mistreatment of employees in a protected class necessarily gives rise to an inference that all subsequent employment decisions adversely affecting that protected class or someone in it, no matter how unrelated, are also tainted with bias. Timmerman, 483 F.3d at 1117. For evidence of general bias to be pertinent, we require some connection or logical nexus between a showing of general bias and a particular employment decision. Id. at 1117-18. The general bias must play a direct role in the adverse employment decision in the plaintiff's case. Id. at 1118 (emphasis added). Turner relies on Hansel 's finding of a hostile work environment for conduct that ended in 1988 to show that PSCo harbored a general bias against women when it refused to hire her in 2004. Here, the required nexus obviously does not exist. First, the hostile work environment in Hansel is not proximate in time to the discrimination alleged in this case. In some instances, numerous adverse employment actions involving other protected employees, each occurring within a year of the adverse employment action at issue, may suggest the decision maker was motivated by the same general discriminatory bias. See Greene v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 98 F.3d 554, 560-61 (10th Cir.1996). But we have clarified that a gap of two years between the alleged general bias and the adverse employment action signals a lack of temporal proximity. Timmerman, 483 F.3d at 1115 n. 3. In Turner's case, the gap was over fifteen years, certainly long enough to be outside the range of temporal proximity. Moreover, Hansel involved different individuals engaging in different conduct. Because the focus of a pretext analysis under Title VII is on the decision maker, see Piercy, 480 F.3d at 1200, the nexus between an alleged general bias and a particular employment decision made years later becomes even more tenuous when the bias existed before the relevant decision maker was in a position to make employment decisions. Here, Edmisson was not a manager at Comanche when the conduct in Hansel occurred, and Hansel involved a different form of discrimination-the plaintiff alleged a hostile work environment, not an adverse employment action-from the discrimination alleged in this case. In sum, the existence of prior litigation for sex harassment in the 1980s is in this case insufficient to warrant an inference of sex discrimination in hiring in 2004.