Opinion ID: 449050
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Admission of Employee Disciplinary Records and Summaries.

Text: 65 Plaintiffs maintain that the disciplinary memoranda that defendants' lawyers' paralegal used in preparing the summaries, as well as the summaries themselves, should not have been admitted into evidence. Plaintiffs argue that the disciplinary memoranda are hearsay and do not fall within any of the exceptions, such as the business records exception provided by Rule 803(6) of the Federal Rules of Evidence. In addition, plaintiffs contend that the summaries were in any event inadmissible under Rule 1006 because they were inaccurate and because they were produced too late. The district court has broad discretion in admitting evidence under Rules 803(6) and 1006, and we will not disturb its decision unless there has been an abuse of that discretion. 66 Rule 803(6), the business records exception to the hearsay rule, was intended to permit the admission of records maintained in the regular course of business, unless the source of information or the method or circumstances of preparation indicate a lack of trustworthiness. United States v. Chappell, 698 F.2d 308, 311 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 931, 103 S.Ct. 2095, 77 L.Ed.2d 304 (1983). Plaintiffs argue that the disciplinary memoranda were prepared and kept primarily for use in the grievance procedure, and that consequently there is a high risk that the versions of the rule violations represented by the memoranda are biased. They compare the memoranda to company reports about accidents, see, e.g., Palmer v. Hoffman, 318 U.S. 109, 63 S.Ct. 477, 87 L.Ed. 645 (1943), or to reports prepared by prison guards about inmates' alleged misconduct, see, e.g., Bracey v. Herringa, 466 F.2d 702 (7th Cir.1972), that have been held to be inadmissible. We believe, however, that the district court's determination that the disciplinary memoranda had sufficient indicia of reliability so as to be admissible under Rule 803(6) was not an abuse of discretion. See Paxton, 688 F.2d at 567 (defendants introduced employment records that listed reasons why each employee was discharged to rebut plaintiffs' classwide prima facie case); McDowell v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 575 F.Supp. 1007, 1063 (E.D.Ark.1983) (defendants' employment records, along with other evidence, were admissible to rebut plaintiffs' allegations of discriminatory discharges). Unlike the accident report in Palmer, the memoranda here were part of the systematic conduct of running a business; they were kept according to a regular procedure and for a routine business purpose--memorializing employee performance--that tended to insure accuracy. In this way they are also different from the prison guards' reports in Bracey, since the disciplinary memoranda were not prepared primarily with a view toward their use in a subsequent adversarial proceeding. The memoranda related not only to the more extreme examples of employee behavior, e.g., insubordination, but also to the more routine but equally important gauges of employee performance, e.g., competence in the completion of work assignments. Accordingly, the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting these business records. 67 Next, plaintiffs argue that even if the disciplinary records themselves were admissible, the summaries of those records prepared by defendants' counsels' paralegal were not admissible as summaries under Rule 1006. 24 Plaintiffs maintain that the admission of the summaries was inappropriate because they were not made available to plaintiffs at a reasonable time and place and because they are inaccurate. As defendants correctly point out, however, only the underlying documents, and not the summaries, must be made available to the opposing party so as to give them a reasonable time to respond, United States v. Foley, 598 F.2d 1323, 1338 (4th Cir.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1043, 100 S.Ct. 727, 62 L.Ed.2d 728 (1980), and there is no question that the underlying personnel records here were made available to plaintiffs well before trial. In addition, we find nothing wrong with the district court's acceptance of the summaries as basically accurate. The trial court heard testimony as to specific incidents of misconduct and had no trouble finding the summaries reliable. Had we been conducting the trial we may have permitted plaintiffs more time to respond to defendants' summaries than they were given by the district court, but we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in admitting the summaries.