Opinion ID: 752355
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: City of Warren's Cross Appeal

Text: 41 In its cross-appeal, the City of Warren challenges the award of back pay to Joseph Fears. We review a district court's award and calculation of relief for abuse of discretion. See Wilson Metal Casket Co., 24 F.3d at 840.
42 The City of Warren contends that the district court abused its discretion in awarding Joseph Fears back pay based solely on Fears' [s] uncorroborated, self-serving testimony. The City of Warren essentially asks us to review the credibility of Joseph Fears as a trial witness and assess the weight the trial judge accorded to Fears's testimony. We may neither weigh the evidence [nor] pass on the credibility of witnesses ... Ratliff v. Wellington Exempted Village Schools Bd. of Educ., 820 F.2d 792, 795 (6th Cir.1987); see also Anderson v. City of Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 573, 105 S.Ct. 1504, 1511, 84 L.Ed.2d 518 (1985) (Due regard is given to opportunity of trial court to judge credibility of witnesses.). Therefore, we decline to disturb the district court's assessment of Fears's credibility and conclude that the court did not abuse its discretion by awarding Fears back pay. 43
44 In the alternative, Warren argues that the district court abused its discretion in awarding Fears back pay despite his alleged failure to mitigate damages by waiting to reapply for a position with the city until 1991, seven years after Warren eliminated the residency requirement for police applicants. In an apparent case of first impression, Warren asks us to consider whether a Title VII claimant who was never hired because of discriminatory employment practices is precluded from a back pay award because he did not reapply for work with the same employer when it eliminated its discriminatory practices. The district court found that Fears's failure to reapply to the City of Warren did not equal a failure to mitigate damages, and therefore, did not preclude his back pay award. We affirm the district court's decision. 45 A Title VII claimant has a duty to mitigate damages by seeking substantially equivalent employment. See Ford Motor Co. v. EEOC, 458 U.S. 219, 231-32, 102 S.Ct. 3057, 3065-66, 73 L.Ed.2d 721 (1982). This duty has ancient origins, and operates to prevent claimants from recovering for damages which they could have avoided through reasonable diligence. Rasimas, 714 F.2d at 623. In this case, Fears worked as an officer with the Detroit Police Department from July 1985 to November 1990. He therefore found and pursued employment comparable to that he would have enjoyed with the City of Warren absent discrimination. Thus, Fears's work as a Detroit police officer satisfies Title VII's requirement that he mitigate his damages. 46 Warren asks us to reach the inequitable conclusion that Fears should have been aware of the City's elimination of its residency requirement for police applicants in 1984 and he was therefore obligated to reapply to the Warren police force after he had been working in Detroit. We decline to reach this result. No established authority requires Title VII claimants who have found comparable employment to reapply for positions with employers who have previously refused to hire them for discriminatory reasons. This is simply not a hoop Title VII requires claimants to jump through, and we will not be the first to require it. 47 For the above stated reasons, we find that the district court did not abuse its discretion in awarding Joseph Fears back pay, and we affirm this aspect of the district court's opinion. 13
48 Warren asks us to review the district court's refusal to reduce Fears's back pay award by a factor which represents the probability that the city would have hired him absent discrimination. The district court recognized Warren's argument that without the residency requirement more qualified applicants would have applied for police positions, and therefore, Fears's likelihood of being hired would have been less than 100%. However, the court noted that the information before it was insufficient to allow a determination representing which percentage would appropriately reflect the probability of hire. The district court correctly applied the principle that [a]mbiguity should be resolved 'against the discriminating employer' and when 'it is impossible to reconstruct the employment of each claimant, back pay equal to the maximum amount which could have been earned but for the discrimination is appropriate.'  JA at 108. 49 The cases the City of Warren cites, Ingram v. Madison Square Garden Center, Inc., 709 F.2d 807, 812 (2d Cir.1983), and Dougherty v. Barry, 869 F.2d 605, 615 (D.C.Cir.1989), are distinguishable from the present case in that they involved several victims of discrimination whose numbers exceeded the number of available positions. In this case, neither party disputes that Warren hired twenty-four of the twenty-five applicants for police jobs during the time that Fears would have applied, and by all accounts Fears was qualified for such a position, as evidenced by his securing employment with the Detroit Police Department within the same time frame. Therefore, the district court was correct in resolving the attendant ambiguity in favor of Fears, the victim of discrimination in this case. 50 Accordingly, we affirm the district court's decision not to reduce Fears's back pay by the undetermined probability of hire factor.