Court Opinion

ID: 9669970
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:11:46.7026+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:01.419954
License: Public Domain

Williams, J.
(concurring). My Brother Levin has written a perceptive and understanding opinion with which I concur completely. I add these few words of exegesis only as a footnote out of almost forty years of experience in "the system”.
Government management in a case such as this *81has a critical responsibility both to the public and to the individual employee. Government is to be encouraged to use modern science, including psychiatry, to meet its responsibilities to protect the public and to improve its service, while at the same time safeguarding the rights of individual employees and employee morale generally. The Department of Natural Resources is to be commended in recognizing a new and useful management tool to serve the public. However, in this particular instance, as my Brother Levin ably brings out, there wasn’t a concomitant recognition of the rights of its own employees, especially in connection with the employment of a science not yet fully understood or commonly accepted by the public. The common reaction to the requirement of a "regular” medical examination on the one hand and a psychiatric examination on the other is altogether different. As long as this is so, personnel practices must recognize this reality. Understandingly and diplomatically employed, psychiatry could have been in this instance both a safeguard to the public and of assistance to all the employees involved.
One additional word. My Brother Levin cogently pointed out that "[although 'only’ Peterson’s job is technically involved [in trying to expunge the objectionable memorandum] in this litigation, in essence his entire career is at stake.” Even without the far flung possibilities of dissemination of personnel information via computerization, it behooves management to work out some accommodation with its right and need to know with the employee’s right and need not to be forever blackballed by the permanent inclusion in his personnel files of derogatory material involving subjective, unilateral and untested judgments. All too often *82when it comes to subsequent promotion or hiring opportunities, these negative unilateral, untested and subjective judgments outweigh an overwhelmingly preponderant and tested record of excellence. As a consequence, not only fairness to the individual but public service efficiency requires some adequate method of handling such items. At some point, with so much at stake, due process inevitably enters.