Racial discrimination claim is revived on appeal

This case involves an allegation of racial discrimination by two white state workers who claim they were denied a position because the state wanted to promote a Black employee instead. The Court of Appeals finds the plaintiffs have stated a claim that allows them to proceed to discovery.

The case is Florence v. Seggos, a summary order issued on June 7. Plaintiffs were passed over for the position of Director of Law Enforcement (DLE) for the Department of Environmental Conservation. One plaintiff earned the highest civil service test score. The other ranked second. The interim position was given to Rivers, a Black man who had failed the test. 

What happened next gives rise to this case. The department petitioned the state to reclassify the position so that applicants who did not pass the test could be considered for the position also. According to the decision, "One of the Department’s professed reasons for seeking the change was that it could attract a more diverse pool of applicants if a test were no longer required. During this period  of  time,  Rivers  
allegedly  confirmed  that  someone  on  the  staff  of  then-Governor Andrew Cuomo 'was advocating for [him] from an affirmative action standpoint.'” The state agreed to drop the test requirement and Rivers got the position.

The district court disallowed this claim from proceeding, but the Court of Appeals (Chin, Sullivan and Bianco) reverses, and the case returns to the docket. The Court reasons:

Plaintiffs, who were majors, had superior rank to Rivers, who was a captain. They also allege that they were assigned to units with greater responsibilities and that they registered the highest scores on a test designed to measure aptitude – a test that Rivers failed. As for the Department’s purported discriminatory motivation, Plaintiffs allege that the Department openly acknowledged that its request to reclassify the DLE position was designed to bypass the all-white list of test-passing candidates that existed when the DLE position became vacant. When viewed together, these facts easily suffice to “provide ‘at least minimal support for the proposition that the employer was motivated by discriminatory intent.’”

The Court cites Vega v. Hempstead Union Free Sch. Dist., 801 F.3d 72 (2d Cir. 2015), and Littlejohn v. City of New York, 795 F.3d 297, 311 (2d Cir. 2015), for this proposition, still the go-to cases for motions to dismiss under Rule 12. 

How did the state try to defend the district court's ruling? One argument was that plaintiffs were not comparable to Rivers in terms of qualifications for the position because Rivers had been acting DLE. But the Court notes that plaintiffs alleged that Rivers was not properly performing his duties and, besides, his seven months' experience as DLE was not substantial enough to place him in a different category of candidates than plaintiffs.