Discrimination claim against New York court system fails

This case alleges that the New York court system discriminates on the basis of national origin because court interpreters earn less money than other court employees. The Court of Appeals finds the plaintiffs cannot win their case.

The case is Bergnes v. Zayas, a summary order issued on May 23. This case was dismissed under Rule 12. As the Court of Appeals puts it, plaintiffs "presented statistical evidence showing that court interpreters are more highly qualified but receive less pay than court reporters who are majority white, English speaking employees. Second, they present anecdotal allegations of hostility faced by court reporters." This is not enough to state an equal protection claim, the Court of Appeals (Parker, Park and Vilardo [D.J.]) holds.

The Court hold that if you want to plead an equal protection claim based on statistics alone, the numbers must be statistically significant in the mathematical sense and "must also be of a level that makes other plausible non-discriminatory explanations very unlikely." That strict language draws from Burgis v. New York City Dept. of Sanitation, 798 F.3d 63 (2d Cir. 2015). Plaintiffs lose the case for these reasons:

First, plaintiffs "provide no concrete statistics about courtroom personnel broken down by national origin, ethnicity, race, ancestry, or otherwise. Instead, they allege only that the majority of court interpreters are persons of a non-Anglo national origin while court reporters are mainly people who are not foreign-born." That claim is too vague and conclusory to state an equal protection claim.

Second, the anecdotal allegations are not enough to bring this case to discovery. The anecdotes do not suggest the court system had a policy or practice of discrimination in this context. Nor do plaintiffs connect the anecdotes to any policy or custom concerning how defendants pay their court interpreters. 

What do we learn from this case? Statistical evidence, for purposes of proving intentional discrimination, is hard to come by. Anecdotes often will not prove a policy or practice against a municipalities.