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This employment discrimination case was dismissed on technical grounds: the plaintiff did not expressly plead the claim in his complaint. Under an obscure pleading rule, you do not have to actually plead the claim so long as the statement of facts supports such a claim. Plaintiff's claim is thus reinstated.
The case is Quinones v. City of Binghamton, issued on May 12. In 2014, the Supreme Court reiterated that "the federal rules effectively abolish the restrictive theory of the pleadings doctrine" and "do not countenance dismissal of a complaint for imperfect statement of the legal theory supporting the claim asserted." "To stave off threshold dismissal for want of an adequate statement of their claim, plaintiffs are required to do no more than state simply, concisely, and direct events that, they allege, entitle them to damages." That case was Johnson v. City of Shelby, 574 U.S. 10 (2014). Who says the Supreme Court never rules for plaintiffs these days?
Plaintiff's discrimination claim was dismissed because he did not enumerate such a claim, alleging only that his rights were violated under the First Amendment. But the introductory paragraph to the complaint said that defendant violated 42 U.S.C. 1981, the federal racial discrimination statute, and the allegations in the complaint did assert that plaintiff was subjected to racial harassment: that he was repeatedly called Ricky Ricardo and a coworker mimicked him when he spoke Spanish. Another patrol officer directed ethnic slurs against an Hispanic colleague in the presence of other officers. This happened almost every day.
Defendants were on notice of plaintiff's discrimination claim because of these factual allegations, and in fact defendants addressed the discrimination claim on the merits, so they were not exactly blind-sided on this issue. The Court of Appeals (Jacobs, Park and Pooler) remands the case to the district court to decide if these allegations state a plausible claim under the Iqbal pleading standard.
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