Federal Law & Legal System – Page 160 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Seventh Circuit Week in Review: Corporate Criminal Liability, Reconsideration of Suppression Rulings, and More

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:April 11, 2009
Post category:Circuit Splits Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Seventh Circuit

The Seventh Circuit had four new opinions in criminal cases this week. The cases addressed the mens rea requirements for corporate criminal liability, procedural aspects of suppression hearings, child pornography sentencing, and conditional guilty pleas. Taking the cases in that order:

In United States v. L.E. Myers Co. (No. 07-2464), the defendant corporation was convicted of criminal OSHA violations in connection with the electrocution death of one its employees. The Seventh Circuit (per Judge Sykes) reversed and remanded for a new trial in light of erroneous jury instructions. The errors related to mens rea issues. Myers was convicted under a statute that bases liability on the knowing creation of a hazardous condition in knowing violation of an OSHA requirement.

The problem is that a corporation, as a legal construct, cannot really know anything; the only way a corporation knows something is to the extent the law is willing to impute the knowledge of particular employees to the corporation. Seventh Circuit precedent indicated that “corporations ‘know’ what their employees who are responsible for an aspect of the business know.” More specifically, the corporation was said to know what an employee knows if the employee has a duty to report that knowledge to someone higher up in the corporation.

Seventh Circuit Week in Review: A Lawful Stop, But Just Barely

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:April 3, 2009
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Seventh Circuit

There is not much to report from the Seventh Circuit front this week. The court issued only one new opinion in a criminal case, and it was not one that broke any new legal ground. In United States v. Brewer (No. 08-3257), the defendant was convicted of unlawfully possessing a firearm. A police officer responding to a call about gunfire in an apartment complex saw Brewer driving away from the complex. Brewer’s car was stopped on that basis, resulting in discovery of the incriminating weapon. On appeal, Brewer argued that the gun should have been suppressed because the underlying stop was unconstitutional. The court (per Judge Posner) agreed that it was at least a close call (“the case is on the line between reasonable suspicion and pure hunch”), but ultimately determined that the “unusual circumstances” of the case met the test for reasonability.

Seeking a Practical Age Discrimination Standard

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:March 30, 2009
Post category:Federal Civil Litigation Labor & Employment Law U.S. Supreme Court

In Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., being argued Tuesday, March 31, the Supreme Court will address how to analyze mixed-motive claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Nothing less than meaningful access for employment discrimination plaintiffs to relief under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (CRA of 1991) is at stake.

Background

To understand the importance of the Gross case to employment discrimination law, it is necessary to understand a fundamental distinction that has arisen in so-called individual disparate treatment cases, where a worker claims to have suffered an adverse employment action based on a protected characteristic under an employment discrimination statute. Initially, most of these cases were handled under the McDonnell Douglas pretext framework, which requires an employee to establish that the employer’s putative legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for its employment actions are pretextual and the real reason for the action was unlawful discrimination.

In 1989, the Supreme Court developed another model for proving disparate treatment discrimination in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. There, a woman denied promotion to partner in an accounting firm was able to show both legitimate and illegitimate motives for the employment action. Although a plurality of the Court decided that the plaintiff could make out a case by showing the illegitimate reasons for not promoting her were the “motivating reason,” a significant concurrence by Justice O’Connor set up that the illegitimate reason had to be a substantial part of the employer’s motivation and direct evidence was required to show that motivation. Many courts thereafter followed Justice O’Connor’s formulation.

Two years later, Congress enacted the CRA of 1991, requiring only that the illegitimate reason had to be motivating. Unfortunately, Congress did not make clear its intentions about what framework should govern age discrimination claims under the ADEA.