A recent federal court decision in an employment racial discrimination matter highlights the importance of alleging violations of both federal and state antidiscrimination laws when bringing forth suit.

In McKenna v. City of Philadelphia, the federal district court drastically reduced the plaintiffs’ jury award from $10 million to $900,000 after finding that the plaintiffs had failed to plead state law causes of action. 

The plaintiffs, Philadelphia police officers, had filed suit against the City of Philadelphia, alleging that they had been retaliated against after complaining about the racially discriminatory treatment of their African-American colleagues by the police department.  Their complaints, however, included only causes of action pursuant to Title VII and other federal civil rights statutes but did not include any causes of action pursuant to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act (PHRA), the state’s antidiscrimination statute. 

Following trial, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiffs in the collective amount of $10 million in compensatory damages.  

As Title VII contains a statutory cap of $300,000 per plaintiff for compensatory damages, the City moved the federal district court to apply the statutory cap to the plaintiffs' damages awards.  The plaintiffs sought to avoid the effect of the statutory cap by having the federal district court “mold” the verdict to apportion the excess compensatory damages to a claim under the PHRA, a practice previously sanctioned by the federal court of appeals.  In most respects, a PHRA claim is analyzed identically to one pursued under Title VII.  One way in which the PHRA and Title VII differ is that the PHRA does not include a cap on compensatory damages. 

Finding that the plaintiffs never pled violations of the PHRA in their Complaints and, consequently, did not try them to a verdict, the federal district court refused to mold the verdict to apportion the excess compensatory damages to a claim under the PHRA for that reason. 

The McKenna decision clearly reaffirms why a complaint in this area of the law must include violations of both federal and state antidiscrimination laws.  This glaring mistake cost the plaintiffs in McKenna $9.1 million.  

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