Glynn v. City of Stockton

Employment Discrimination

Eastern District

U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller

Defense Lawyers: Jesse Maddox, Kimberly Horiuchi, Liebert Cassidy Whitmore

Plaintiff’s Lawyers: Nancy McCoy, Gary R. Basham, Basham Law Group

The pair of Liebert Cassidy Whitmore attorneys who defeated an employment discrimination lawsuit against a fired city employee said they were able to turn her arguments of bias against her by employing a defense strategy they initially questioned whether to use.

The plaintiff was Jessica Glynn, who was hired to implement the Stockton Ceasefire Coalition program, a partnership-based violence prevention program. She was fired shortly before giving birth to her child, and sued the city for pregnancy discrimination and whistleblower retaliation.

Glynn pointed to comments from her Mormon boss about family “coming first” as evidence of a discriminatory perspective which implied she should be with family instead of working. Glynn v. City of Stockton, 15-CV00529 (E.D. Cal., filed March 9, 2015).

But Kimberly Horiuchi, an associate with Liebert Cassidy Whitmore who helped defend the case, worked with partner Jesse Maddox to go on offense. The pair worked to convince the jury that Glynn made unsubstantiated assumptions about her Mormon boss’ motivation in firing her.

“I think that they were able to sort of say, ‘Look, that’s effectively what discrimination is,’... she was doing it to him,” Horiuchi said.

Basham Law Group attorney Nancy McCoy, in her closing argument for the plaintiff, suggested that Glynn’s supervisior’s comments were “clearly discriminatory,” and said her client was fired for complaining about unfair pay and other problems.

Horiuchi said the defense strategy was to invert the plaintiff’s argument to persuade the jury to find in the city’s favor.

“To me, the long-term defense strategy is that while people may have been less conscious of implicit biases before, I think juries are more aware of implicit biases now,” Horiuchi said.

The defense also focused on what they described as Glynn’s problems in a pivotal job.

Maddox, who was the lead counsel on the case, said that the city “couldn’t risk keeping someone in that position who wasn’t laying the foundation in the direction that the city intended it to be laid.”

In the city of Stockton, which had suffered bankruptcy just before the lawsuit and was working to decrease high crime rates, Maddox said there was urgency to improve the program.

“That would be something that jurors could identify with — they had just been through bankruptcy — [and] their violent crime rate was so high,” he said.

On the whistleblower and discrimination claims, the jury returned a verdict unanimously in favor of the defense in February 2017.

— Caroline Hart