Hill v. State

1

WYNEIL HILL, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. STATE OF IOWA, IOWA DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES, and GLENWOOD RESOURCE CENTER, Defendants-Appellants.

No. 22-0653

Court of Appeals of Iowa

March 8, 2023

Appeal from the Iowa District Court for Mills County, Richard H Davidson, Judge.

The defendants appeal an adverse jury verdict, raising alleged evidentiary errors by the district court.

Brenna Bird, Attorney General, and Chandlor G. Collins (until withdrawal) and Robert J. Thole, Assistant Attorneys General for appellants.

Gregory G. Barntsen and Joseph D. Thornton of Smith, Peterson Law Firm, LLP, Council Bluffs, for appellee.

Heard by Bower, C.J., and Badding and Buller, JJ.

BADDING, JUDGE.

Glenwood Resource Center,^[1] a facility for Iowans with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses, appeals a jury verdict in favor of its former employee, Wyneil Hill, on his claims of disability discrimination and constructive discharge. Glenwood claims the district court abused its discretion in several pretrial evidentiary rulings on the parties' motions in limine. On the claims where error was properly preserved for our review, we find no abuse of discretion and affirm the judgment for Hill.

I. Background Facts

Hill is an army veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of seeing his sergeant get shot in the stomach on a mission in the late 1980s. Decades later, while employed at Glenwood as a resident treatment worker, Hill was caring for a resident with a colostomy when his disorder was triggered. In an email to his supervisor after the incident on August 3, 2019, Hill wrote that seeing the resident's intestines through his stoma caused him to have "flashbacks of fellow soldiers being wounded in battle. Being close to those who have open organ areas is bad for me. I had no clue that I would see clients like this or I could have mentioned it specifically."

Glenwood referred Hill to a therapist, and he remained off work through August 13 when he met with his human resources manager, Natalie McEwen, and a shift administrator to discuss his return to work. Hill went to the meeting in hopes that he could go back to work the next day in an area where he would not have to care for residents with colostomies. Despite this request, McEwen did not give Hill a letter that she had drafted on August 12 temporarily reassigning him to a kitchen staff position. She instead told him that Glenwood could not "100 percent guarantee that he was never going to see the things that triggered him," even though there were only three to four residents-out of the 100 or so there at the time-who had colostomies. Feeling that he had no other option, Hill resigned. Although McEwen told him that he "could resign without prejudice," she marked his separation form as not eligible for rehire.

After leaving his job at Glenwood, Hill could not find other employment. He sued Glenwood in November 2020 for disability discrimination and constructive discharge, alleging he was not provided with reasonable accommodations for his disability of post-traumatic stress disorder, which forced him to resign. The jury returned a verdict for Hill on both claims, awarding him $142,500 in lost earnings and $150,000 in non-economic damages.

Glenwood appeals, claiming the district court abused its discretion in: (1) admitting the August 12, 2019 letter temporarily reassigning Hill to a kitchen staff position; (2) prohibiting Glenwood from providing context for the letter and explaining why it was not provided to Hill at the meeting on August 13; (3) excluding evidence about Hill's "criminal history, drug addiction, therapy records, and other items included in his employment background checks"; and (4) admitting evidence about the training, or lack thereof, that Hill received for his position at Glenwood.

II. Error Preservation

Most of Glenwood's brief focuses on the admission of the August 12, 2019 letter into evidence. It argues that Hill used this letter "to show an accommodated position was available and used [Glenwood's] failure to provide the letter to him at the August 13th meeting as proof [Glenwood was] not interested in working with him to find an accommodation." See Goodpaster v. Schwan's Home Serv., Inc., 849 N.W.2d 1, 16-18 (Iowa 2014) (discussing the elements of a reasonable-accommodation claim). The problem, according to Glenwood, is that Hill was being reassigned to food and nutrition services because of an investigation into his workplace behavior and Hill's claim that he was subjected to racial slurs, not to accommodate his post-traumatic stress disorder. As a result, Glenwood claims the letter "was not relevant to any claim or defense in this trial." Glenwood also claims that once the letter was admitted, the district court should have allowed it to explain "why the letter was drafted, i.e., the ongoing investigations."

We cannot address these claims because Glenwood has not provided us with "a sufficient record disclosing the error upon which it relies."^[2] Estes v. Progressive Classic Ins. Co., 809 N.W.2d 111, 115 (Iowa 2012). Glenwood's motion in limine did not seek to exclude the August 12, 2019 temporary reassignment letter, though it did ask that Hill be prohibited from offering evidence about Glenwood's investigation into his workplace behavior and coworkers' racial slurs. The district court granted that portion of Glenwood's motion, ruling at a pretrial conference: "I'd like to make this as clean as possible and keep it a disability case and constructive discharge, period." So the parties were instructed that they could not offer evidence about "Hill's behavior or coworkers' behavior, as well as the racial slur" allegations.

To comply with the court's ruling, the parties had to remove and redact some of their proposed exhibits before trial. At the end of the pretrial conference, the court told counsel to contact him if they had any disagreements while completing that task. They apparently did so, as the court noted on the record before jury selection on the first day of trial:

The court held another pretrial conference, one much briefer and was not on the record via telephone. And as part of that pretrial conference over the telephone on March 3rd, the court was appraised that the impasse involved Plaintiff's Exhibit 17 and a similar Exhibit FF of defendant's [the August 12, 2019 temporary reassignment letter]. The court ruled that this exhibit was admissible.

When Hill offered the letter at trial, Glenwood responded: "We would just object in line with a prior ruling by the Court." Trouble is, we don't know what objection Glenwood made to the letter at the unreported hearing or the basis for the court's ruling. See In re F.W.S., 698 N.W.2d 134, 135 (Iowa 2005) ("The court may not speculate as to what took place or predicate error on such speculation."). Without that information, or any indication from the record that Glenwood asked to provide context for the letter, we cannot address its first two claims on appeal. See id. ("It is the appellant's duty to provide a record on appeal affirmatively disclosing the alleged error relied upon."); see also Iowa R. App. P. 6.806(1) ("A statement of the proceedings may be prepared to create a record of a hearing or trial for which a transcript is unavailable if a party deems it necessary to complete the record on appeal."); Jones v. Glenwood Golf Corp., 956 N.W.2d 138, 143 n.1 (Iowa 2021) ("A record can be made of off-the-record colloquies.").

III. Merits

We begin our analysis of Glenwood's remaining two claims with some basic principles of evidence: "Relevant evidence is admissible, unless provided otherwise. However, irrelevant evidence is not admissible. Evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence; and the fact is of consequence in determining the action." Eisenhauer ex rel. T.D. v. Henry Cnty. Health Ctr., 935 N.W.2d 1, 17 (Iowa 2019) (cleaned up) (quoting Iowa Rs. Evid. 5.401, .402) . But even relevant evidence "is not admissible 'if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.'" McClure v. Walgreen Co., 613 N.W.2d 225, 235 (Iowa 2000) (quoting Iowa R. Evid. 5.403). The determination of relevancy, and application of the balancing test in Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.403, rests within the sound discretion of the district court. Id.; see Harris v. Jones, 471 N.W.2d 818, 821 (Iowa 1991). We will only find an abuse of that discretion if it was exercised "on grounds or for reasons clearly untenable or to an extent clearly unreasonable." Mohammed v. Otoadese, 738 N.W.2d 628, 631-32 (Iowa 2007) (citation omitted).

A. Background-check evidence

Glenwood claims the district court abused its discretion in excluding evidence that would have appeared on Hill's background checks for employment, including an "assault conviction from 2014," delinquent child-support payments, "drug history," "investigations into [Hill] abusing his stepdaughter," "criminal history," and "therapy records," plus Hill's "background and record check evaluation" at Glenwood.^[3] It argues "these items were relevant with respect to [Hill's] claim for damages, specifically because the types of jobs he was applying for, those in criminal justice and as a contracted driver (Uber/Lyft), perform background checks and would disqualify and did disqualify him for employment." With this evidence being excluded from trial, Glenwood argues Hill was able to testify that the reason he remained unemployed was because Glenwood marked his separation form as ineligible for rehire.

To put this claim into context, Hill testified at trial that after leaving his job at Glenwood in August 2019, he had been...