Perez-Gimenez, Juan M., United States District Judge
Trial court ordered an adverse inference instruction against defendant in an employment discrimination suit after defendant destroyed emails and resumes of applicants. Male employees of defendant’s company filed suit claiming that defendant only offered management positions to female employees.
During discovery, plaintiffs requested numerous internal emails between managers and the resumes of job applicants. Plaintiffs warned defendants to preserve the requested documents on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, defendant shredded the requested resumes and destroyed the emails according during a company-wide “software migration.”
The court imposed sanctions on defendant in the form of an adverse inference instruction and excluded testimony relating to defendant’s hiring practices. The court was not able to find the defendant acted in bad faith, but did find that the defendant was at least negligent in allowing the spoliation of relevant documents. Spoliation occurred when defendant destroyed the information that they were under a duty to preserve. Here, the duty to preserve was not at issue because much of the spoliation occurred following plaintiffs’ discovery requests. Because the court was unable to find that defendant acted in bad faith, the court held that a sanction more severe than an adverse inference was not warranted.
ERICK D. ZAYAS, Plaintiff-Intervenor,
v.
VENTURA CORPORATION LIMITED, Defendant
Counsel
Beatriz Biscardi, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Miami, FL, for Plaintiff.Edgar J. Rivera–Nunez, Villa Blanca, Caguas, PR, for Plaintiff–Intervenor.
Carlos R. Paula, Labor Counsels, Jaime E. Pico–Rodriguez, San Juan, PR, for Defendant.
OPINION AND ORDER
Ventura understands that Jésika Ruiz and María Mojica's emails were lost during a system migration, but who knows whether those employees actually erased their emails from all electronic records at the Company prior to their departure since both employees were actually terminated by Ventura. Those two employees were terminated involuntarily from their employment positions at Ventura and since they did not leave the Company in good terms, it is uncertain whether any emails really existed for them in Ventura's databases at the time of such migration or whether such employees had cleaned their email accounts before leaving the Company. At the time that the instant Complaint was filed neither Jésika Ruiz nor María Mojica were employed by Ventura.
The intended goals behind excluding evidence, or at the extreme, dismissing a complaint, are to rectify any prejudice the non-offending party may have suffered as a result of the loss of the evidence and to deter any future conduct, particularly deliberate conduct, leading to such loss of evidence ... Therefore, of particular importance when considering the appropriateness of sanctions is the prejudice to the non-offending party and the degree of fault of the offending party.