Thompson v. Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut
Filing
46
Memorandum Opinion and Order granting re 37 MOTION for Summary Judgment. A separate judgment will be entered. Signed by District Judge Tom S. Lee on 10/4/13 (LWE)
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF MISSISSIPPI
EASTERN DIVISION
DAREADELL TERRELL THOMPSON
VS.
PLAINTIFF
CIVIL ACTION NO. 4:12CV112TSL-JMR
TRAVELERS INDEMNITY COMPANY
OF CONNECTICUT
DEFENDANT
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
This cause is before the court on the motion of defendant
Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut (Travelers) for summary
judgment pursuant to Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil
Procedure.
Plaintiff Dareadell Terrell Thompson has responded to
the motion and the court, having considered the memoranda of
authorities, together with attachments, submitted by the parties,
concludes that Travelers’ motion is well taken and should be
granted.
On February 26, 2010, plaintiff Dereadell Thompson was
terminated from his employment as a police officer with the City
of Meridian.
Following his termination, and after timely filing
an EEOC charge, he filed suit in this court against the City under
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. and
42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging he was terminated on account of his
race and that he was denied a fair appeal of his termination in
violation of his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights.
The
case was tried in June 2012 and resulted in a jury verdict for the
City on both claims.
A month later, on July 13, 2012, Thompson filed the present
action against Travelers for negligent misrepresentation, alleging
that a proximate, contributing cause of his termination was a
letter sent by Travelers to the City in September 2009 in which
Travelers, the City’s workers’ compensation insurer, negligently
and falsely reported that Thompson had obtained workers’
compensation benefits to which he was not entitled by
misrepresenting his work status to Travelers, and further, that
after it was brought to plaintiff’s attention that a benefits
check had been sent to him in error, plaintiff not only failed to
return the check as he said he would but cashed it and kept the
money.
Travelers argues in its motion for summary judgment that
Thompson’s claim against it fails as a matter of law for one or
more of the following grounds: (1) Thompson is collaterally
estopped from relitigating his wrongful termination issue upon
which his claim against Travelers is predicated; (2) Travelers’
alleged misrepresentations or false statements regarding
Thompson’s workers’ compensation claim were not the proximate
cause of Thompson’s termination by the City; and (3) Travelers
made no material misrepresentations or false statements to the
City regarding Thompson’s workers’ compensation claim.
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Travelers is not entitled to summary judgment on ground (1)
or ground (3).
As to ground (1), Travelers argues that in order
for Thompson to succeed on his claim against Travelers, he must
necessarily establish that he was wrongfully terminated by the
City and yet the jury in his previous lawsuit already found that
he was not wrongfully terminated, so that he is collaterally
estopped from relitigating this issue.
In fact, however,
Thompson’s suit against the City did not determine whether he was
wrongfully terminated.
Rather, the issues presented to the jury
were whether Thompson was discriminated against because of his
race and whether he was denied due process.
The jury was not
asked to determine and did not determine whether Thompson was
wrongfully terminated.
There is thus no merit to Travelers’
collateral estoppel argument.
Travelers’ argument as to
ground
(3) is also without merit, as Thompson has presented evidence that
in the court’s view is sufficient to create a genuine issue of
material fact as to whether Travelers’ letter to the City
contained material misrepresentations.
However, Travelers is entitled to summary judgment based on
ground (2), for in the court’s opinion, as a matter of law,
Travelers’ letter did not proximately cause or contribute to
plaintiff’s termination.
Ultimately, plaintiff was not terminated
on the basis that he attempted to defraud Travelers or that he
failed to return monies that had received from Travelers in error.
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Rather, he was terminated because the newly-elected police chief,
Lee Shelbourn, concluded, afer reviewing plaintiff’s personnel
file, that during his tenure with the police department, plaintiff
had repeatedly engaged in misconduct, and indeed had committed a
number of serious infractions, which Shelbourn believed warranted
his discharge.
That is, after reviewing plaintiff’s file,
Shelbourn concluded that plaintiff’s history of violations, and
the failure of progressive discipline, left him with “no
alternative but to terminate [plaintiff’s] employment.”1
Thompson asserts that Travelers’ letter was a proximate cause
of his termination since it was Travelers’ letter which prompted
Shelbourn to go back through his personnel file and look at his
previous disciplinary infractions, which in turn led to his
termination for those infractions.
He reasons that if Travelers
had not recklessly sent the letter making false charges concerning
the workers’ compensation claim, Shelbourn would not have gone
1
Shelbourn identified a number of violations in his
letter but found that his termination was warranted based on
plaintiff’s “particular conduct in using your position as a
Meridian police officer to obtain the assistance of a law
enforcement officer in another jurisdiction to gain unlawful entry
to a man's home; using City time and a City vehicle to hang
political door hangers in violation of law and your acknowledgment
that you knew on-duty political activity is not allowed; and
finally, forging the signature of a detective and a judge to
obtain a fraudulent subpoena.”
The court notes that in January 2013, Thompson was convicted
and sentenced to prison for wire fraud relating to the last listed
offense, i.e., forging the signatures of a justice court judge and
Meridian detective to obtain a fraudulent subpoena.
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through his file and terminated him; and he thus concludes that
Travelers’ actions were a proximate cause of his termination.
“Proximate cause is a concept which is more accurately
defined by reference to the distinct concepts of which it is
comprised, which are: ‘(1) cause in fact; and (2)
foreseeability.’”
Davis v. Christian Brotherhood Homes of
Jackson, Mississippi, Inc., 957 So. 2d 390, 404 (Miss. Ct. App.
2007) (citations omitted).
The Mississippi Supreme Court has
stated, as a broad proposition, that “[c]ause in fact means that,
but for the defendant's negligence, the injury would not have
occurred.”
Huynh v. Phillips, 95 So. 3d 1259, 1263 (Miss. 2012).
See also Ogburn v. City of Wiggins, 919 So. 2d 85, 91 (Miss. Ct.
App. 2005) (“‘Cause in fact’ means that the act or omission was a
substantial factor in bringing about the injury, and without it
the harm would not have occurred.”) (citation omitted).
is more to it than this.
But there
In Thompson v. Miss. Central Railroad
Co., the Mississippi Supreme Court described the cause-in-fact
concept, stating:
The proximate cause of an injury is that cause which, in
natural and continuous sequence, unbroken by any
efficient intervening cause, produced the injury, and
without which the result would not have occurred; or, as
otherwise stated, there must be an efficient causal
connection between the negligence complained of and the
injury, and that connection must be a natural and
continuous sequence unbroken by any other cause.
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175 Miss. 547, 166 So. 353–54 (1936).
See also Gulledge v. Shaw,
880 So. 2d 288, 293 (Miss. 2004) (stating that “the cause in fact
of an injury is that cause which, in natural and continuous
sequence unbroken by any efficient intervening cause, produces the
injury and without which the injury would not have occurred”).
Besides a finding of cause in fact, proximate cause also
requires an additional finding of foreseeability.
In the
proximate cause context, “[f]oreseeability means that a person of
ordinary intelligence should have anticipated the dangers that his
negligent act created for others.”
Johnson v. Alcorn State Univ.,
929 So. 2d 398, 411 (Miss. Ct. App. 2006).
As plaintiff points out, the question whether negligence
proximately caused a person’s injuries is ordinarily a jury
question in Mississippi.
West v. Drury Co., 412 Fed. Appx. 663,
669 (5th Cir. 2011) (citing Ill. Cent. Gulf R.R. Co. v. Milward,
902 So. 2d 575, 582 (Miss. 2005)).
See also Am. Creosote Works of
La. v. Harp, 215 Miss. 5, 12, 60 So. 2d 514, 517 (1952) (stating
that “[w]hen reasonable minds might differ on the matter,
questions of proximate cause and of negligence and of contributory
negligence are generally for determination of [a] jury.”).
however, no reasonable or fair-minded juror could find that
Travelers’ letter was a proximate cause of plaintiff’s
termination.
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Here,
First, relative to the issue of cause in fact, the court
notes that in his lawsuit against the City, Thompson took the
position that he would not have been fired had Bennie Dubose, the
black police chief who held office prior to Shelbourn, remained in
office.2
He claimed, in effect, that he was fired because the new
white police chief wanted him gone and used the allegations
relating to potential workers’ compensation fraud as an excuse to
look for a reason to fire him.
Under this theory, it would seem
there is lacking the required “efficient causal connection”
between Travelers’ negligence and plaintiff’s claimed injury;
Shelbourn’s determination to get rid of plaintiff, and his
willingness to dredge up old infractions as a basis to do so, is
the cause in fact of plaintiff’s injury.
Even if reasonable minds might differ as to whether the
circumstances might support a finding that Travelers’ alleged
negligence was a cause in fact of plaintiff’s termination, there
is clearly no reasonable basis on which a jury could find in
plaintiff’s favor on the element of foreseeability.
It is perhaps
arguable that Travelers could reasonably have foreseen that its
letter would prompt an investigation into the circumstances of
Thompson’s actions surrounding the workers’ compensation claim and
2
In his response to the City’s motion for summary
judgment, Thompson asserted that he “would not have been
terminated in the first place if the black police chief had not
been replaced by the white police chief.”
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the allegation that he had received and failed to return a check
to which he was not entitled; and Travelers could have foreseen
that Thompson might be disciplined, up to and including
termination, if the investigation confirmed the facts represented
by Travelers.
However, even according to plaintiff, the City
knew, prior to his final termination, that he had not attempted to
defraud Travelers and that the assertions in Travelers’ letter
were not accurate.
Clearly, Travelers could not reasonably have
foreseen that Thompson would be terminated anyway, based on
completely unrelated transgressions for which he had already been
disciplined.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that
Travelers could have foreseen that its letter would prompt
Shelbourn to review plaintiff’s disciplinary record, certainly
Travelers could not have reasonably anticipated that Shelbourn, in
reviewing plaintiff’s personnel file, would find therein a record
of offenses that would warrant plaintiff’s termination,
particularly based on past offenses for which plaintiff had
already been disciplined.
In sum, it is clear that plaintiff’s ultimate termination was
proximately caused by his own prior disciplinary actions, not by
any action of Travelers.
For this reason, plaintiff cannot
prevail on his claim in this cause and Travelers is entitled to
summary judgment.
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Accordingly, it is ordered that Travelers’ motion for summary
judgment is granted.
A separate judgment will be entered in accordance with Rule
58 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
SO ORDERED this 4th day of October, 2013.
/s/ Tom S. Lee
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
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