Casarella v. State of New York

Background

Mike Casarella worked for the New York State Department of Transportation as a probationary Highway Maintenance Worker Trainee II from March 18, 2015, through October 2, 2015. He worked at the DOT’s Sprainbrook Yard in Yonkers, New York. His duties included operating heavy machinery, maintaining equipment, and repairing and maintaining highways and bridges.

Casarella received probationary performance reviews. His first review rated his overall performance as satisfactory but identified several areas needing improvement. The record also showed that he was late nine times between May 8 and July 30, 2015. He received a counseling memorandum about tardiness and was warned that further lateness could lead to discipline. The parties also presented evidence that he failed to personally report certain absences and did not timely report workplace injuries.

Casarella complained in several letters about threats, harassment, and treatment of probationary employees. Those written complaints did not state that he was Italian or that the alleged harassment was based on his Italian heritage. Casarella later testified that coworkers, including Mike Krasnow and Hector Barranco, called him “Guinea” and subjected him to daily anti-Italian harassment. The defendants denied that the harassment occurred or that Casarella reported it to them. The opinion describes conflicting evidence about the frequency and duration of the alleged name-calling.

Casarella was injured on August 5, 2015, after he was assigned to collect paper near a roadway. His accounts of the incident differed. In some records, he said he ran to avoid a car and injured his ankle; in other accounts, he said a car hit him. He did not return to work afterward. Teliska requested Casarella’s termination based on poor performance and failures to follow DOT rules, and his employment ended effective October 2, 2015. The opinion states that Barranco and Krasnow did not participate in the termination decision.

Claims and Summary-Judgment Standard

Casarella asserted claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the New York State Human Rights Law, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The defendants moved for summary judgment under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56. Summary judgment is appropriate when the evidence shows no genuine dispute about a fact important to the case and the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. The court must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the party opposing the motion, but that party cannot rely only on unsupported or conclusory allegations.

Title VII Discrimination

The court granted summary judgment against Casarella’s Title VII national-origin discrimination claim. The court assumed that Casarella was a member of a protected class and qualified for his position, and that his termination was an adverse employment action. But it found no competent evidence that the officials who made the termination decision—Peter Teliska and Dyan Rajasingham—were motivated by anti-Italian bias.

The court also held that, even if Casarella had established an initial discrimination claim, the defendants had offered legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for the termination. Those reasons included documented lateness, failures to report absences and injuries as required, performance deficiencies, and failure to follow workplace rules. The court concluded that Casarella had not produced enough evidence for a reasonable factfinder to determine that those reasons were false or that national-origin discrimination was the real reason for his termination. The Title VII discrimination claim was dismissed.

Title VII Hostile Work Environment

The court granted summary judgment on the portion of the hostile-work-environment claim based on the alleged denial of a backup truck on August 5, 2015. Casarella’s testimony indicated that other crew members were nearby and faced the same danger, and that the backup truck was positioned incorrectly rather than withheld from him because of his national origin. The court found no evidence from which a reasonable juror could conclude that he was denied protection or exposed to danger because he was Italian.

The court denied summary judgment on the portion of the Title VII hostile-work-environment claim based on repeated anti-Italian slurs. Although the court described Casarella’s case as very weak and his testimony as inconsistent, it held that a reasonable juror could believe his consistent assertion that coworkers called him “Guinea” for some period while he worked at the DOT. Because deciding whether that testimony was truthful would require evaluating credibility, the court found a genuine factual dispute. This claim survived against the Department of Transportation to that extent.

Title VII Retaliation

The court dismissed Casarella’s Title VII retaliation claim. Casarella claimed that the DOT terminated him because he complained about anti-Italian harassment. The court found that the timing of his alleged complaint and termination was enough to support an initial inference of causation. But the defendants offered supported, non-retaliatory reasons for the termination, and Casarella did not provide enough evidence that those reasons were a cover for retaliation or that retaliation was the decisive cause of his termination.

New York State Human Rights Law

The court held that Casarella’s New York State Human Rights Law discrimination and retaliation claims failed for the same reasons as the corresponding Title VII claims. The court deemed his remaining state-law hostile-work-environment claim abandoned because he did not address the defendants’ arguments against it in his opposition to summary judgment. The opinion also states that the court had previously dismissed the NYSHRL claims against the Department of Transportation based on Eleventh Amendment immunity.

Federal Civil-Rights Claim

The court stated that Casarella’s claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 was based solely on the Equal Protection Clause. Section 1983 provides a way to seek relief for violations of federal constitutional rights by a person acting under state authority; it does not itself create the underlying constitutional right. Because the court found a triable factual dispute about whether Casarella experienced a hostile work environment based on his Italian heritage, it held that his § 1983 claim against Krasnow and Barranco in their individual capacities survived.

Disposition

Judge Nelson S. Roman granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment in part and denied it in part. The court dismissed the Title VII discrimination and retaliation claims and all remaining NYSHRL claims. The Title VII hostile-work-environment claim against the Department of Transportation survived except insofar as it relied on the alleged denial of a backup truck. The § 1983 claim against Krasnow and Barranco in their individual capacities also survived. The court scheduled a pretrial conference for November 12, 2020, and directed the clerk to terminate the summary-judgment motion.