Justices Order New Trial in Race Bias Suit

SAN FRANCISCO — A Los Angeles race discrimination case that led to an $89.5-million jury award against Hughes Aircraft Co. must be retried, the California Supreme Court decided Monday.

The unanimous ruling strongly reaffirmed the broad discretion of trial judges to toss out jury verdicts they believe are not supported by the evidence.

The state high court sided with Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Malcolm H. Mackey, who presided over the 1994 discrimination case brought by two former Hughes employees against the then-aerospace company.

Mackey ordered a retrial on the grounds that the downtown Los Angeles jury had been inflamed by prejudice and passion.

A Court of Appeal later reduced the $80 million awarded in punitive damages to $7.8 million, bringing the total award to $17.35 million. But the appellate court refused to uphold Mackey’s order for a new trial.

Some African Americans and plaintiffs’ lawyers have charged that Mackey is hostile to race discrimination claims, and a comment Mackey made about “this minority jury” in the Hughes case was cited in briefs before the state high court.

Santa Monica lawyer Ian Herzog, who represents the former Hughes employees, questioned Monday why the court would give “unbridled, broad discretion” to judges who may have race and sex biases.

He said Mackey appears to think “that only white people can be trusted to sit dispassionately on matters of race.”

But Justice Janice Rogers Brown, writing for the court, said the trial judge “is in the best position to assess the reliability of a jury’s verdict.”

A judge’s decision to set aside a jury verdict and grant a new trial cannot be overturned on appeal unless it can be shown that no reasonable person would have agreed with the judge, the court said.

“So long as the outcome is uncertain at the close of trial--that is, so long as the evidence can support a verdict in favor of either party--a properly constructed new trial order is not subject to reversal on appeal,” wrote Brown, the court’s only African American justice.

One of the plaintiffs, Jeffrey Lane, who is African American, charged that Hughes failed to appoint him to several management positions because of his race, and then retaliated against him after he complained to Hughes’ human resources department.

David Villalpando, who also sued Hughes, contended that Hughes demoted him for refusing to write a poor job evaluation of Lane. Hughes denied the charges.

Lane is an engineer “with an incredibly high IQ,” his attorney said.

“We discovered that the average nonblack [Hughes employee] got his first pay promotion in three to five years,” said Herzog. “It took Lane over 10 years to get his first one, and he had to beg for it.”

He said the jury included whites, blacks and Latinos. “Here we have a clear-cut case, and these people have to retry it,” Herzog said. “It really puts a damper on these kinds of cases.”

Herzog said he expects to prevail again. Paul Grossman, Hughes’ lawyer, countered that he believes Hughes will win in the retrial.

“It has been a five-year battle to achieve a new trial and undo a trial that clearly did not work,” Grossman said. “ . . . Hughes didn’t do anything wrong.”

He complained that plaintiffs’ attorneys tried to smear the reputation of Mackey.

“They were trying to send a message to the judiciary that any judge who overturns a civil rights verdict . . . is going to be accused of being racist,” Grossman said. “The tactics were outrageous.”

Mackey overturned another race discrimination award in 1996. In that case, a jury had awarded $11.1 million to a Nigerian-born salesman who sued his employer. The case eventually was settled out of court.

Critics of Mackey at the time publicly charged that he was hostile to discrimination cases. They cited comments he made in a 1980 story in The Times.

At the time, a Filipino woman had brought a paternity suit against Mackey, and members of the Filipino community claimed that Mackey was trying to get her deported. Mackey denied the deportation charge.

Referring to the Filipino woman with whom he had a child, Mackey told a Times reporter: “Were this woman white, this situation never would have come up, because this woman [is in] some parts irrational. The situation would never would have come up, it would have been settled.”

In the Hughes case, Mackey found that there was not substantial evidence supporting Lane’s discrimination and retaliation claims, and that Hughes did not retaliate against Villalpando.

A spokesman for Hughes Electronics Corp. said the company was pleased with the court’s decision. Hughes’ aircraft division was sold in 1997, and Hughes is now a telecommunications company.

Brown, in a concurring opinion signed by Justice Ming W. Chin, said punitive damages should rarely be more than triple the amount awarded for economic losses.

Times staff writer Ken Reich contributed to this story.