Trial News

A jury verdict against Walmart for violating a worker’s reasonable accommodation under the ADA will stand, the Seventh Circuit has ruled. The defendant cannot use the appeal to re-litigate the facts of the case and overturn a jury’s decision, the court held. (Equal Empl’t Opportunity Comm’n v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2022 WL 2353026 (7th Cir. June 30, 2022).)

Paul Reina, who is deaf and legally blind, worked for Walmart as a cart attendant for 16 years. During his employment, he had three unpaid job coaches who assisted him as part of a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. But when a new manager was hired at the store, he believed that the job coaches were doing the majority of Reina’s work, so he suspended Reina and then treated him as a new hire who had to fill out paperwork to request the job coach accommodation with a medical questionnaire completed by a doctor.

As the process of reinstating Reina’s accommodation dragged on, he filed an administrative complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging that Walmart violated the ADA by refusing to provide the job coach as a reasonable accommodation. The EEOC brought a claim against Walmart, and a jury awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages for the defendant’s actions, finding that the company maliciously or recklessly disregarded Reina’s rights under the ADA.

The defendant appealed to the Seventh Circuit, arguing that the verdict should be overturned because, as a matter of law, Reina could not perform the essential functions of a cart attendant. It further asked the court to adopt a bright-line rule that a full-time job coach cannot qualify as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. It also argued that the punitive damages should be overturned because the EEOC relied on a novel theory of liability at trial.

The court pushed back, stating that by asking the court to enter judgment as a matter of law on whether Reina could perform the essential functions of a cart attendant, the defendant was asking the court to interfere with the fundamental fact-finding role of a jury. The court cautioned that “an appeal of a jury verdict is not an opportunity for the losing party to try the case anew.” The jury instructions at trial, which Walmart agreed to at the time, directed the jurors to determine the essential functions of the job and whether Reina was capable of performing them. This was an appropriate task that was “squarely within the domain of the jury,” the court concluded.

The court also rejected the defendant’s attempts to create a rule that full-time job coaches can never be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. An accommodation under the statute is only “per se unreasonable when the accommodation itself creates ‘an inability to do the job’s essential tasks.’” Otherwise, each case must be evaluated on its own, fact-based merit, the court explained.

Next, the court considered the defendant’s argument that it was entitled to judgment as a matter of law because the EEOC relied on a novel theory of liability and that as a result, punitive damages cannot be available because the defendant would not be on notice that it was discriminating under the ADA. The court disagreed with the defendant’s construction of failure to provide a reasonable accommodation as a novel liability theory simply because the facts involved a job coach, which had not been explicitly addressed before in the circuit. Because the analysis for the defendant’s ADA violation is fact-specific and based on the individual circumstances of the worker’s ability to perform essential job functions, it is irrelevant whether the issue of a job coach had come before the court previously. Walmart was already on notice as to how reasonable accommodations function under the law and that a jury would be the ultimate fact-finder.