Legal Docket - Fanning the flames of false accusations

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning, June 13th, 2022 and we’re glad you’ve joined us for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning to you, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

We expect the U.S. Supreme Court to hand down opinions this morning. Thirty argued cases remain to be decided out of a total of sixty-five accepted.

Last week, the justices handed down four opinions.

One is a unanimous decision dealing with corporate bankruptcy, what’s known as Chapter 11. An amendment to that law raised the fees U.S. Trustees earn for managing those bankruptcy proceedings. The problem is that North Carolina and Alabama were exempt from the law, because those states use a different system of bankruptcy.

The justices found that exemption violates the clause in the U.S. Constitution that requires uniform laws on bankruptcies throughout the country.

The case isn’t over. It’s now remanded to lower court to figure out what to do in light of the Supreme Court’s finding.

REICHARD: Alright, second ruling, also unanimous. It says an airline employee can take up her wage dispute in court in lieu of arbitration.

The Federal Arbitration Act provides for private resolution of contract disputes, but explicitly exempts contracts involving employment of “seamen,” “railroad employees,” or “any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.”

The high court agreed with the airline employee who argued she falls under that last class of workers. So she doesn’t have to arbitrate her wage dispute and may proceed with her overtime pay claim in court.

EICHER: On to the third decision, this one 7-2 against the family of a severely injured child. The case involved a 13-year-old girl, who suffered a catastrophic brain injury when she stepped off a school bus and was hit by a truck.

The state Medicaid agency in her home state of Florida paid for the girl’s immediate medical needs. Then the family settled a lawsuit against the school district for $800,000. The state then placed a lien on that money, citing a law that entitles the state to recover a percentage for medical expenses. In this case, around $300,000.

The family argued the state is entitled only to a portion of the settlement that covered the girl’s past medical expenses.

But the majority justices disagreed. They found the relevant distinction is between medical and non-medical expenses, not past and future medical expenses.

The family must reimburse the state the $300,000.

The girl is now in her 20s and remains on life support with the state Medicaid fund covering her ongoing expenses.

REICHARD: This last ruling is 6-3 in favor of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent who showed up at an inn without a warrant and roughed up the owner. The innkeeper sued for violation of his civil rights.

Generally, you can’t sue federal officials for civil rights violations. Some exceptions exist, and those are called Bivens claims. And here, the court declined to let the inn owner pursue either of his two civil-rights claims: one for unreasonable search and seizure; the other for freedom of speech. The opinion says Congress is best positioned to create remedies in this context than is the high court.

It’s not an unexpected result, but it is disappointing for those working to hold federal officials accountable when they violate the rights of others.

EICHER: Today we return to our summertime Legal Docket, talking about cases that don’t make it to the Supreme Court but that are nonetheless noteworthy. Today’s case involves Oberlin College in Ohio and how the school acted toward a local business owner who fought back.

Oberlin in May filed an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court after it lost tens of millions of dollars in a lawsuit by a local bakery.

Here’s the background to the case. In November 2016, an Oberlin student used a fake ID to try to buy alcohol at Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery. The student also tried to shoplift and when confronted, he ran.

Two more students jumped into the fray and began beating the employee. All three of the students eventually pleaded guilty to theft.

But the case didn’t end there. It just got started. Accusations of racism against the business owners took off like wildfire. The students are black, the business owners white.

REICHARD: The facts weren’t in yet.

Bakery owner David Gibson told CBS News in 2019:

GIBSON: Our feeling is that is what you have in life, is your reputation. It had taken us generations to build that reputation for us, and in just one day, we’d lost it.

One person who’s followed the case from the start and attended every day of the trial is William Jacobson. He’s a professor at Cornell law school and founder of the Legal Insurrection blog.

I wanted some context for what happened at Oberlin.

JACOBSON: …they were already, in the words of the student newspaper, melting down over Trump's election. A student writing in a student journal called it Oberlin’s culture of theft, that the students felt that it was their right to steal from the local stores. So the Gibson family was already very attuned to the problem of shoplifting. They had called the police many times regarding shoplifting.

The protests got bigger and went on for several days outside the bakery.

Things went from bad to worse:

JACOBSON: There were calls for the college community to boycott the bakery. And I think you could imagine the impact that would have if you're in a college town, and nobody at the college will come to your store. That's pretty devastating...

The store owners tried to restore their business and their reputation without resorting to litigation.

JACOBSON: And so David Gibson testified that he had meetings with the college, where he asked the college to please rescind the accusations that they're racist, to please rescind the accusations that they engaged in racial profiling, and that if they would do that, it would help the bakery restore its reputation and we could move along. The college refused to do that, refused to either. He didn't even ask for an apology. He just asked for a statement clarifying the college's position and they wouldn't do it.

The college also indicated that if the Gibson's wanted their bakery business, with the food service vendor back, they would have to agree to certain conditions. One of the conditions would be that anytime they stopped an Oberlin College student for shoplifting, they would have to call the college, not the police. And the Gibson's couldn't agree to that either. And ultimately about a year later they filed the lawsuit.

I reached out to the top administrators of the school at the time of these events for comment: College president Marvin Krislov. General Counsel Donica Thomas Varner. Meredith Raimondo who was Dean of Students.

None got back to me for comment.

Jacobson told me what he observed at trial:

JACOBSON: There was testimony by multiple witnesses that the college’s Dean of Students, Meredith Raimando, not only participated but led the protests and also led the handing out of a flyer, which became the basis for the defamation claim, of accusing the bakery of having a long history of racial profiling and of having assaulted these students…The dispute percolated for many months, the college directed the food service provider to cut off the bakery that ultimately became the basis for a claim which nobody seems to want to pay attention to, which was tortious interference with business.

So part of the ultimate verdict was defamation. And part of it was also tortious interference with contract, because they had an independent contract with a food service provider, who then had a contract with the college and the college got them cut off.

One aspect that caught Jacobson’s attention was the cavalier attitude of the school toward this small business and the damage done to its century-old good reputation in the community.

JACOBSON: They were extremely dismissive in their answer towards the bakery. They were pejorative towards the Gibsons in their answer. And I remember writing that based on everything that's publicly known at that time, this approach is not going to work, because these were actual shoplifters. There's no evidence they were stopped because they were black. And in fact, the evidence had come out from analysis of police records, the percentages of non white people reported by the Gibsons for shoplifting almost exactly mirrored the percentage of non white people in the community. So basically, they called the police and tried to get arrested anybody who shoplifted.

The jury didn’t believe the school’s defense that it hadn’t defamed anyone or interfered with any contract.

The jury came back with $11 million in compensatory damages. And not only for defamation or tortious interference with a contract:

JACOBSON: And it was also intentional infliction of emotional distress as to Grandpa Gibson because he was particularly targeted by people.

The end result was that the compensatory and punitive damage component was, and I'm going to round numbers here, $25 million dollars. In addition to that, the plaintiffs, the Gibsons, whose lawyers were on contingency fee, got over $6 million in attorneys fees and costs…

The fees for the school’s attorneys? Over $5 million.

JACOBSON: Which goes to show you this was very vigorously defended. This college fought everything- motion after motion after motion after motion- for multiple years before it ever got to trial. And so the judgment that was entered was just under 32 million dollars, 31 million and change. And the college was, to avoid execution on the judgment, to avoid the Gibsons being able to seize assets, were required to post an appeal bond in the amount of $36 million.

So Oberlin lost. Then it appealed, and lost on appeal. Now the college has appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court. No word yet whether it’ll take the case.

And that’s where things stand today.

But all this didn’t come out of nowhere.

JACOBSON: There were controversies that made national news at Oberlin, about alleged cultural appropriation in the dining hall, that there were ethnic dishes that were not being properly prepared. And that was racist. And that was a terrible thing. And the students protested, and everybody laughed at it.

But this was Oberlin. It was a culture of always looking for a victim, always looking for a reason to accuse people of racism. One of the things that was seen is one student during this turmoil supposedly saw somebody in a Klan robe walking on campus at night. It turned out that it was a female student who had wrapped herself in a blanket to protect herself from the cold when she was walking home one night. It was not a KKK sighting, but that was the atmosphere on campus.

That erroneous KKK sighting happened in 2013. The Gibsons’ debacle occurred three years later.

It’s sad to report that two of the older Gibson men, 90 year old Grandpa Allyn Gibson and his son David Gibson, have both died during this dragged-out litigation, still on appeal.

Jacobson tells me the bakery business is just hanging on.

Meanwhile, top administrators I asked to interview? The general counsel, the president, the dean of students? They all have jobs at other colleges.

JACOBSON: And that, I think, is the moral of the story here, which is that there is a very, very nasty, oppressive trend in higher education that we've seen play itself out in the Gibson's bakery case.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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