Ricci V. Destefano Case Study

1548 Words7 Pages

The City of New Haven, Connecticut, in 2003, had vacant positions within their Fire Department. The City desired to fill these positions and pursued a means to identify internal candidates for promotional opportunities. Charles E. Mitchell (2013) writes, “The City hired Industrial /Organization Solutions, Inc. (IOS) to develop and administer its examination at a cost of $100,000.000. IOS took painstaking efforts to design and develop a test that was fair, job related, and consistent with business necessity” (p. 45). The examination outcome indicated that the white candidates had done far better than the minority candidates. Later, this is a case brought before the U.S. Supreme Count know as Ricci v. DeStefano. Using the article written by …show more content…

The federal district court dismissed Ricci’s Title VII and equal protection claims. The Second Circuit upheld the court’s ruling and denied a re-hearing. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a certiorari. The U.S. Supreme Court brought the question before them according to Charles Mitchell (as cited in Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009) by framing it as “whether the purpose to avoid disparate-impact liability excuses what otherwise would be prohibited disparate-treatment discrimination”. Charles Mitchell (2013) went on to say, “by not promoting the more successful White employees, was this an act of illegal disparate treatment under Title VII (p. 43)? The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal disparate treatment. Assisting the U.S. Supreme Court in their ruling is the established Uniform Guidelines on Employment Selection Procedures (UGESP). The guidelines state, when an employer determines that adverse impact was evident in its testing process, they shall (1) valid the procedures (test), (2) confirm the linkage to its job, (3) consider alternative testing procedures (Mitchell, p. 45). The City choose to not consider any of the