In late September, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for the Western District of New York affirmed the dismissal by a district court’s judgment in a 2 to 1 decision of a class-action lawsuit that claimed a company’s refusal to hire ex-offenders with criminal convictions had a discriminatory impact on Black job applicants. The plaintiffs in Mandala and Barnett v. NTT Data, Inc., argued that they were hired by the company, but the offers were later revoked due to past criminal convictions, citing national statistics showing that African Americans are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates than whites. The 2018 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 class action complaint was dismissed for failure to state a claim, but upon appeal, the Second Circuit determined that “Plaintiffs have provided no basis on which to presume that their proffered statistics are representative of the applicant pool in question.”
Source: ESR Check, ESR News Blog, September 21, 2020
