Watson Spence partners, Alfreda Sheppard and Louis Hatcher, have won a big trial victory over the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC sued Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital (Phoebe) for disability discrimination and retaliation in a lawsuit filed in 2017. Five years and one day after the filing of the lawsuit, a federal jury in the United Stated Middle District of Georgia delivered its verdict in favor of Phoebe, flatly rejecting the accusations made by the EEOC.
“It took the jury less than an hour to understand what the EEOC folks apparently could not grasp over a period of five years — that the four Phoebe employees accused of violating federal law had done nothing of the sort,” said Hatcher. “Those ladies had a combined 148 years of experience at Phoebe, and this is the first time anyone had ever filed a charge of discrimination against any of them. We were furious with the EEOC for not doing a proper investigation and accusing these ladies without any rational reason for doing so.”
“They have had to live with these false accusations hanging over them for the past five years,” said Ms. Sheppard. “The EEOC claimed that in 2020 that they ‘achieved a successful outcome in 95.8 percent of all district court resolutions,’ but we were not deterred because we were determined to clear these ladies’ good names, and we did.”