On March 8, 2017, the Rhode Island Supreme Court (RISC), for the first time, concluded that § 28-5-7(6) of the Rhode Island Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA), like its federal counterpart under Title VII, does not provide for individual liability of an employee of a defendant employer.
The case, Mancini v. City of Providence, 155 A.3d 159 (R.I. 2017), reached the RISC as a certified question from the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. The plaintiff, Sergeant Mark Mancini of the Providence Police Department, alleged that he was denied a promotion due to disability discrimination. Mancini initiated litigation against both the City of Providence and the Chief of Police, who made the decision resulting in the promotion denial. The Chief of Police moved to dismiss, claiming that § 28-5-7(6) did not allow for individual liability, which lead the District Court to bring the issue to the RISC.
The relevant portion of the statute states, “It shall be an unlawful employment practice . . . [f]or any person, whether or not an employer, employment agency, labor organization, or employee, to aid, abet, incite, compel, or coerce the doing of any act declared by this section to be an unlawful employment practice . . . .” Recognizing that courts both within and outside of Rhode Island had reached conflicting interpretations of similar statutory language, the RISC found the statute ambiguous and turned to “traditional principles of statutory construction” to conclude that it did not provide for individual liability. In short, “if the General Assembly intended to authorize the imposition of individual liability, it would have done so by using language far clearer than that employed in § 28-4-7(6).”
The RISC acknowledged that its interpretation deviated from that of courts in neighboring Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. Interpreting similar “aiding and abetting” language, courts in those jurisdictions had concluded that employees may be held individually liable for unlawful employment practices. Thus, employers operating in multiple locations throughout New England should take note that although their employees need not fear individual liability in Rhode Island, they may still face liability in neighboring jurisdictions.
Surprisingly, the RISC declined to give any deference to the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights (RICHR), which has significant responsibility for enforcing FEPA and which, according to its amicus brief submitted to the court, has “a long history of holding individual non-employer respondents liable for aiding and abetting discrimination.” Although the RISC acknowledged that, where a statute, such as the one at issue, is ambiguous, deference should generally be given to the interpretation of the agency charged with enforcing that statute, the court gave no such deference here. Rather, the court concluded that because the statute was ambiguous, and because the issue presented a pure question of law that was neither “fact-intensive” nor “of a technical nature,” the court’s interpretation of the statute controlled. Should the RISC adopt a similar posture toward agency deference in subsequent cases, it could undermine the RICHR’s interpretive authority.
To discuss how this decision affects your business practices, please contact the Hinckley Allen attorney with whom you regularly work, or one of our Labor & Employment attorneys.