A federal trial court in Maryland has slapped the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) with a substantial attorney’s fees sanction for continuing to prosecute a discrimination lawsuit after it became evident that the agency could not win its case.
The decision to award the company attorney’s fees in EEOC v. Freeman, No. 8:09-cv-02573 (D. Md. September 4, 2015), comes after the court had ruled earlier that the EEOC should have known to discontinue its Title VII litigation challenging Freeman’s background check policy once the report containing the “inexplicably shoddy work” of the EEOC’s expert, Kevin Murphy, was excluded.
Observing that “Yet, instead of folding, the EEOC went all in” in defending its efforts, and noting that the agency “insisted on playing a hand it could not win,” the court concluded that the EEOC now must face the music and reimburse the employer $938,771.50 of the $1.6 million in expenses it incurred defending the baseless lawsuit.
A copy of the trial court’s sanctions ruling in Freeman is available at ___________________________.