The Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the Department of Veterans Affairs, finding a fired pharmacist lacked evidence that medication-error discipline masked race bias or retaliation.
What happened
The Seventh Circuit on Thursday upheld a win for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in a former pharmacist’s Title VII suit, ruling that he did not show his firing during probation was a cover for race discrimination or retaliation over an internal EEO complaint.
Hakeem Abayomi, who worked as a clinical pharmacist at a VA facility in Hines, Illinois, alleged he was fired because he is Black and because he had filed an internal discrimination complaint against his supervisor. A three-judge panel affirmed summary judgment for the department in an opinion by Judge Jackson-Akiwumi, joined by Judges Hamilton and Kirsch.
The court said the VA gave a nondiscriminatory reason for the termination: careless work performance, failure to follow policies and medication errors during Abayomi’s probationary period. The termination letter cited two errors discussed in a Weingarten investigation, and the opinion noted that Abayomi admitted three of four alleged medication errors, including that he had dispensed the wrong heparin amount because he was rushing.
Abayomi argued the stated reason was pretextual and pointed to other pharmacists who he said were treated more favorably. The panel was not persuaded, saying the comparator evidence did not line up because one pharmacist did not share the same decision-maker, was not probationary, and contested and was cleared of most alleged errors. The court also said it could not “fill in evidentiary holes with speculation.”
The panel separately rejected the VA’s threshold argument that Abayomi’s withdrawn EEO complaint could not support a retaliation claim. The filing of a discrimination charge, not whether it remained pending, was the protected activity, the court said, warning that the department’s theory would create an incentive for employers to pressure workers into withdrawing complaints.
But that point did not save the retaliation claim. The panel said the causation problem remained: although Abayomi pointed to the roughly two-month span between his EEO complaint and his firing, he lacked corroborating evidence that retaliatory motive, rather than the medication errors, caused the termination.
The court concluded that, viewing the evidence as a whole and in Abayomi’s favor, the record was insufficient to support either his race discrimination or retaliation claim.