1. Who has to prove a company discriminated against an employee? Do you agree with the burden of this obligation?

2. Do you believe that Dr. Alvarado-Santos could not possibly have experienced discrimination on the basis of national origin as long as the individual who assumed her responsibilities was of the same national origin as she was? In other words, since she and Dr. Devarie were both Puerto Rican, was it not possible that Dr. Rodríguez-Pichardo was discriminating against her on the basis of her national origin?

3. As an employer, what is the best way for you to protect the company from charges accusing one of your supervisors of discrimination such as the one involved in this case?

Issue: Whether the evidence set forth at trial would enable a reasonable jury to find that the Employer’s proffered nondiscriminatory reasons are pretextual, and the employee contract was in fact not renewed because of her gender and/or national origin. Was the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework applied correctly by the jury?

Facts: Dr. Ana Alvarado-Santos, a native of Puerto Rico, sued the Department of Health of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico for discriminatory failure to renew her contract, in violation of Title VII. Dr. Alvarado-Santos directed one of two Admission Centers at the Bavamón Correctional Complex. The contract of the other director, a male physician also originally from Puerto Rico, was renewed. Dr. Alvarado-Santos had experienced difficulties with her supervisor, a native of the Dominican Republic, who had been overheard making a disparaging remark about Puerto Rican doctors and asserting the superiority of Dominican doctors. The Department of Health claimed that the contract decision was based on the need to combine the two Admission Centers, and on the lower compliance rate of the Admission Center headed by Dr. Alvarado-Santos. The trial jury found in favor of Alvarado-Santos on both her claims of national origin and gender discrimination under Title VII. The Department of Health appealed and Alvarado-Santos cross-appealed, arguing that she was entitled to an award of front pay in addition to compensatory damages and back pay.

Decision: The First Circuit Court concluded that the evidence was insufficient to support a finding of discrimination and reversed, entering judgment for the Department of Health. The Court held that Alvarado-Santos failed to meet her burden of demonstrating that the nondiscriminatory reasons for contract nonrenewal offered by the Department of Health were pretextual, as required by the McDonnell Douglas framework. Based on the trial evidence, including the Puerto Rican national origin of the male colleague whose contract was renewed, “no reasonable jury could conclude” that Alvarado-Santos’ contract nonrenewal was motivated by national origin discrimination. In reversing, the Court surmised that the jury’s decision was “influenced by the entirely improper and inflammatory closing argument by plaintiff's counsel, pitting people from Puerto Rico against people from the Dominican Republic.” The closing argument by plaintiff’s counsel at trial included comments such as: “Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let it happen in Puerto Rico. You opened your arms to these people. They came in. You treated them fairly. And what do they do?” The court expressed its “dismay that, even while calling on the jury to uphold principles of equality and anti discrimination, plaintiff's counsel made inflammatory arguments to the jury based on the Dominican nationality of some individual defendants.”