WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court reinstated a discrimination ruling Monday in favor of 6,000 black applicants for Chicago firefighting jobs in the 1990s, leaving public employers in a pickle if they are required by law to use tests for deciding who should be hired or promoted.
After two Supreme Court decisions with very different results in the past year, employers can be sued for using tests that screen out most minorities, and they also can be sued by high-scoring white applicants if the test scores go unused.
The apparent conflict is built into the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the justices said Monday. “It is a problem for Congress, not one federal courts can fix,” said Justice Antonin Scalia.
He spoke for the court in a 9-0 ruling in a case that began in 1995 when 26,000 applicants took a written test to become a city firefighter. Faced with the large number applicants for only several hundred jobs, the city decided it would consider only those who scored 89 or above.
This cut-off score excluded a high percentage of the minority applicants. After a trial in 2005, U.S. District Judge Joan Gottschall ruled the test had an illegal “disparate impact” because the city had not justified the use of the cut-off score. Experts had testified that applicants who scored in the 70s or 80s were shown to be capable of succeeding as firefighters.
The city did not appeal the finding but said the firefighters had waited too long to appeal. In Monday’s ruling, the high court disagreed.
Last year, however, the high court ruled that disappointed white firefighters were victims of discrimination by city officials in New Haven, Conn., who had dropped a promotion test after they learned no black candidates were among the top scorers. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices said this amounted to illegal racial discrimination against the white firefighters.
The Supreme Court on Monday also:
• Reinstated the sex-trafficking and forced-labor convictions of a New York man dubbed the “S&M Svengali.”
• Agreed to decide whether a Texas death-row inmate should have access to evidence for DNA testing that he says could clear him of three murders.
• Said it will consider ending a lawsuit that challenges Arizona’s tax breaks for donations to private-school scholarships. Opponents claim the breaks funnel taxpayer money disproportionately to religious schools.
• Rejected an appeal by Microsoft Corp. to review a jury verdict that it infringed on a patent owned by Alcatel- Lucent.
• Ordered the federal appeals court in Atlanta to take another look at the case of Lawrence Jefferson, a death- row inmate accused of beating a co- worker to death. Jefferson argues that his lawyers failed to raise childhood brain damage as a mitigating factor during sentencing.
• Agreed to hear a dispute between businesses and consumers over arbitration agreements, looking at whether a company may force customers to resolve disagreements individually or must allow them to band together.
• Said it will decide whether automakers can avoid facing product-liability lawsuits over lap-only seat belts because they meet minimum federal safety standards.
