Photo: Tesla
After Tesla was sentenced to pay $136.9 million to Owen Diaz due to racism episodes in Fremont on October 4, the company appealed the decision on November 17. According to the company, the punitive damages award of $130 million “simply cannot stand.” Responding to that appeal, Diaz’s lawyers said the point of that high value is precisely to educate Tesla to avoid racism.
According to Bloomberg, Diaz’s attorneys said on December 7 that “Tesla will continue to engage in the same reprehensible conduct” if the decision is reverted. Considering this is the second time the company has been convicted for doing very little to prevent racist episodes on its premises, that’s a valid point.
In August, Tesla lost an arbitration case against Melvin Berry and had to pay him $1 million. Berry was called by racial slurs twice by his supervisors. Instead of suing Tesla in regular courts, like Owen Diaz, Berry had to go through an arbitration process because he was a direct Tesla employee. Diaz escaped that because he was a contractor.
Right after the court decision, Valerie Capers Workman wrote for Tesla employees giving her version of the facts. Tesla’s VP of People said it was an “unfair verdict” considering all that the company does to prevent racism in its factories. For Diaz’s attorneys, “Tesla’s post-trial briefing shows that it has still not learned its lesson.”
Diaz’s verdict is considered one of the highest ones in U.S. history for racial discrimination coming from an individual plaintiff. In his lawyers’ words, that demonstrates that “the jury emphatically disagreed with Tesla’s self-serving, counterfactual fantasy, which was no more persuasive at trial than it is now.”
That said, what Diaz’s attorney asked the court was to ignore Tesla’s request for a new trial. The verdict would be fully justified by “the singularly reprehensible nature of Tesla’s conduct.” Legal experts in similar cases say that it is not unlikely that the EV maker will manage to cut the punitive damages award in half. Although that would still be an impressive amount of money, would Tesla avoid similar situations if it could pay less? If you remember that it still names warranty repairs as goodwill fixes, that will surely make you wonder.
In August, Tesla lost an arbitration case against Melvin Berry and had to pay him $1 million. Berry was called by racial slurs twice by his supervisors. Instead of suing Tesla in regular courts, like Owen Diaz, Berry had to go through an arbitration process because he was a direct Tesla employee. Diaz escaped that because he was a contractor.
Right after the court decision, Valerie Capers Workman wrote for Tesla employees giving her version of the facts. Tesla’s VP of People said it was an “unfair verdict” considering all that the company does to prevent racism in its factories. For Diaz’s attorneys, “Tesla’s post-trial briefing shows that it has still not learned its lesson.”
Diaz’s verdict is considered one of the highest ones in U.S. history for racial discrimination coming from an individual plaintiff. In his lawyers’ words, that demonstrates that “the jury emphatically disagreed with Tesla’s self-serving, counterfactual fantasy, which was no more persuasive at trial than it is now.”
That said, what Diaz’s attorney asked the court was to ignore Tesla’s request for a new trial. The verdict would be fully justified by “the singularly reprehensible nature of Tesla’s conduct.” Legal experts in similar cases say that it is not unlikely that the EV maker will manage to cut the punitive damages award in half. Although that would still be an impressive amount of money, would Tesla avoid similar situations if it could pay less? If you remember that it still names warranty repairs as goodwill fixes, that will surely make you wonder.
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