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- Latest news item posted on 09/04/2008 at 09:44 AM
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$1 million judgment in sexual harassment case against Cincinnati landlord
(WASHINGTON, Sep. 04, 2008)
-- The Justice Department today announced that former Cincinnati landlord, James G. Mitchell, and his company, Land Baron Enterprises, agreed to pay $1 million in monetary damages and a civil penalty, after admitting that they violated the Fair Housing Act (FHA). This is the largest monetary settlement the Department has ever obtained in a case alleging sexual harassment violations under the FHA.
"These women were subjected to blatant, threatening and unwanted sexual advances in their homes," said Grace Chung Becker, Acing Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. "While nothing can fully compensate for the pain that these women experienced, this $1 million settlement reflects the gravity of the alleged conduct. I commend the victims who bravely came forward and Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) for their referral."
Under the consent judgment, which must be approved by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, the defendants -- James G. Mitchell and Land Baron Enterprises, a corporation that owned many of the properties that Mitchell managed -- must pay $890,000 in compensation to 12 women who Mitchell sexually harassed and $110,000 in a civil penalty to the United States. The first $250,000 must be paid within two weeks of the court’s approval and the remaining $750,000 will be payable within 30 days of the court’s approval and will be distributed among the 12 women. In addition, the consent judgment enjoins Mitchell from further discrimination and requires him to retain an independent management company to manage future rental properties he acquires. Mitchell currently does not own or operate any rental properties.
The complaint alleges that the defendants subjected female tenants to unwanted verbal sexual advances and unwanted sexual touching; entered the apartments of female tenants without permission or notice; granted and denied tangible housing benefits in exchange for sexual favors; and took adverse action against female tenants when they refused or objected to his sexual advances.
PRESS RELEASE by the Department of Justice
Plainfield Hispanic-rights group hires lawyers in immigration suit
(PLAINFIELD, N.J., Aug. 31, 2008)
-- The Latin American Coalition, a city Hispanic-rights group, has retained attorneys from a prominent New York City-based civil-rights organization in response to a federal lawsuit that has the potential to turn the city into the epicenter of the national debate concerning illegal immigration.
The coalition retained the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which will work pro bono in opposing the Washington, D.C.,-based Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The institute previously supported anti-illegal immigration ordinances in Riverside and Hazelton, Pa., but both towns were ultimately forced to abandon them. The Defense and Education Fund played a pivotal role in one of those cases, when U.S. District Judge James M. Munley overturned the Hazelton ordinance by ruling it unconstitutional, and Riverside rescinded its ordinance when township officials said the town could not afford the legal costs of defending it.
FULL STORY in MyCentralJersey.com
Reconstruction after Katrina: Brazen housing discrimination continues
(NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30, 2008)
-- After she tried to rent out her home, Kiana Alexander found it burned to the ground.
The stories sound like strange echoes from another era, as if someone had wound up the old Victrola of history and let the Dixie tunes rip. They begin on a half-abandoned street in St. Bernard Parish, an aggressively white community on the southeastern edge of New Orleans. That is where Daphne Clark, 39, an African-American supervisor at a group home, rented a house with help from a rental voucher last year, and that is where the harassment began. First, the Confederate flag hoisted over a neighbor's house followed by stares and sneers; then the official torment by the parish government as it waged a post-Hurricane Katrina crusade against the specter of rental housing. For Clark, this took the form of a series of "notices of violation" warning her that the parish would disconnect her utilities -- not because she had done anything wrong but because her landlord had failed to apply for a rental permit, as required by a new parish law. According to Hestel Stout, a white contractor working on Clark's house, the parish official who delivered one of these notices explained to him, "How would you like those types living next to you?"
Such are the stories drifting out of New Orleans and its environs these days, dispatches from a rebuilding effort that often bears an alarming resemblance to a segregation re-enactment. Throughout the region, historically white suburbs, as well as one African-American neighborhood, have been tightening the housing noose by passing laws that restrict, limit or simply ban the building -- and even renting -- of homes that traditionally benefit poor and working-class people of color. Couched in the banal language of zoning and tax credits, density and permissive-use permits, these efforts often pass for legal and rarely raise eyebrows outside the small community of fair-housing monitors. But taken together -- and accompanied, as they so often are, by individual acts of flagrant racism -- they represent one of the most brazen and sweeping cases of housing discrimination in recent history.
FULL STORY in The Nation
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