Retaliation Cases

The defendant P filed a complaint with the named defendant, the Commis- sion on Human Rights and Opportunities, alleging that P's former employer, the plaintiff, the Hartford Police Department, had discrimi- nated against P on the basis of his ancestry. Upon graduating from the police academy, P, who is Vietnamese, began a probationary period of employment, which included a field training program and during which superior officers were required to complete daily observation reports evaluating his performance. P received a satisfactory rating upon com- pletion of the field training program and then continued to receive generally satisfactory daily evaluations from his superior officers, includ- ing K, who previously had been disciplined for making discriminatory and/or racist remarks to other individuals. Subsequently, on two separate occasions, K made certain remarks to P about his grammar and writing skills, criticizing P's accent, inquiring into P's ethnicity, nationality, edu- cational background, and whether the Hartford citizens with whom P interacted could understand him. When P indicated that he would file a grievance against K if he did not stop making such comments, K stated that P should ''watch what [he says] or [he] won't be around [for] long.'' K told other superior officers about his interactions with P and sent a memo to the commander of the police academy, calling P argumentative and confrontational. Thereafter, multiple officers began, for the first time, to label P as argumentative and confrontational in their daily observation reports. One officer wrote a memo noting that numerous daily observation reports were missing from P's file. In addition, days after K sent his memo to the commander, P was contacted about an incident that had occurred seven months earlier during field training, when P lost a piece of the hat to his uniform. When interviewed by the commander, P stated that, at the time he lost the hat piece, he had been ordered by his superi

Retaliation Temporal Proximity Causation Wrongful Termination in Violation of Public Policy Free Speech State Action. In the absence of state action, the free speech protections of the Ohio Constitution do not generally provide a basis for an at-will employee to raise a claim of wrongful termination in violation of public policy against a private employer. An interval of more than three months between an allegedly protected activity and an adverse employment action is generally too long to support an inference of retaliatory causation based only on temporal proximity.

Judgment affirmed. Although the appellant designated only the trial court's final judgment in his notice of appeal, this court could address the trial court's interlocutory rulings because interlocutory orders merge with a court's final judgment. The trial court did not err by denying the appellant's motion to compel, motion for sanctions, motion to strike, or motion in limine. The appellant failed to demonstrate that his employer either waived its ability to rely on, or was prevented from relying on, his criminal background as the grounds for terminating his at-will employment. The trial court did not err by denying appellant's motion for judicial notice or motion for summary judgment. The trial court properly granted appellees summary judgment on appellant's claims of race discrimination, disability discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination in violation of public policy, unlawful aiding and abetting of discrimination, and defamation.