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Otero v. Housing Authority of the City of Bridgeport11/16/2004
General Statutes § 31-290a permits an employee to file a civil action to recover damages from an employer for wrongful discharge if the discharge resulted from the employee's filing of a claim for workers' compensation benefits. In this case, a jury found that the employee had failed to prove a claim of wrongful discharge and therefore returned a verdict in favor of the employer. The principal issue in this appeal by the employee is whether the trial court, in its charge to the jury and in its admission of certain evidence, impaired the plaintiff's ability to present her claim. We affirm the judgment of the trial court.
From March, 1981, until September, 1996, the plaintiff, Isabel Otero, was employed by the defendant, Housing Authority of the City of Bridgeport, as a maintenance foreperson. Although there had been a dispute between the parties about whether the plaintiff had stolen a toilet from the defendant, the gravamen of her complaint in this case was that, in violation of § 31-290a, the defendant wrongfully had terminated her employment in retaliation for the exercise of her right to receive workers' compensation benefits on an earlier occasion. By way of a special defense and a counterclaim, the defendant attributed the termination of the plaintiff's employment to her fraudulent seizure of the toilet owned by the defendant.
The plaintiff's case was tried to a jury, which returned a verdict in favor of the defendant. In its answer to a special interrogatory, the jury found that the plaintiff had failed to establish a prima facie case of wrongful discrimination. The court accepted this verdict and denied the plaintiff's motion to set it aside.
In this appeal, the plaintiff argues that the court should have granted her motion to set aside the verdict because the court improperly (1) charged the jury about the significance of the defendant's allegation that her discharge was based on her theft of a toilet and (2) admitted into evidence her signed statement about the circumstances of her discharge. We affirm the judgment of the trial court.
I.
The plaintiff contends that the trial court's instructions to the jury created confusion as to the proper legal standard governing wrongful discharge claims under § 31-290a of the Workers' Compensation Act. In particular, the plaintiff asserts that the court precluded the jury from considering the relationship between an accusation that she had stolen a toilet and the defendant's subsequent decision to discharge her from employment. The plaintiff argues that, because this allegedly improper jury instruction was harmful to her case, the court improperly denied her motion to set aside the verdict. We are unpersuaded.
A challenge to the validity of jury instructions presents a question of law. Our review of this claim, therefore, is plenary. Cable v. Bic Corp., 270 Conn. 433, 440, 854 A.2d 1057 (2004); Hartford Courant Co. v. Freedom of Information Commission, 261 Conn. 86, 96-97, 801 A.2d 759 (2002). We must decide whether the instructions, read as a whole, properly adapt the law to the case in question and provide the jury with sufficient guidance in reaching a correct verdict. Marshall v. O'Keefe, 55 Conn. App. 801, 804-805, 740 A.2d 909 (1999), cert. denied, 252 Conn. 918, 744 A.2d 438 (2000).
The following facts are relevant to the resolution of this appeal. The plaintiff presented evidence that she had received workers' compensation benefits from September, 1995, through April, 1996, for an injury to her lower back. In November, 1995, the plaintiff's supervisor rated the plaintiff's job performance as unsatisfactory with respect to certain responsibilities, and noted tha
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