The $2.2 million verdict a federal jury ordered an East Point company pay for illegally collecting two employees DNA is a precedent-setting warning to businesses to stay away from genetic material, lawyers said Monday.
Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds sued Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services fter the company took cheek swabs from them in 2012. The company, which warehouses Kroger groceries, suspected the men were leaving feces in aisles of foodstuffs and sometimes on the canned goods. The DNA test, however, cleared the men.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg had ruled the company violated a federal law prohibiting genetic testing by employers.
A jury of eight woman Monday awarded Lowe and Reynolds a total of $475,000 compensatory damages for such things as mental pain and suffering and $1.75 million for punitive damages to deter Atlas and other companies from future bad acts. Lawyers, however, expect the award to be lowered.
“We didn’t know what to expect but it is what we hoped for,” the plaintiffs’ attorney, Amanda Farahany, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It is the message that we wanted to send.”
Dion Kohler, lawyer for the company, said the two men suffered no compensatory harm. Kohler also said the company had acted on incorrect advice from Kohler’s law firm that voluntary DNA tests of employees were legal under federal law.
“From our perspective, there was no evidence to support punitive damages,” Kohler said. “This was a one-time deal, and it was an unique and isolated circumstance.
Farahany argued the issue was that the genetic material was illegally placed with a private company.
“They can do whatever test they want with it in the future,” she said. “That is the slippery slope that the law was designed to prevent.”
Reynolds still works for the East Point company and Lowe recently left to start a business.
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