A Corrections Officer Who Turned a Blind Eye on an Assault Against an Inmate Is Not Entitled to Unemployment Compensation Benefits
A corrections officer has a duty to protect inmates. If he/she turns a blind eye on threatened or actual physical assaults of inmates for fear of retaliation by coworkers, the officer is not entitled to collect unemployment-compensation benefits after being fired for doing so. See Department of Corrections v. Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, -- A.2d --, No. 1205 D.C. 2006 (Commw. Ct. March 6, 2008).
The Lancaster Service Center and the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania agree on that. The Unemployment Compensation Board of Review disagreed, though, and awarded benefits.
On the employer’s appeal, the Commonwealth Court held that the corrections officer was not entitled to benefits because the officer’s fear of retaliation was not good cause for willful misconduct. The misconduct was violating his duty to protect inmates and therefore acting contrary to the employer’s best interests and intentionally disregarding the behavior standards that the employer could expect. (If an employee proves that he/she had good cause for willful misconduct, benefits can be awarded.) As the appellate court put it:
[I]t shocks the conscience of this Court that the Board concluded that a corrections officer who refused to report a threat of violence against an inmate and refuses to render aid to an inmate being beaten could use fear for his own personal safety as good cause justification for his refusal to render aid.
The corrections officer argued that he had good cause for the violations because he feared for his own future safety if his coworkers retaliated against him for thwarting the attack engineered by a fellow corrections officer. No doubt, this is not a position anyone would want to find themselves in. However, the officer’s fear was held not to justify his disregard of what he was hired to do.
The prudent thing for the officer to do would have been to act to protect the inmate, then enlist the employer’s assistance with dealing with any retaliation by coworkers. While that option might not have been appealing to the officer from a practical perspective, his employer had to be able to rely on the officer to discharge his duty of protecting inmates. An employer entity can only act through its representatives.
This decision can apply to other workplaces as well, standing for the general proposition that an employee who willfully violates a job duty because of fear of coworkers’ retaliation must not be awarded unemployment-compensation benefits.
