Court hears argument to dismiss in Bowers case

The defense counsel for the University of Virginia argued to dismiss a civil lawsuit filed by former employee Dena Bowers on Wednesday, September 6. After hearing arguments from both defense and plaintiff, the court adjourned without a decision.
Bowers, who used to work in UVA’s Human Resources division, sat behind her attorney, Deborah Wyatt­ (”spelled like Wyatt Earp,” she helpfully informed the press after the hearing), as UVA’s defense attorney, Richard Kast, addressed each of Bowers’ four claims in defense of an e-mail she sent to a co-worker. The e-mail allegedly contained information from the NAACP that was critical of the University’s charter initiative.
Kast focused on disproving Bowers’ claim of due process violation. He argued that Bowers had opportunities to accept a “de novo” hearing, and to contest her termination prior to her trial, but did neither. The defense called Bowers’s case a “garden variety misconduct and insubordination case” rather than “a constitutional claim.”
Wyatt argued against the defense’s attempt to make conclusions based on Bowers’s contested e-mail, which, she noted, was not filed at present. The defense admitted that the e-mail was not filed, and claimed that it needed to verify the document’s content.
Counsel for the defendant maintained that the content of Bowers’s e-mail could not be separated from her position with UVA’s human resource department, the branch in charge of the charter initiative criticized in the NAACP attachment. Wyatt countered that “there was no confusion that the documents were NAACP documents,” rather than University documents, because they were labeled as such.
No date is currently set for a decision regarding the defense’s motion to dismiss, though Bowers said that it may take a few weeks.