In Percy v. Basil Townsend, No. 16-cv-5304, 2024 WL 2846688 (S.D.N.Y. May 30, 2024), the court, inter alia, denied plaintiff’s motion for prejudgment interest on plaintiff’s compensatory damages award ($125,000) following the jury’s verdict for plaintiff on her hostile work environment claim under the New York State Human Rights Law.
From the decision:
As an initial matter, [t]he award of interest is generally within the discretion of the district court and will not be overturned on appeal absent an abuse of discretion. When damages awarded to the plaintiff represent compensation for lost wages or back pay, it is ordinarily an abuse of discretion not to include prejudgment interest. But for compensatory damages—which involve non-economic damages like pain and suffering, mental anguish, and emotional distress—the guidance is less clear. A few courts have awarded prejudgment interest on compensatory damages where plaintiffs prevailed on their federal – or federal and state – employment discrimination claims and the court found it necessary to meaningfully make plaintiff whole…. Robinson v. Instructional Sys., Inc., 80 F. Supp. 2d 203, 207-208 (S.D.N.Y. 2000); see also Chen v. Shanghai Cafe Deluxe, Inc., No. 17-CV-2536 (VF), 2023 WL 2625791 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 24, 2023) (awarding prejudgment interest on combined backpay and emotional distress damages on federal and state claims).
Other courts have rejected requests for prejudgment interest on compensatory damages, finding that such awards are not the norm for New York federal courts and are generally unnecessary to make the claimants whole. These courts often emphasize that unlike a backpay award, [a]n award of compensatory damages for pain and suffering…is not so easily calculated and represents the jury’s translation into monetary terms a loss that is difficult to quantify. Adding to this difficulty, a compensatory damages award is not easily divided into specific periods like back pay and it does not represent an amount that the defendant has withheld from the plaintiff in the same way that awards in contract or property actions do. Several courts have also noted that New York state courts generally find that prejudgment interest is unavailable for awards for past emotional distress.
Here, the Court declines to award prejudgment interest on Plaintiff’s compensatory damages award because it is unnecessary to make Plaintiff whole. These damages were awarded by the jury under state law and, as discussed in McIntosh, the reasons for limiting prejudgment interest under CPLR § 5001 to contract and property actions apply with particular force to a case involving compensatory damages under NYSHRL. Such damages are not easily calculated, and the jury’s award already represents their best quantification of losses that are difficult to quantify. Indeed, the jury heard evidence about Plaintiffs non-economic damages (including the time periods involved) and was specifically instructed that [c]ompensatory damages seek to make the plaintiff whole.
[Citations and internal quotation marks omitted.]
Having said the above, the court concluded that it “has no reason to second-guess the jury’s calculation.”