Llamas

Opinion by Judge RICHARD C. TALLMAN; Concurrence by Judge MICHAEL DALY HAWKINS.

Juan Llamas sued the Butte Community College District (“District”), its Board of Trustees, and three of its employees (“defendants”) for violating his civil and due process rights by terminating him from his part-time employment, barring him from future employment with the District, and denying him an adequate opportunity to rebut their conclusion that he had cheated in interviewing for a full-time janitorial position. We affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of defendants.

I. Background.

Llamas was hired by the District as a temporary, part-time, on-call custodian in 1996. One year later, he applied for a full-time position and was interviewed by an oral screening panel. The panel prepared a new list of job-related questions to ask the interviewees because the previous list had been used several times. The panel also created a list of model answers to facilitate objective scoring of the candidates.

When Llamas arrived for the interview, he and the other candidates were allowed to review the questions for a few minutes. Llamas’s answers reportedly recited the language and…

Concurring:

I concur in the majority’s conclusion that the Defendants’ actions do not violate Title VII or federal constitutional principles of due process.

I write separately because one unfortunate consequence of this litigation is that Juan Llamas’s employment record at the District is now in full view of the public, including the details of the District’s termination. As Paul Harvey says, there is more to the story.

The District terminated Llamas and declared him unfit for future employment of *1132 any-type, all based on an accusation that he had acted dishonestly in the course of applying for a promotion-an accusation he was never permitted to challenge. It would be one thing if the Defendants’ “investigation” leading to that accusation had been fair and complete. It was neither. The following example captures the nature of the Defendants’ processes: An individual who in fact scored higher than Llamas on the model questions — someone who had equal access to the office where a copy of the “cheat sheet” turned up missing — was never investigated nor accused of cheating.