There were no mistakes made in Pat Rowe Kerr's trial last year against the Missouri Veterans Commission, Director Larry Kay and the state Public Safety Department, a three-judge state appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.
A Cole County jury determined Kay and the commission were liable for both sex and age discrimination as well as retaliation against Kerr, violating Missouri's Human Rights Act.
The jury awarded Kerr a total of $2.875 million in actual and punitive damages - money that has not yet been paid while the state appealed the trial results.
Kerr also was awarded attorneys' fees for the trial, and the appeals court ruled Tuesday she is entitled to additional attorneys' fees for the appeals process.
Because the appeals court doesn't do those calculations, it sent the case back to Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem to determine the amount of the additional fees the state owes Kerr.
In a 21-page opinion written by Judge Karen King Mitchell, the appeals court in Kansas City rejected the five arguments of error the state raised about the two-week jury trial Beetem held.
The attorney general's office represented Kay, the commission and the department in the trial and appeals.
Loree Ann Paradise, Attorney General Josh Hawley's spokeswoman, said she couldn't comment because "this is pending litigation."
Kerr's attorney, Jerome Dobson, of St. Louis, said Kerr "presented overwhelming evidence of discrimination and (Beetem) tried an excellent case.
"The real question is why Larry Kay is still the executive director of the commission. By our calculations the state's liability now is more than $3.5 million because of Larry Kay's actions," Dobson said.
In its appeal, the commission argued Kerr had failed to exhaust her administrative remedies regarding the retaliation claim, and Beetem was wrong when he excluded some evidence and allowed what was called "me too" evidence Kerr presented.
But, Mitchell wrote, the commission "has failed to carry its burden of demonstrating error in either the exclusion or the admission of any of the evidence it identifies."
The opinion includes a detailed history of Kerr's working with veterans before being hired by the commission in 2004, then helping the commission create an ombudsman's position, to which she was later appointed.
The ruling said Kerr and Kay clashed almost immediately after he was hired as the commission's deputy director in October 2006.
"Just after Kay was hired, he told Kerr there were 'generational differences' between them and asked Kerr when she planned to retire," the court noted as one of a number of instances showing conflicts between the two.
When Kay became the commission's director in June 2009, he proposed splitting the ombudsman's position into two jobs, and Kerr disagreed with that plan.
Kay "became angry with Kerr and called her on a regular basis over the course of the next month to berate and intimidate her into taking the outreach position," Mitchell wrote.
She accepted it in July 2009, was fired Nov. 10 and told to clean out her office on Veterans Day, the court ruling said.
After filing complaints with the state Human Rights Commission and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then getting a right-to-sue letter, Kerr filed her lawsuit in 2011.
After she was fired, Kerr joined the planning committee for a University of Missouri-Columbia veterans outreach conference and later was asked to step down from the committee because Kay told the university the commission wouldn't participate if Kerr was involved.
She then added a retaliation complaint to her formal complaints with the Human Rights Commission and EEOC.
But during the trial, Kerr also presented evidence of an incident during a public meeting in Odessa - after she had filed the lawsuit - when Kay walked out of the meeting after Kerr asked a question, saying he wasn't comfortable because she had filed the suit.
The state said Beetem shouldn't have allowed that evidence because it hadn't been included in the Human Rights complaints.
The appeals court ruled the Odessa situation was enough like the University of Missouri incident to be allowed, adding: "At no point during trial did MVC object to evidence pertaining to the Odessa incident."
The state also complained Beetem wouldn't allow it to use evidence Kerr had filed in her lawsuit because Kay had rejected her personal interest in him.
The appeals court said much of that information was raised in trial testimony, and the specific issues the state raised in the appeal "were not logically relevant" to the case.
Part of Kerr's case involved several people who served under Kay during a National Guard deployment to Kosovo, who testified Kay had belittled and berated high-ranking female officers and replaced many of them with men.
The state objected to that testimony as being prejudicial to Kay and the commission.
But Mitchell wrote, "Because MVC failed to object to the admission of any of this evidence (during the trial), we decline to review this point."
The state can ask the full appeals court to hear the case or ask the Supreme Court to hear it.