Jury Awards $89.5 Million in Hughes Race Bias Lawsuit : Workplace: The judgment is one of the largest of its kind given to individual plaintiffs. The company vows to appeal.

In a huge racial discrimination judgment, two former Hughes Aircraft Co. employees--an engineer who claimed he was denied promotions and pay raises because he is black and a Latino supervisor who backed him up--have been awarded $89.5 million by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury.

Although a small number of class-action lawsuits have yielded bigger awards, the judgment in the Hughes case is one of the biggest ever nationally in a discrimination case involving individual plaintiffs.

Most of the judgment came in punitive damages decided Monday, with $40 million awarded to engineer Jeffrey Lane, 39, and another $40 million going to Lane’s former supervisor, David Villalpando, 36. Both live in Los Angeles.

Hughes said it will appeal the judgment, calling it, in a two-sentence news release, “irrational, irresponsible and outrageous.”

Legal experts also said that, given the size of the award, it is very likely that the Superior Court judge handling the case, Malcolm H. Mackey, will reduce the judgment within the 60 days he has in which to take such an action.

But one of the Santa Monica lawyers representing Lane and Villalpando, Ian Herzog, said the award was warranted because “racism is rampant” at the company. Hughes has denied that it discriminates against its employees.

“If Hughes didn’t get the message from this, and I don’t think they did, it is not enough,” Herzog said. “How else do you get to lawbreakers like these . . . unless you hit them in the pocketbook?”

Charges of racial discrimination, often involving alleged bias against Asian Americans, have emerged with some regularity in the aerospace industry. Hughes itself, in a separate court case, was ordered last year to pay $1.4 million to a black accountant who claimed he was denied promotions and underpaid because of his race. The company says the case ultimately was settled for a smaller amount.

In addition, another black engineer and his white supervisor are suing Hughes in a racial discrimination case similar to the Lane-Villalpando suit and brought by the same lawyers.

In the case brought by Lane and Villalpando, the plaintiffs claimed Lane was denied a promotion he was due to receive because he lodged internal complaints with the company about racial discrimination.

Villalpando testified that he was pressured by management to give Lane negative performance reviews, but that when he instead came to Lane’s defense, he eventually was pushed out of his job.

“When you hear testimony like that, it’s very, very powerful. When it comes from a supervisor, it has credibility with a jury,” said Larry J. Shapiro, publisher of California Employer Advisor newsletter on employment law. Shapiro said he knows of no larger award in a non-class-action case.

Hughes, in its court filings, asserted that race played no part in Lane’s treatment, maintaining that he “had not shown the leadership or put forth the extra effort to merit being promoted.”

During two earlier phases of the eight-week trial, the jury had awarded $6.1 million to Lane and $3.4 million to Villalpando for emotional distress, lost wages and benefits. Herzog said Lane, who worked for Hughes from 1977 through 1992, has been largely disabled by chronic fatigue syndrome and Epstein-Barr disease that he claims stemmed from the stress he suffered at Hughes.