In Chirdo v. Minerals Technologies, Inc., et. al., 2009 WL 2195135 (E.D. Pa. July 23, 2009), U.S. District Court Judge  Lawrence F. Stengel denied plaintiff's request that the jury be given a "spoliation charge." Holding that there was no evidence that the defendants intentionally destroyed relevant evidence.

In this employment discrimination case, plaintiff claimed that his employer deleted relevant documents after it knew or reasonably should have known about plaintiff's discrimination claim.  Plaintiff claimed that he could have used emails he sent during his employment to counter defendants' evidence that it terminated him for poor performance.  These emails were relevant he contended because they would have helped him show that his firing was pretextual.

Defendants countered that the documents were destroyed pursuant to the company's document retention policy.  The court found that the emails were destroyed in May 2005, approximately five months before defendants received notice of plaintiff's EEOC charge.  Thus, there is no evidence that defendants willfully or fraudulently destroyed evidence with the intent to prevent the plaintiff from obtaining it.  Nor did the court find any obligation to preserve evidence prior to the EEOC Charge and therefore denied plaintiff's requested jury instruction.