A jury in D.C. federal court found Thursday that Capitol Police discriminated against a former K-9 officer in training on the basis of her sex and awarded damages of $850,000.
The verdict was reached seven years after Mauricia VanMeter, a current Capitol Police officer who was dismissed from the department’s K-9 training program in 2017, alleged that her superiors targeted her for being a woman and treated her differently from her male counterparts.
The lawsuit was filed in 2018 and wound its way through the court system. The jury returned a verdict after several days of deliberation and a 10-day jury trial at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“Officer VanMeter’s heartfelt thanks goes to the jury for their tireless effort to ensure that justice was done in this case,” Les Alderman, the attorney representing VanMeter, said Thursday after the verdict was delivered.
A spokesperson for the Capitol Police did not respond to a request for comment on the decision, and the department’s public information office is closed for routine business during the government shutdown.
In the lawsuit, VanMeter alleged that her training supervisor Sgt. Anthony Phelps told her in the third week of a 14-week training program that he planned to fail her. VanMeter was the only woman in the class of trainees.
She alleged she was treated differently than her male counterparts and that Phelps “derided and belittled” VanMeter after she disclosed to him that she suffered from anxiety and asked him not to speak to her in an “abusive manner,” according to the complaint.
Phelps dismissed VanMeter in the 11th week of the course, even though she passed every test and training exercise to that point, she alleged in the lawsuit.
The case moved at a glacial pace through the courts, including a delay in 2021 when the judge originally assigned to the case, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Jackson was later appointed to the Supreme Court.
Judge Jia M. Cobb was assigned the case in 2021, and in late 2024 she denied a summary judgment motion to dismiss the case filed by the Capitol Police. At a virtual status hearing in January of this year, Cobb explained that VanMeter had provided expert testimony from a service dog professional, Kyle K. Heyen, who found she performed equal to or better than her male counterparts who passed the course.
The Capitol Police K-9 unit has been the subject of other discrimination complaints in recent years.
Alderman also represented Juan Cobbin, a former Capitol Police sergeant who alleged he was the victim of racial discrimination and retaliation when he was removed from his position as head of K-9 training and moved to a less coveted, non-K-9 position in the department.
Cobbin filed a claim with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights in May 2021 and, in September 2023, the OCWR ruled in his favor.
The OCWR decision states that Cobbin had superior qualifications to his white successor to lead the K-9 training program “and that the reasons proffered by the USCP for Cobbin’s transfer were pretextual.”
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