A federal jury in Atlanta took just 20 minutes Friday to decide that managers of a Buckhead restaurant hadn’t discriminated against a former professional basketball player and an attorney, both African-Americans, when they were ordered to leave after refusing to surrender their seats to two white women.
The jury of five men and five women, including three African-Americans, reached their verdict after a weeklong trial in which former NBA player Joe Barry Carroll and Atlanta attorney Joseph S. Shaw sought as much as $3 million in damages for what they claimed were violations of federal civil rights laws by the staff and owners of The Tavern at Phipps in Buckhead.
