A Union Pacific locomotive
ST. LOUIS — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has upheld a jury verdict for Union Pacific Railroad Company in a lawsuit brought by an employee, rejecting his challenges to the jury instructions used at trial.
In an opinion filed Oct. 30, the appeals court concluded that the district court did not abuse its discretion by instructing jurors that Stephen Parr had to prove the railroad intentionally retaliated against him, by giving a business judgment instruction, or by limiting the relevant period for his safety reports to December 2022 through February 2023.
The jury had found that Parr did not prove his prima facie case under the Federal Rail Safety Act, which prohibits retaliation against employees for reporting hazardous safety or security conditions.
Parr appealed after the jury found for Union Pacific and the district court denied his request for a new trial.
The appeal focused on three instructions: the meaning of retaliation under the rail safety law, an instruction telling jurors not to consider whether the railroad’s actions were wise, reasonable or fair, and a time limit on the safety reports the jury could consider.
The case arose from Parr’s complaints about workplace safety and other matters. Union Pacific hired him in 2015 and trained him to use its Safety Line to report workplace safety issues and its Values Line to report violations of laws, regulations and company policy.
From 2018 to 2022, Parr made more than 160 Safety Line complaints and more than 100 additional complaints directly to local managers, according to the court’s account.
In 2022, Parr began sending text messages and emails about complaints to employees who were not his direct supervisors, including Carrie Stevens.
The opinion says Stevens was uncomfortable with the communications and reported her experience to General Manager Coleman Bell.
Bell met with Parr in December 2022 and gave him a letter of counsel directing him to stop communicating safety concerns by text, email or social media and to use the Safety and Values Lines.
Parr then filed Values Line complaints alleging retaliation and ethics violations, which continued through February 2023.
Union Pacific later notified him that it was investigating him for misusing the Values Line and failing to follow management’s instructions.
Following a disciplinary hearing, the company terminated him, citing conduct it characterized as quarrelsome, discourteous and insubordinate. A Public Law Board later reinstated Parr without back pay.
Parr argued that the jury instruction requiring proof of “intentional retaliation” conflicted with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Murray v. UBS Securities.
That ruling addressed a whistleblower provision in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The Eighth Circuit said its earlier decisions on the rail safety law remained binding and could be reconciled with Murray, which did not say its reasoning applied to other statutes using the same contributing-factor framework.
The appeals court also said the instruction required only that Union Pacific’s decision to fire Parr was due, at least in part, to his protected activity.
The appeals court rejected Parr’s challenge to the business judgment instruction as well. It said an earlier Eighth Circuit decision had approved a substantively similar instruction in a rail safety case.
The instruction, the court concluded, was compatible with Parr’s claim and did not prevent jurors from considering whether the railroad’s explanation was pretextual.
Finally, the court upheld the instruction limiting the relevant safety reports to those made from December 2022 through February 2023.
It said Parr’s complaint was ambiguous about which protected activity he claimed led to retaliation, while his testimony indicated he had not been fired, demoted or formally disciplined for reports made before December 2022.
The court also found that Parr had not moved to amend his complaint to include an earlier-report theory and that the record did not show the issue had been tried by consent.
The appeal was submitted Sept. 24. Circuit Judges Duane Benton, James B. Loken and Ralph R. Erickson considered the case; Benton wrote the opinion. The Eighth Circuit affirmed the judgment for Union Pacific.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit case number: 25-3379
