Stevenson v. Union Pacific Railroad Co.

A train-crossing collision seriously injured Frank Stevenson (plaintiff) and killed his wife in November 1998. Stevenson sued Union Pacific Railroad Company (Union) (defendant) 10 months later. The court held a three-day pretrial hearing addressing Union’s destruction of two types of evidence. First, Union recorded over an audio tape of contemporaneous conversations between the crew and dispatch under its routine procedure of reusing tapes. But Union preserved other records of the accident, saved tapes helpful in other cases, and knew their relevance in fatal-collision lawsuits. The court found destroying the tape prejudiced Stevenson’s case because no other records of contemporaneous conversations existed. Second, Union destroyed track-maintenance records before and during litigation under a one-year retention policy. The judge found Union’s spoliation unreasonable and in bad faith, warranting sanctions. At the trial’s outset, the judge informed the jury that Union destroyed evidence it should have preserved and gave an adverse-inference instruction that the jurors could, but were not required to, assume that the tape and records were adverse to Union. The judge did not allow Union to rebut that instruction by explaining its routine record-retention policies and repeated the instruction at the trial’s close. The jury found for Stevenson, and the court awarded him attorneys’ fees related to spoliation. Union appealed.