A phone call from one supervisor was enough to end a federal Title VII lawsuit
A federal appeals court has handed employers a clear win on reference checks and a roadmap for defending hiring decisions against race discrimination claims.
On May 22, 2026, the Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the Will County Sheriff's Merit Commission, the Will County Sheriff's Office, and Will County, Illinois, in a Title VII case brought by Darell Burton, a Black applicant cut from the deputy sheriff hiring process after a negative reference from his employer.
Burton applied to become a Will County deputy sheriff in 2010 while working as an assistant signalman for the Canadian National Railway. The certification process is long and rigorous, running through a short-form application, written exam, physical agility test, long-form application, psychological evaluation, polygraph, formal background investigation, and a final interview with the commissioners.
He cleared the early stages. Then came the background investigation. The railroad never returned the mailed reference form, so a sergeant in the Sheriff's Office called Burton's supervisor, Mike Youngman, to get the reference by phone. According to the court's account, Youngman's marks were strongly negative. He said Burton was not dependable, did not work well with others, would not be rehired, and would not be recommended for a job in law enforcement. Youngman also said Burton was off on a questionable work-related injury he had not reported on time.
The Commission's staff flagged the reference as a red flag and presented it to the commissioners, who removed Burton from the process.
Burton sued, arguing the real reason was race. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants. The Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Sykes, agreed.
The court said the evidence pointed to only one reasonable conclusion. Burton was cut because of the negative reference, which the court described as a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for the decision.
Burton's counterarguments fell flat one by one.
He said the Commission's delay in disclosing the reason for his rejection was suspicious. The court pointed out a local ordinance actually bars the Commission from disclosing rejection reasons. Following the law, the court said, raises no suspicion.
He pointed to a chart notation that appeared next to other applicants' names but not his, suggesting it should have been used if his background really was the issue. The Commission said the notation referred to applicants cut at the long-application stage, which Burton had passed. The chart itself supported that explanation.
He flagged a comment from a commissioner who referred to a former Commission member as colored during a deposition. The court called it a stray remark made nearly a decade after Burton's case, with no link to the hiring decision. Burton had also failed to raise the argument in the district court, which waived it.
He argued the red-flag process was handled abnormally in his case. The court disagreed. The staff member who coordinated certification had testified that a lone no on a reference form would not necessarily be a red flag on its own. But Youngman had volunteered detailed negative information by phone, and she testified that the full combination of that information added up to a red flag. The court found nothing unusual in how she handled it.
His statistical case also fell short. Burton's data set covered only 119 of more than 280 applicants from that period, identified seven non-white applicants, and did not control for other variables. Of the three Black applicants in his sample aside from himself, two were certified and one was cut after failing a polygraph.
Finally, Burton tried a cat's paw theory, the idea that a biased lower-level employee, here the investigating sergeant, manipulated the decisionmakers. The court found nothing in the record suggesting bias. Burton's only basis was his own view that the sergeant should not have taken the supervisor's information at face value. That, the court said, was not evidence of discriminatory intent.
For HR leaders, the takeaway lands cleanly. A documented, employer-sourced negative reference can hold up under a race discrimination challenge. Stray remarks far removed from the decision will not do the work. Thin statistics will not either. And cat's paw theories need actual evidence of animus at the lower level, not second-guessing of how a reference was handled.
