Texas Department of Public Safety v. Robert Christopher Callaway

Supreme Court of Texas
                          ══════════
                           No. 24-0966
                          ══════════

               Texas Department of Public Safety,
                             Petitioner,

                                 v.

                  Robert Christopher Callaway,
                            Respondent

   ═══════════════════════════════════════
               On Petition for Review from the
     Court of Appeals for the Thirteenth District of Texas
   ═══════════════════════════════════════

                     Argued January 15, 2026

      JUSTICE SULLIVAN delivered the opinion of the Court.

      The Texas Department of Public Safety fired Chris Callaway, a
former Texas Ranger who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder,
because of a terrifying incident at his daughter’s high school. When
counselors there threatened to detain his daughter to keep her safe,
Callaway rushed to the school with his DPS badge, handcuffs, and gun.
Confirming his own self-assessment after the fact—namely, that his
PTSD sometimes “takes over” and yields “less than optimal outcomes”—
Callaway menaced a pair of school counselors and threatened to arrest
the two police officers who arrived on the scene.     DPS terminated
Callaway after investigating the incident.    Callaway sued DPS in
response, urging a disability-discrimination claim under Chapter 21 of
the Texas Labor Code. Because his claim fails as a matter of law, we
reverse and render judgment for DPS.
                                   I
      DPS hired Callaway as a Trooper in 2004, promoted him to a
Special Agent in its Criminal Investigations Division in 2010, and
selected him as a Texas Ranger in 2012. It was a rough detail. Callaway
took medical leave in 2017 to seek treatment for alcoholism and PTSD,
and transferred back to the Criminal Investigations Division in 2018.
He took additional medical leave in late 2019 to receive inpatient
treatment for alcoholism and PTSD.
      On January 15, 2020, while he was still out on medical leave,
Callaway and his wife received a call from their daughter’s high
school. School counselors reported that the daughter might soon be
detained due to a mental-health crisis. Grabbing his DPS badge, his
handcuffs, and (because he was off duty) his personal sidearm,
Callaway hurried to the high school with his wife and loudly
confronted one of the counselors inside the small office where his
daughter was being held. A second counselor joined them in the office
upon hearing the ruckus, along with two officers from the school
district’s police department.
      When the police officers advised that they would be transporting
his daughter to a behavioral-health facility, Callaway ordered them to
“get out of my office right now.” Callaway also displayed his DPS badge




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and threatened to prove “who has got a bigger set of handcuffs” by
putting the police officers “in jail for interfering with [his] rights as a
parent.” When the counselor’s office phone began to ring, Callaway
yelled at her not to answer it. That counselor later reported that she
“felt trapped and feared for [her] safety and [her] life” and had “never
been so afraid.”     Eventually, Callaway and his wife allowed their
daughter to travel to the behavioral-health facility with one of the
police officers.
       A few days later, the school district’s police department sought to
charge    Callaway    with      abuse   of   official   capacity   (a   Class A
misdemeanor), official oppression (another Class A misdemeanor), and
interference with public duties (a Class B misdemeanor). See Tex. Penal
Code §§ 39.02, 39.03, 38.15. The district attorney later dropped those
criminal charges.
       During DPS’s investigation of the incident at the high school,
Callaway blamed his misconduct on the PTSD for which he’d sought
treatment.    His affidavit noted that, due to “repeated exposure to
trauma and learned behavior by a brain,” he “stay[s] in an elevated state
of hypervigilance” and, “when it takes over, things often end with less
than optimal outcomes.” Callaway conceded that he “acted emotionally
during the situation” at the high school, where he “reacted with fight or
flight” and “chose to fight.”
       Colonel Steve McCraw, who was then the Director of DPS,
ultimately decided to fire Callaway due to the high-school incident. As
Director McCraw testified in a discharge appeal hearing before the
Public Safety Commission of Texas:




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      [Callaway] was emotional. As a father of a daughter, I get
      that. We’re all emotional and we’re trying to protect our
      kids in that regard. And we’re all very defensive in that
      regard.

      But a DPS Officer has an obligation to control their
      emotions when they get there, plain and simple. And one
      thing you can’t do, you can’t walk into . . . an office and
      order a police officer out when he’s trying to do his official
      job, plain and simple. . . .

      [W]hen you have your badge displayed in that way, you’re
      using your position as a DPS special agent to . . . interfere
      with the official response of police in another police agency,
      period. . . .

      [W]e can’t afford to have a trooper, a special agent, or Texas
      Ranger that can’t control their emotions and someone
      seeking thrill or has to be driven by a thrill.

      After DPS terminated his employment, Callaway sued the agency
under Chapter 21 of the Texas Labor Code for disability discrimination
and retaliation.    The trial court denied DPS’s joint plea to the
jurisdiction, traditional motion for summary judgment, and no-evidence
motion for summary judgment. On interlocutory appeal, the court of
appeals “affirm[ed] the trial court’s judgment with respect to Callaway’s
claim that his termination was motivated by discrimination based on his
PTSD disability,” but “render[ed] a judgment of dismissal for want of
jurisdiction on the remainder of Callaway’s claims.” 722 S.W.3d 446,
475 (Tex. App.—Corpus Christi–Edinburg 2024). DPS filed a petition
for review, which we granted.
                                   II
      DPS didn’t violate Chapter 21 of the Texas Labor Code when it fired
Callaway. His state-law claim of disability discrimination invokes Section



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21.051:    “An employer commits an unlawful employment practice if
because of . . . disability . . . the employer . . . discharges an individual . . . .”
Tex. Lab. Code § 21.051(1). The plain text of Section 21.105, however,
makes short work of the lone claim left in this case:
       A provision [like Section 21.051] referring to discrimination
       because of disability . . . applies only to discrimination
       because of . . . a physical or mental condition that does not
       impair an individual’s ability to reasonably perform a job.

Id. § 21.105 (emphasis added).
       The import of Section 21.105 is that, “if a claimant’s disability
(that is, a mental or physical impairment) in fact limits her ability to
perform the job she has or seeks, Chapter 21 simply does not prevent
the employer from terminating her or refusing to offer her the job
‘because of ’ that impairment.” Tex. Tech Univ. Health Scis. Ctr.—El
Paso v. Niehay, 671 S.W.3d 929, 952 (Tex. 2023) (Boyd, J., dissenting);
accord Hilton v. Sw. Bell Tel. Co., 936 F.2d 823, 830 (5th Cir. 1991) (per
curiam) (“Simply put, [Chapter 21] does not force employers to hire or
retain a handicapped person who, because of his handicap, simply
cannot perform a job.”). That makes all the sense in the world, as then-
Justice Willett once explained for our Court: “Were the law otherwise,
any person who, for instance, wishes to be a ballerina or professional
basketball player could routinely sue for disability discrimination if the
Bolshoi or the San Antonio Spurs declined employment.”                       City of
Houston v. Proler, 437 S.W.3d 529, 532 & n.10 (Tex. 2014) (citing Tex.
Lab. Code § 21.105).
       By asking whether a person with a disability can “reasonably
perform a job,” Section 21.105 imposes an objective standard.




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“Reasonableness has always entailed an objective inquiry.” Freeport-
McMoRan Oil & Gas LLC v. 1776 Energy Partners, LLC, 672 S.W.3d
391, 399 (Tex. 2023); see also State v. Zurawski, 690 S.W.3d 644, 662
(Tex. 2024); In re State, 682 S.W.3d 890, 894 (Tex. 2023) (per curiam). So
an employer can’t get carte blanche to fire anyone with a disability by
conjuring up some idiosyncratic definition of what it means to “reasonably
perform a job” at his company. Section 21.105’s objective standard doesn’t
insulate pretextual terminations of that sort.      But that’s not what
happened in this case.
      Callaway can’t satisfy the objective standard that the Legislature
has imposed. We can assume that Callaway’s PTSD (though not his
alcoholism) qualifies as a Chapter 21 “disability.” See Tex. Lab. Code
§ 21.002(6)(A) (“ ‘ Disability’ means . . . a mental or physical impairment
that substantially limits at least one major life activity of [an]
individual . . . . The term does not include . . . a current condition of
addiction to the use of alcohol . . . .”). The DPS Director determined that
this PTSD would “impair [Callaway’s] ability to reasonably perform a job”
for the agency. Id. § 21.105. It’s easy to understand why, even though
none of us on this Court have ever served as a law-enforcement officer:
DPS can’t give someone a sidearm and a badge, send him out to handle
stressful interactions with other Texans, and then have that officer snap
under pressure. To do so would unreasonably endanger citizens and
officers alike. Indeed, by “throwing his weight around” with officers from
the school district’s police department, as his own counsel put it at oral
argument, Callaway created a grave risk of blue-on-blue violence.




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      Given the “presumptions of good faith and regularity” that we owe
to “a coordinate branch[ ]” of state government, we’d be hard-pressed to
contradict Director McCraw’s determination of impairment under
Section 21.105. Webster v. Comm’n for Law. Discipline, 704 S.W.3d 478,
496 (Tex. 2024). That’d be so even if Callaway seriously argued in this
Court that he’s still qualified to perform a DPS job, despite suffering
from PTSD that caused him to violate his oath at the high school.
      Yet Callaway makes almost no effort in this regard, devoting less
than a full page of his merits brief to the issue. He cites Section 21.105
zero times in this Court, choosing instead to discuss federal statutes and
judicial opinions that shed no light on the meaning of the statutory text
our Legislature enacted.     See, e.g., Niehay, 671 S.W.3d at 945–46
(Blacklock, J., concurring); Tex. Tech Univ. Health Scis. Ctr.—El Paso v.
Flores, 709 S.W.3d 500, 511–13 (Tex. 2024) (Blacklock, J., concurring).
As for pointing us to record evidence, Callaway comes up short by
arguing that he remains “qualified for his position with the DPS” merely
because he’s “a licensed peace officer in the State of Texas.”        See
Respondent’s Br. 23.
      Because Callaway suffers from PTSD that “impair[s his] ability
to reasonably perform a job” within the meaning of Section 21.105, the
prohibition in Section 21.051 doesn’t even “appl[y]” to DPS’s decision to
terminate him because of that disability.      Tex. Lab. Code § 21.105.
Callaway’s disability-discrimination claim therefore fails as a matter of
law. Cf. Chevron Corp. v. Redmon, 745 S.W.2d 314, 318 (Tex. 1987) (“As
a matter of law Redmon’s disabilities do not constitute those severe
impairments which article 5221k was intended to protect.”). That claim




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should’ve been dismissed along with all the others. See, e.g., Alamo
Heights ISD v. Clark, 544 S.W.3d 755, 800 (Tex. 2018).
                                  III
      Texans should give thanks for men like Chris Callaway, who put
his physical and mental health on the line throughout sixteen years of
DPS service. But gratitude is also owed to Director McCraw, who made
the final decision to fire a DPS Special Agent whose PTSD objectively
impaired his ongoing ability to protect and serve.          That decision
promoted public safety, and it didn’t give rise to a disability-
discrimination claim under Chapter 21 of the Texas Labor Code. We
reverse in part the judgment of the court of appeals and render judgment
dismissing Callaway’s claims against DPS.



                                        James P. Sullivan
                                        Justice


OPINION DELIVERED: April 10, 2026




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