MOBILE, Ala. – An Alabama woman who says she was falsely arrested for shoplifting at a Walmart and then threatened by the company after her case was dismissed has been awarded $2.1 million in damages.
A Mobile County jury on Monday ruled in favor of Lesleigh Nurse of Semmes, news outlets reported.
Nurse said in a lawsuit that she was stopped in November 2016 when trying to leave a Walmart with groceries she said she already paid for, according to AL.com. She said she used self-checkout but the scanning device froze. Workers didn’t accept her explanation and she was arrested for shoplifting.
Her case was dismissed a year later, but then she received letters from a Florida law firm threatening a civil suit if she didn’t pay $200 as a settlement, according to her lawsuit. That was more than the cost of the groceries she was accused of stealing.
Nurse said Walmart instructed the law firm to send the letters — and that she wasn’t the only one receiving them.
“The defendants have engaged in a pattern and practice of falsely accusing innocent Alabama citizens of shoplifting and thereafter attempting to collect money from the innocently accused,” the suit contended.
WKRG reported that the trial featured testimony that Walmart and other major retailers routinely use such settlements in states where laws allow it, and that Walmart made hundreds of millions of dollars this way in a two-year period.
Defense attorneys for Walmart said the practice is legal in Alabama. A spokesperson told AL.com that the company will be filing motions in this case because it doesn’t “believe the verdict is supported by the evidence and the damages awarded exceed what is allowed by law.”
O1O1O1O on November 30th, 2021 at 22:57 UTC »
The AP story did a really poor job of reporting what happened. The system freezing part made it sound like she left without paying when that happened. When Fox Business posted the AP story their rabid commenters lost their shit. Reading the comments is like jamming your fingers in a car door over and over. Maybe one in 20 stopped to think for a second and wrote some sense.
According to this much more detailed story I found https://www.wkrg.com/mobile-county/2-1-million-verdict-woman-who-sued-walmart-and-won-talks-to-wkrg-news-5/ the machine freezing part was just something that happened during the process, and she did get help from a Walmart associate. After paying and leaving with her family she was then accosted and accused of shop lifting and later arrested. A year later Walmart did not show up in court and the case was dismissed. One commentator on Fox Biz stated (without a reference) Nurse actually proved from her credit card that she had paid - I was not able to find that reported yet.
I guess you'd have to find the court documents to know for sure what was claimed by both parties and what evidence there was but it seems telling that Walmart could easily have pulled the surveillance video, shown that, and the case would be won and closed - but they didn't.
What this story is really about is a pattern of people being arrested for shoplifting, Walmart not going to court, and then collecting $200 "settlement" from over a million people. I expect they made a calculation that no matter what the facts are it is cheaper to have someone arrested, don't show up in court which would actually cost time and lawyers fees to do, but instead collect a summary $200 fee from the accused.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that of the 1.4 million people they did this to in the last two years there was more than one person like Nurse who protested innocence, could even prove it, but did not get their day in court and then were coerced into paying $200 for a crime they didn't commit.
rrrdesign on November 30th, 2021 at 21:43 UTC »
They also use to take out “peasant insurance” on their own employees without them knowing. So when a worker died from cancer, with no medical assistance from WalMart, the company made thousands and the family got nothing. Walmart is evil.
oh_no_aliens on November 30th, 2021 at 18:47 UTC »
Fuck walmart those despicable assholes, extorting money from innocent people with lawyers holy fuck what kind of degenerate bullshit is this??
FUCK them holy shit! I hope she actually gets to collect the $2.1 million settlement, since walmart fights to fuck over people. People need to stop shopping there fucking shit.