Per the article belowit is asserted that a server was fined $15,000 and sent to jail for not carding a minor when serving alcohol. I find this almost impossible to believe. I can understand that the restaurant might be fined and the server fired, but that the server is legally liable (and subject to jail) as well is news to me.
Can servers be fined and sent to jail for not checking IDs anywhere in the US?
Yes, they can. In California, where this occurred, California Penal Code - Section 25658 states:
“(a) Except as otherwise provided in subdivision (c), every person who sells, furnishes, gives, or causes to be sold, furnished, or given away any alcoholic beverage to any person under 21 years of age is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
I don’t know where the $15,000 fine comes in, but Section 25658 further states:
“(2) Except as provided in paragraph (3), any person who violates subdivision (a) by furnishing an alcoholic beverage, or causing an alcoholic beverage to be furnished, to a minor shall be punished by a fine of one thousand dollars ($1,000), no part of which shall be suspended, and the person shall be required to perform not less than 24 hours of community service during hours when the person is not employed and is not attending school.”
The server is acting as an agent of the licensee and is expected to take proper care when serving alcoholic beverages so as not to furnish alcohol to underage persons or the visibly impaired. The amount of the fine seems extreme to me, but the burden is on the server to check for ID to make sure the person buying the alcohol is at least 21.
I doubt the quoted anecdote, in that the amount of the fine seems excessive, and usually, such things would be a matter of state law, rather than federal. That said, yes, it is quite possible that a server–or a cashier in a store that sells alcohol–would be held criminally liable for serving a minor.
Can the OP clarify: Are you asking if it is against the law to sell to a minor, or for simply not checking an ID?
If someone is 21 years old and you sell them booze without checking ID, AFAIK, that is not against the law (but for some reason TN law comes to mind as requiring ID checks of everyone).
If you sell booze to someone that is 20, then clearly you have broken the law. In most states it is a defense if the 20 year old presented you a reasonably good fake ID.
It clearly must depend on the state. In this state there are regular sting operations about selling alcoholic beverages to minors. The standard punishments are fines for the business and a short suspension of alcohol selling privileges. I have never seen a mention that the individual person selling the alcohol was sanctioned.
My stepmother was carded in an Idaho restaurant - and she was 93 at the time.
The server explained that since she did not order a drink, but my father ordered a beer, the rule was - no exceptions - that anyone who did not order a drink sitting with someone who did, also had to be carded. The server apologized but that was the rule.
In most jurisdictions, the person actually serving and the establishment are both liable (Remember the scene in “Clerks” where the guy fills in for his friend, sells cigarettes to a 5-year-old, and then the clerk is fined?). I’ve never heard of anywhere that offers jail time, and unless it was a habitual offender, I don’t see it ever being jail time. Every so often you hear about a bar that loses its license temporarily, forced to shut down for a month or something, for repeated underage violations… plus fines.
I recall in Toronto for a while there was a concern that some bars had a setup to photograph ID’s at the door, to “cover their ass” about underage drinking - but the concern was with privacy and identity theft problems.
AFAICT there is no legal requirement to check a person’s ID. However it makes good sense from a liability point of view, because if you serve ID to a minor, you’re responsible. Some minors will depend on the server neglecting to check ID. And undercover officers, who are usually 20 years old, will carry proper ID, but if you neglect to card them and serve alcohol to them, you’ll be arrested. And how do you tell a person’s age without checking? Can you tell a 20 and a 21 year old person apart? Especially in a group? Some 17 year olds can pass for a person in their early 20s. Many establishments have a policy to card anyone who looks to be under 30 and their employees are instructed to follow that policy. You’re risking your pocketbook and your freedom, as well as your job, if you don’t.
In this state (WA), there is not a legal obligation to check ID. There is a legal obligation not to sell alcohol or tobacco to persons underage, and if you do so, then both the business and the individual are liable to fines, and in a practical sense the individual will lose their job to boot. Checking ID is thus the only safe way to ensure that you’re doing your job, and can be used as proof of due diligence if you get handed a very convincing fake. The state does regular sting operations where they send in underage volunteers to attempt to buy alcohol or cigarettes, and a few years back one of my co-workers got fined and lost her job for selling to one of those people, so it’s definitely something that exists as a real threat for anyone in a checkstand.
Our store’s rule of thumb is that you should card anyone who appears to be under the age of 30. I, personally, card anyone who looks to be under 50, since if you phrase it just right, then people of a certain age will be overjoyed to be carded.
The drinking age isn’t a federal requirement, rather it’s a carrot-or-stick approach. Many states had drinking ages of 18 or 19, but raised it in response to a Department of Transportation move to cut federal highway funding to states that didn’t have a minimum drinking age of 21. States are free to lower the drinking age below 21, but they’ll lose 10% of their federal funding if they do.
It’s like the DOT saying, “Nice highways you have in your state. It would be a shame if you couldn’t afford to maintain them.”
I think that an extra zero may have been slipped in on the $15000 fine in the OP article, but maybe not.
In Oregon the server could be fined $200-$1500 for serving alcohol to a minor or visibly intoxicated person. And get jail time, although I have never heard of that being applied.
Quote is from a big ass PDF from OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission) so I didn’t cite it here.
And the OLCC does periodic sting operations to test for compliance. They send in a under-age person and an OLCC officer and see who they can entrap.
During my last 4 years I was an alcohol compliance investigator in the vice section detective bureau of the agency I retired from.
One of the things I did from time to time was send an underager in to bars & stores to try to get served or purchase alcohol. When the server would demand ID I had the decoy show their actual ID. You wouldn’t believe how many servers would look at an ID card that clearly showed the purchaser was under 21 and still serve them.
Sometimes I would have the decoy take an empty beer bottle up to the bar in a tavern or restaurant and say “I’ll have another of these” which implied they had already been served previously.
I also used decoys that looked older than 21 even though they weren’t.
Some of these are pretty extreme tactics. But at no time did I or any other investigator ever have one of our cites tossed as being entrapment.
The article does not actually say the server was fined $15,000 or that the actualy offense was the failure to ask for ID.
It is most likely that because the server did not ask for ID, she subsequently and mistakenly served an alcoholic beverage to a minor. The “federal agent” was probably not a federal agent, but instead worked for the state alcohol enforcement agency. Every state is a bit different, but they all have something like that. In Florida, it is the Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco which often sends in underaged persons to check the compliance of the business. With such a similar name to the federal agency, they are often confused and mistaken for the ATF. Officers in that division are even called Special Agents. So when they are citing the server for a misdemeanor, and introduce themself as “Special Agent Smith with the Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco”, it confuses many people.
Assuming that the figure of $15,000 is accurate, this was probably not the fine, but rather the total cost in lawyer fees and court costs.
In Florida, the offense is a misdemeanor. A server, bartender or store clerk caught selling to a minor is cited and given a mandatory court appearance. Technically they are arrested, but released with a promise to appear in court.
It is up to the local agency, though. The DABT mentioned above does not book suspects or take them to jail. Technically, a guilty verdict in court could result in a one year jail sentence, but nobody is actually going to get that. Most likely it will be a fine and community service, probabtion, pretrial intervention or something like that.
However, there are some small agencies in Florida that have a policy of actually booking suspects for alcohol related offenses. If these agencies are involved, then the bartender or store clerk is going to be taken to jail. Not sure what the bond is set at, though I think most of them get released on their own recognizance after they are processed at the jail.
From age 16-18, I used to do this for the DABT. I always had to give them my actual ID when asked. Further, if they asked “How old are you,” I had to tell them my real age. Like you said, a lot of times they would look at the ID and not even read it.
This would probably be pushing the limit of agency policy in Florida. I suspect it would not be allowed there.
Florida case law prevents this. The decoy cannot look 21, and certainly not older. I was not allowed to have any facial hair or dress in a way that made me appear to be of legal age. I guess it isn’t a strict liability offense there. Not sure, but I was told that this was considered entrapment and people were having charges dismissed because of it. So the agency was very strict on my appearance. They had to take a picture of me each day I went out so they could show in court that I did not appear to be 21 to a reasonable person.
You would remove the tranche of people born in the three years following 18, which would mean fewer people to be caught as minors.
My dad started drinking in pubs at 11. Never did him any harm.
Apart from being a life-long alcoholic, of course.
[ *But that would have probably happened anyway. Seems to skip every other generation in my family; I barely drink at all. Which is not as popular with the fair sex as one might imagine. *]
The anecdote was hearsay. It was just something a server told the writer. What set my bullshit detector off was that 1.) federal agents are over 21, so the server wouldn’t have been charged with serving a minor 2.) “federal agent” is an incredibly vague term 3.) the federal government does not have jurisdiction over the drinking age; it’s a matter for the states.
I think it’s a story the server tells patrons to shut them up if they complain about being carded.
There are other cultural differences between the U.S. and other countries that won’t be solved by simply lowering the drinking age. We have a horrendously high rate of alcohol-related highway fatalities compared to many other countries, and a troubling rate of underage drinking and driving. Making that legal isn’t going to magically make them all act more responsibly.
I know it isn’t considered entrapment, but I don’t know why. An agent of the state is inviting a member of the public, whom he doesn’t suspect of any criminal activity, to commit a crime. But for the agents actions, no crime would be committed.
That is generally the test for entrapment in other activities but it doesn’t apply to alcohol sting sales.
Former convenience store clerk chiming in; we had a policy of carding anyone who looked under 27, and both the authorities & corporate would conduct stings. The state used actual minors, and had to show real ID if asked. Failing a state sting meant instant termination (for cause so no unemployment). Corporate used decoys that could be as old as 25, and they were allowed to lie about their age or say they forget their ID (they weren’t allowed to threw temper tantrums* though). Failing a corporate sting meant a 7 day unpaid suspension for a 1st offence, and instant termination (for cause so no unemployment) for a 2nd offence within 12 months). Oh, and this was only for tobacco (gas stations in PA can’t sell beer).
*We were adjacent to a college campus so there were alot of temper tantrums. The worst were usually from the male half of straight couples; though I recall one ROTC cadet that was obnoxious enough that I actually called the university’s public affairs office on him.
People in most European countries drink substantially more than we do, while having a lot less highway fatalities.
We have one of the most lax ‘legal BAC’ limits anywhere: in a lot of European countries, the legal BAC to drive is far below 0.08. If we were serious about being interested in lowering drunk driving, we wouldn’t focus on the drinking age, and instead would focus on lowering the acceptable legal limit to drive. We don’t, of course, because the real motivator here is a neo-Calvinist disapproval of alcohol, rather than a serious cost/benefit analysis.