ETA: your turn for the cites.
I found the story about Brock while doing my own research earlier in the thread. If you read a little more carefully he had a bar tab, for drinks that they did drink, apparently, and a food tab for food that had been ordered but not yet served. He was charged with being disorderly and resisting arrest so this was clearly a case where the cop who was called is going to throw the book at him. That case, I felt, didn’t pass muster as an example. I will read the other cite and get back.
In my business I have run up against a few of incidents that cross into this type of problem. I as an onsite computer tech have on several occasions had people ask me to show up at their home, spend several hours performing a virus cleanup, then state they do not have enough money to pay or cannot pay because wife has the checkbook/atm card/whatever.
If its a lack of funds like they hoped it would be done in an hour incurring a lesser charge I will write up the invoice, make a note on the invoice that customer agrees to pay the balance within 30 days, have them sign it, and accept the partial payment. This way I have a nice binding contract for which money has changed hands. About half of them eventually pay, the rest I rarely bother with.
For ones like the one I had a few months ago I was more than a little pissed and the guy is standing there telling me he had no mechanism to pay and never did. So i have racked up $200 worth of service fees, I called PD.
They came out and despite the fact he did not deny that he never had the money when he called me out they did not feel they could cite him for theft of services, and that this was a civil matter over timing of the payment because the guy is promising to pay me, just not right now.
So the “theft of services” statutes are toothless because apparently police officers tend to interpret theft to require conversion of a tangible item. They take dine and dash plenty seriously, but fix and dash since its just my time, does not cut it.
I went to a couple different "pay for legal questions"sites and even had a chat with a couple of the guys at a criminal defense firm I do computer work for.
The consensus seems to be that although it does meet the letter of the law as a criminal act, functionally it turns PD into payment enforcement, and they tend to back off of anything that looks like civil payment enforcement.
At a glace the first cite has merit for your case. A couple of points to note, no details are given as to circumstances other than what you quoted, and it appears to be a very small town and a guy who already had a warrant out for his arrest. But you are definitely on the right track. I would be curious to know the details of the case and how it was resolved in court.
On rereading the first cite I realize it doesn’t actually ever say he didn’t receive his food. It is worded in a way that could mean that. It says “he ordered 9.95 worth of pizza and walked out.” That very well might mean “he ordered 9.95 worth of pizza and walked out [with it]”
Were any of these people actually charged and convicted of the offense? Cops are not exactly known to be experts at interpreting the finer points of the law.