Don’t need answer fast, this is all hypothetical, you are not my lawyer, blah blah blah.
This guy got locked in the beer cooler at a convenience store and figured, what the hell, he might as well drink the beer.
Assume for the sake of this thought experiment that I’m the guy locked in the cooler. Assume further there is no way I can make enough noise that the employees can hear me (unlike the guy in the report). Assume further that I have no means of getting out. Also, it’s Saturday night, and due to our town’s blue laws, the store won’t open until noon Sunday, so I’m looking at 10-12 hours in the cooler.
Do I have an affirmative defense against shoplifting in this case? Or does the law expect me to just stay dry for 12 hours?
My defense would revolve around me having to take a piss, so I drank a quart bottle of beer so I’d have something to pee into. Only then I had to go again, and no way I’m drinking pee. And I don’t know who shit in that empty twelve pack holder, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.
You might have a defense against, say, laws against consuming alcohol on the premises if you can make an argument that you needed to drink something to stay hydrated and beer was all that was available. Necessity can be a defense against criminal charges.
But the time when you’d pay for the beer is after you get out. If you don’t happen to have enough on you, identifying yourself to the shopkeeper and going to get suitable payment seems like the thing you should do, and should reasonably be punished if you don’t.
If you steal someone’s car to take a dying loved one to the hospital, you might get out of theft charges due to exigency. But if you crash it on the way there, you’d still have to pay for the damages.
I wonder if you’d have some claim against the shop? Locking a cooler customers can enter without checking if it’s empty is a hazardous practice. 10-12 hours in a cooler is enough to cause some health issues and (maybe?) a hypothermic death.
Allowing a customer to be locked in a beer cooler overnight implies potentially non-trivial liability. I think they’d happily say “Mr. Homie has our best wishes and two cases of beer, of his choice.”
“Had drank”? what are they teaching them in internet reporter school these days?
Anyway, does anyone else think it sounds like the guy hid in the cooler to see how much free beer he could get? That’s sure what it sounds like to me.
But in answer to the OP’s hypothetical, malt beverages do have calories and some B vitamins, albeit, they aren’t exactly Ensure, but they will keep you from feeling hungry (in a way that wine or vodka won’t), and while you will dehydrate more quickly drinking alcohol, it’s not that much of a concern in a cooler.
If the employees really were that negligent, I’d say you have a pretty good case (pun intended) that you needed something to fuel yourself, and that was literally all you had access to.
But if the store wants you to pay for it, I’d pay for it. You can sue later, but you should pay up in the moment. After all, wherever you were at the time, you would have had to pay for your food. I would not try to argue that they owe you for locking you in, because that’s how the police get called-- albeit, it’s really not a smart store owner who insists, because that’s how people decide to file lawsuits.
According to the article the guy could have gotten out of the cooler at any time he wished.
AFAIK, it’s pretty much mandatory to have some kind of inside latch release. In any case I can’t quite feature a cooler manufacturer not installing or providing such a latch, liability you know.
I know there are cheap business owners, one such might not see the need, I would be inclined to think that the potential liability would be enough to convince the cheapest business owner of the wisdom of having an inside release.
In addition employees go in an out of freezers and coolers all the time during business hours and need to be able to get out. Also, given the heat gain to the freezer / cooler with the door open, it’s imperative to keep the doors closed as much as possible.
The other issue is that the guy didn’t offer to pay.
I am not a Lawyer, but I don’t think the individual has any defense other then the employees left him in the store after it closed. And how did the employees not check? The old doge of crouching on a toilet at closing time?
If he had been willing to pay for what he consumed rather than bolting he probably would have avoided any retail theft charges though they may have cited him for an open container in public vio or something else. Either way, that guy was a previous criminal and completely full of beans on this incident.
What I find interesting is this:
According to the police report, Van Ert drank an 18-oz. bottle of Icehouse beer and three cans of Four Loko.
I wonder if the Four Loko were the 23.5 ounce size @ 12% alcohol. If so, combined with the 18 ounces of 5.5% Icehouse he consumed the alcohol equivalent of approximately 17 regular beers. That’s a lot of ethanol in 6 hours.
Correct. A walk in cold box or freezer can be opened from the inside, It is required by law. Even if a padlock is across the lock outside. I am not sure but I believe it is part of OSHA requirements now.
Yes, any large walk-in cooler/freezer is absolutely required to have an inside handle that opens the door.
Typical refrigerated cases like in a grocery store will have clear glass doors on the front, usually without any latch at all. Big ones (like milk coolers) will be open at the back, where employees will restock the cooler. There is a big (pallet-wide) door where forklifts can enter, usually in a back room (non public area).
Smaller coolers, like in a convenience store, might have only the clear glass front door, with no access from the back. Again, those usually have no lock or latch on the front. And generally are hardly large enough for a person to get inside, much less hide unseen.
Some states have laws which limit the hours that beer can be sold. Then a convenience or grocery store that is open longer will have a padlock that can be put on the front door of the beer cooler, to keep customers from opening it. But they usually have strict procedures controlling this: employees have to announce that alcohol sales are ending, get the padlock from in back, check the cooler to verify that nobody is inside, lock it up, and record the time & person doing this in a log book (plus it’s on their surveillance cameras). And not doing it right would get you reprimanded or fired.
So I can’t see how this could have happened accidentally. More likely that guy was hiding in the cooler, planning to come out after they closed & rob the place. Only to find they had locked him inside the cooler. Had he just offered to pay for what he had drunk instead of bolting when he came out in the morning, he probably would have had no charges. Or maybe not, given his lengthy criminal record.
Yes, that’s what it sounds like to me. The article I read said the cooler had glass doors, and the guy didn’t even try to get anyone’s attention. As soon as someone saw him, they opened it.
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He was in the cooler. He didn’t have the run of the whole store.
