There is no doubt something missing from the news articles - and part of what’s missing is that no one under 18 can sell or serve alcoholic beverages in Minnesota. And another part is this
It’s actually possible that what he’s being held responsible for is not the sale itself, but the fact that the 17 year old was allowed to sell/serve the drink.
You’re seriously objecting to a guy being held criminally liable for running his business in a criminal manner? It’s flat-out illegal to have a 17-year-old serve beer in Minnesota, so his setup where a 17-year-old was even able to sell a 19-year old a beer was against the law, and would have been even if it was a 21-year old buying. And anyone getting a liquor license is told how the law works, it’s not some weird surprise to them. The fact that Minnesota has no shortage of people willing to open bars and restaurants seems to indicate that your worry about the effects of this law may be a tad overblown. And it makes the ‘without his knowledge’ a stupid defense - if you’re not willing to take the minimal steps needed to do things like only hire people legally able to serve alcohol, the fact that you didn’t know specifically that this particular event happened doesn’t somehow excuse it.
I like pizza and beer.
Even that is not enough. The FBI tried for years to get Al Capone on a variety of offenses. All they could get him on was tax evasion, much of that was based on his “legal” business operations.
Mr. Kalil failed to take the bolded action. Full stop. That’s all there is to it.
Depending on which state this is in, that 17 year old may not be solely legally responsible for their actions.
And your last complaint (and the only one here that might have any merit at all, IMO) that this should not be an arrestable offense… why don’t you talk that out with someone who was hurt or killed or otherwise impacted by an underage drunk driver and see how far that argument gets you?
We don’t let kids sell alcohol to other kids. And we hold the adults responsible for those kids to account for what the kids do under their watch.
My puzzlement is more fundamental.
SlackerInc, did you just ask “Can that thing which actually happened actually happen?”
Yes, what happened can actually happen. My citation is the fact it actually happened.
I’m not a lawyer (Hell, I’m barely legal) but a related phrase you may want to read about is “strict liability”. In which the mere fact of the violation is an offense, without any requirement for knowing violation (mens rea).
This looks like such an occasion: the violation occurred without the responsible party’s knowledge, but that doesn’t matter. The offense is defined in terms that don’t require knowing violation.
I’m sure the defendant will raise these issues in court. Just because there was sufficient evidence to charge him does not mean he can’t put on a defense along the lines you suggest.
At this point Kalil has only been charged, which is reasonable for the reasons that have been given in this thread. Your position seems to be that the owner of a business should have legal immunity for the actions of his business.
Kalil will have the opportunity to defend himself by showing he took reasonable steps to ensure that his business did not break any laws and that this particular crime was committed in defiance of his business’s policies. If he can show that his business has a general policy of not hiring underage people to serve alcohol with age verification and that they have a general policy of having their employees check IDs and not sell alcohol to underage customers and that this crime occurred because this particular employee had credible fake ID and was secretly violating the business’s policies, then he’ll be okay. I’ll admit that I personally consider that unlikely. I think it’s much more likely that this crime occurred because Kalil and the people he hired to manage his business weren’t taking enough care to make sure nothing illegal was going on.
Nobody was expecting Kalil to perform miracles. But it was reasonable to expect him to run his business to the same standards that the majority of other bar owners manage to run theirs.
Today I learned what the TLA TIL means.
I keep seeing this not happen. Here’s a random cite:
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: “None of the charges against individuals resulted in any prison time, and no charges were levied against upper level executives.”
As far as I know, he didn’t sign up for a fork license, and there aren’t special laws that apply to who can and can’t have forks in a restaurant.
But as someone else said, if that did happen, the owner (or his insurance company) is going to be paying for that too.
It’s pretty unlikely he’ll do prison time over this. He may pay a fine. I think the goal is just to give him enough of a headache that he makes sure it doesn’t happen again. And possibly to make an example of him so that other restaurant owners avoid the same headache.
Actually, that is a different situation involving a different branch of law enforcement. Nobody in the state of New York could make that arrest, it would have to be done at the AG level.
The serving/selling of alcohol does however fall under the state jurisdiction, and the locality.
I believe that the statement, “If you own the business, you’re ultimately liable for the conduct of your employees and anything else that happens in the business,” reflects reality, especially when it comes to the liquor business. As has been mentioned, state liquor boards hold licensees to a very strict standard of liability. People can and do leave drinking establishments in a state of impairment and get into accidents which injure and kill other people. It is up to the licensee to hire and train his staff to prevent this from happening, and to be sure his managers are competent enough to make sure no one is served illegally in his absence.
I’ll bet a large proportion of people saying the owner bears no liability have never worked in liquor sales or had dealings with a state liquor control board.
TIL I learned what TLA means.
hugs (that’s a PDA)
TIL I learned what the TLA acronym means.
The jurisdiction isn’t relevant to the point.
It’s completely different.
Are you arguing that the seventeen-year-old made the decision to hire himself for the job? He obviously didn’t. The decision to hire somebody who was underage was made by the business. The decision to put that employee in a job where he could serve alcohol to customers was made by the business. So the business is responsible for the consequences of the decisions it made.
Matt Kalil is the owner of the business. That makes him responsible for the decisions the business makes. He’s the guy that either makes the decisions directly or hires the managers who make the decisions on his behalf.
If Kalil’s business was breaking the law (which nobody appears to be disputing) then it was his responsibility to fix the problem.
Suppose we gave business owners the kind of immunity you imagine they should have. The results would be insane. Anyone could set up a business to break the law and not worry about what crimes their business was committing. They could collect the profits from the crimes without worrying about the consequences.
Right?
Gnoitall, I followed your link on “strict liability” and then looked at the section on criminal law specifically. I see nothing there criminally punishing something that is not even an “act”. Someone speeding, even if they don’t realize they are doing so, is still actually driving the car over the speed limit. No one cited in the news story has accused Kalil of any specific act of wrongdoing. Although several people here have speculated that he may have been negligible somehow, that was not stated in court at least based on the newspaper account. It appears to be simply his state of being as owner that is resulting in his criminal charge.
Good point. And for all those shrugging this off, can you cite examples of business owners being *criminally *prosecuted simply because they owned the business and an employee broke the law? With no allegation that the owner knew about or condoned the lawbreaking, or was guilty of some kind of specific negligence involving deviation from what is reasonable and prudent as a business owner?
That’s my *only *complaint. I couldn’t have been clearer. It’s right in the first sentence of my OP, for chrissakes. :smack:
What people are those? I certainly never said the owner bears no liability, only that I find it shocking that he could be arraigned in court for a crime in this scenario. But civil liability, liability for a hefty fine, or even loss of his liquor license: sure. None of that would shock me in the least.
This is a strawman, or you are not reading carefully. That is not my position at all–see above.
Whoa, let’s be careful here with throwing around “bar owners”. It’s a pizza joint that sells beer to wash down the pizza. I don’t believe they have an actual physical bar or sell liquor, mixed drinks, etc. If it were that kind of place and he had a 17 year old bartending, that would obviously be messed up.
Doreen, did you click on the links in your legal cite?
I clicked them, and they all specify what acts are felonies and what misdemeanors. So maybe I’m missing some fine point here (IANAL), but it sure looks like the “except sections” caveat should be precisely the point in Kalil’s legal defense. Basically I would interpret it as “except that the licensee cannot be charged with a criminal act for something an employee did”. But s/he can still potentially lose their license, which makes a lot more sense to me.
You’re assuming this would require a “setup”, and that Kalil was even the one “setting up” his business (as opposed to just letting managers do so). In Missouri where I used to live, beer, wine, and hard liquor were sold in supermarkets and convenience stores. My local supermarket had many teens working as cashiers. If my six pack of porter or bottle of bourbon came down the conveyer belt, these teens would have to call a manager or at least an older employee to come ring up that item before they could go back to ringing up the rest of my purchases.
But if they didn’t follow the rule and just rang it up anyway, how would the owner be at fault? If you’re saying a supermarket or pizza joint should simply not hire employees who are under 21, I’d say that’s not realistic and it’s certainly not standard industry practice (if this were the expectation, it ought to be right there in the liquor laws).
I did read the links- section 340A.701 describes certain felonies , 340A.702 describes certain gross misdemeanors and 340A.702 describes misdemeanors. But read my whole post - employing a 17 year old who is then allowed to sell or serve alcoholic beverages is something the license holder did, not the 17 year old employee.
Doing so is apparently a gross misdemeanor. And I have seen nothing that actually specifies the statute he is charged with violating - it’s entirely possible that he is charged with this and not the underage sale