COLUMBIA, S.C. (Legal Newsline) - A store employee who was captured on video taking items she claimed she was planning to donate in charity Easter baskets gets to keep a $110,000 jury award for false imprisonment, a South Carolina appeals court ruled, rejecting the store’s argument the woman was merely questioned about the missing items and could have walked out any time.
Saying it was the jury’s job to decide who was telling the truth, the South Carolina Court of Appeals left undisturbed the $100,000 in compensatory and $10,000 in punitive damages a jury awarded Lisa Styles for the time she spent being questioned by executives with Southeastern Grocers, the parent company of BI-LO grocery stores. The manager testified Styles was free to leave when she wanted but Styles testified she asked to leave several times but would have to sign a confession first.
“Determining which one of these stories is correct is why we have juries,” the court said in a Sept. 27 decision.
A state law known as the ”shopkeeper’s privilege” allows managers to question employees about theft but only soon after the alleged infraction. Styles was questioned weeks after the videotape showed her walking out with a mix of products, some of them paid for and others not.
The store argued it couldn’t be liable for false imprisonment because Styles walked into the office voluntarily, was never restrained or told she couldn’t leave and stayed long after it was clear she was being accused of theft. That doesn’t matter, the appeals court ruled: It is enough under South Carolina for the plaintiff to allege she felt pressured to stay.
Finally, the court rejected arguments the jury was inflamed by irrelevant evidence Styles was the victim of sexism and an overbearing boss who retaliated against her for reporting him to his superiors. The judge also allowed Styles to present anonymous consumer complaints about her boss’s behavior.
“Anonymous customer complaints are not the stuff that airtight cases are made of, but they need not be in order to pass our state’s test for relevance,” the court concluded. They made it more likely than not the manager’s behavior “was causing problems,” the court said, “a central theme of Styles’s case.”