Woman awarded $2.1 million in Walmart shoplifting arrest

An Alabama woman who sued Walmart, contending that she was falsely arrested on a shoplifting charge and that the ordeal had damaged her reputation, was awarded $2.1 million in punitive damages by a jury this week.

The verdict, reached Monday by a jury in Mobile County circuit court, was confirmed by Chuck Lewis, a deputy clerk for the court’s civil division.

Recounting the episode, the woman, Lesleigh Nurse, said Wednesday that she had just finished using a self-service checkout kiosk at the Walmart in Semmes, Ala., on Nov. 27, 2016, when the store’s employees accused her of not paying for some groceries that totaled $48.

Despite her efforts to explain that her husband had paid the full amount of $122 with his debit card, Nurse said, she was held in a back room at the store until a sheriff ’s deputy arrived and told her that she would need to monitor the sheriff’s website for a warrant for her arrest.

Nurse, 36, said the warrant charging her with shoplifting was issued 10 days later. She said she then turned herself in at the county jail in Mobile, Ala., where she remained for about four hours until she was released on bond. Semmes, where Nurse lives, is about 15 miles northwest of Mobile.

The shoplifting charge was dropped in March 2017 when the store’s asset protection specialist failed to show up to court, but Nurse said that she continued to receive letters from Walmart threatening to sue her if she didn’t pay $200.

“It was a nightmare,” Nurse said. “It was an entrapment. That’s what it felt like.”

The jury found Walmart liable for abuse of process — bringing a malicious legal proceeding against someone that is intended to harass them.

But on Nurse’s claims that she was falsely arrested, imprisoned, maliciously prosecuted and slandered, the jurors sided with the retail giant.

Randy Hargrove, a Walmart spokesperson, said Wednesday that the retailer would appeal the verdict and that it believed that the $2.1 million in damages awarded by the jury exceeded the amount allowed under state law in Alabama.

“We continue to believe our associates acted appropriately,” Hargrove said. “We don’t believe the verdict is supported by the evidence.”

Hargrove noted that Walmart’s civil recovery program, one that had faced criticism for aggressive tactics to reach settlements with those charged with shoplifting, was discontinued in 2018. He disputed that the program had been driven by revenues, as some critics had said.

“Civil recovery programs have been reported as profit centers, and they are not,” he said. “And that characterization about our company was not accurate.”

The district attorney and sheriff’s office in Mobile County did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Throughout the ordeal, Nurse said, Walmart refused repeated requests by her lawyers for security camera footage from the store. She said that the video was critical and would have shown a store employee helping her to scan items at the checkout, some of which had to be manually entered because of a problem with the kiosk.

“I believe that they’re so intimidating and so big,” Nurse said of Walmart. “They’ve grown to be so enormous that they feel like they can do anything to anybody. That’s not right. Shame on them.”

During the civil trial, which lasted about three weeks, the judge criticized Walmart for the “intentional loss” of the security camera footage, according to court records.

The Walmart spokesperson said he was unable to answer questions about the videos that were destroyed. According to the spokesperson, the store’s former asset protection associate did appear at Nurse’s originally scheduled criminal proceeding and learned at that time it was being postponed. He left the company and did not appear at the rescheduled hearing, the spokesperson said.

Vince Kilborn, a lawyer for Nurse, said Wednesday that Walmart went out of its way to make Nurse’s life miserable.

“Her reputation is still a thief,” he said. “She’s fought against the largest retailer in the world over $48 and won.”

Nurse said that the damage caused by the arrest cannot be undone.

“There’s no amount of money that’s going to make that go away,” she said.