MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Walmart must pay $900,000 to the widow of a man killed by a drunk driver because an employee failed to detect the 20-year-old’s license was fake, the Alabama Supreme Court.
Walmart argued it would need an “FBI-grade 'crime lab'” to detect every fake ID its clerks encounter. But the Supreme Court said a jury was entitled to decide the employee should have noticed subtle flaws in the purchaser’s counterfeit Georgia ID, including a misplaced signature and a photo border that was crisp instead of feathered.
Jackson Andrew Walters walked into an Ocean Shores Walmart in March 2022 and bought a 12-pack of hard seltzer and a bottle of California champagne at a self-serve kiosk. The purchase triggered an alert and the clerk examined his ID for 5 seconds before approving the sale. It turned out Walters was using a fake Georgia license he’d bought for $40 that said he was 21, however.
Walmart said the clerk had met all the training requirements under Georgia law but a plaintiff expert witness, Ronald Tobb, testified the clerk should have noticed several signs the ID was fake and Walmart could have prevented the mistake by paying for a service that scans IDs.
The day after buying the alcohol, Walters hit and killed James E. Reed as he was crossing a street on his motorized scooter. Reed’s wife Bonnie Estell sued Walters, who was charged with manslaughter, and Walmart, although she later dropped Walters as a defendant. A jury found Walmart liable under Alabama’s dram shop act in 2025 and ordered it to pay $900,000 in damages.
Walmart appealed, arguing it was immune from liability because its employee checked Walters’ ID.
“If alcohol vendors in Alabama have to eliminate shelf space in order to build a FBI-grade 'crime lab' to check for fake IDs, they will simply close," the company wrote in a brief. It also cited a 1992 Alabama Supreme Court decision under a different statute that said if a purchaser “produces a license that appears to be valid” the seller is immune even if the ID later turns out to be fake.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument, saying the earlier decision didn’t involve the dram shop act so whatever the court said was dicta, or language outside the court’s central holding. The other statute also contained qualifications that were absent in the dram shop act in effect in 2022, which was essentially a strict-liability law making sellers responsible whenever an underage person bought alcohol. The court upheld the judgment in a November 6 opinion by Justice Brad Mendheim.
Justice Will Parker concurred in the judgment, but noted that the amended dram shop law might prevent similar verdicts in the future. The new law is “expressly predicated on repudiating the strict-liability standard from our precedent,” he wrote, and may limit dram shop liability to cases where the buyer is “visibly intoxicated.”
“The Legislature has now acted, even if that action does not help Walmart in this specific case,” he wrote. “That is how the process should work.”
Alabama legislators amended the law in 2023, making sellers liable for knowingly providing alcohol to minors, with “knowingly” defined as “knew or should have known under the circumstances.”
Justice William B. Sellers dissented, saying the majority erred by interpreting the old dram shop act so strictly that “a person is punished based on a crime committed by a third party, namely, the underage purchaser of alcohol, even when that crime is entirely undetectable.”
“Walmart had a system in place that alerts a cashier when alcohol is being purchased, cashiers were trained in how to verify identifications, and the cashier involved in the present case checked the identification in question,” he wrote. “The only bad actor was the person using the fraudulent identification to make the purchase.”
