In a 6-1 ruling, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled yesterday that convenience stores may be held liable when they sell alcohol to people who are obviously intoxicated if those people then drove and injured others.
With this ruling the court reverses the decisions of a trial court and the Georgia Court of a Appeals, which had said that Georgia’s “dram shop act” only applies to restaurants and bars where alcohol is served on the premises. The new decision will likely cause convenience stores and other businesses that sell alcohol in Georgia to reevaluate their policies.
The case—Florez v. Exprezit! Stores 98-Georgia—arose from a collision in which twenty-four-year old Billy Joe Grundell purchased a twelve pack of beer at an Exprezit! store and later crashed head-on into a van, killing six people and injuring others. Grundell’s blood alcohol was twice the legal limit at the time of the crash.
The surviving passengers brought a lawsuit against the convenience store under Georgia’s “dram shop act,” which creates liability for businesses that sell alcohol to adults who are obviously drunk, knowing that he or she will soon drive a vehicle. At trial, the judge granted summary judgment to Exprezit!, ruling that the statute did not apply to convenience stores. The Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed, reasoning that that extending liability to convenience stores, where it is less likely that employees will realize how intoxicated a person is, when or where he or she plans to drink the alcohol, or whether he or she will soon be driving. In such a situation, the Court of Appeals believed that jurors would be asked to “speculate” about things they cannot know, creating an “impracticable result.”
The Georgia Supreme Court rejected this view, stating that convenience stores often do “have an opportunity to observe how the customer arrived and, conversely, the manner in which he will depart. The fact that a convenience store employee has less of an opportunity to determine how intoxicated a person is than in a bar or restaurant does not mean that it cannot be held liable for the results of the alcohol sale. Rather, the opportunity to judge will simply be a fact to be determined at trial. If the store knew or should have known the customer was intoxicated and would soon drive, it can be held liable if it sells him or her alcohol and that alcohol causes harm to others.
The case against Exprezit! will now be sent back to trial where these facts will be determined, or the parties will reach a settlement agreement.
Attorney Page Pate was interviewed about this decision by WABE FM 90.1, Atlanta’s public radio station.
