KS court rejects appeal from man who cashed in on Walmart self-checkout mistake
The Kansas Appeals Court on Friday upheld the theft conviction of a Sumner County man who capitalized on a cash-loading error that left a Walmart self-checkout spitting out $20 bills instead of $1s.
“Sometimes, things are too good to be true,” a three-judge panel wrote in their ruling rejecting Nicholas Ryan Morris’ argument that there was too little evidence to support his conviction of theft of property delivered by mistake.
In reviewing evidence shown at trial, “a rational fact-finder could have easily found that Morris was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” the four-page ruling said.
Morris’ conviction stems from a January 2019 shopping trip where he discovered a self-checkout machine at the Walmart store in Wellington was giving incorrect change to customers making cash purchases. Where it should have dispensed $1 bills, the machine spat out $20s.
Instead of receiving $12.80 in change for his initial purchase, Morris got $50.80, court records say.
Impressed with the financial windfall, Morris returned to the same self-checkout machine at least six more times, receiving at least $494 in extra change, court records show. He even convinced his girlfriend and an acquaintance to also use the machine so he could avoid drawing employees’ suspicions.
Court records say Morris’ luck ran out when a store manager who watched security video caught onto the scheme and notified police.
A Wellington officer testified at Morris’ trial that Morris told police he didn’t think he had done anything wrong “because he had paid for the items he bought.”
Morris’ girlfriend told jurors she turned the extra change she got using the self-checkout over to Morris. Both she and the acquaintance eventually returned some stolen money to Walmart.
The appeals court said Friday that the jury had “ample evidence” to deliver a guilty verdict against Morris including his purchase receipts, the store security footage and photographs of Morris using the self-checkout repeatedly. The panel noted that in Kansas, a crime occurs when a person wrongly receives property, knowing who the rightful owner is, but intentionally fails to return it.
The court also rejected an argument from Morris that inconsistent evidence about the number of his self-checkout transactions should have left jurors unable to deliver a unanimous verdict.
This story was originally published September 4, 2020 at 4:46 PM.
