Missouri Supreme Court considers alcohol liability law for bars, stores

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Missouri legislators made a distinction between bars and convenience stores when writing the state's alcohol liability laws. Now the state Supreme Court is considering whether that difference is unconstitutional.

The state's high court heard arguments Tuesday on behalf of a suburban St. Louis mother who claims she should be able to sue the convenience store that sold her 20-year-old son a 12-pack of beer the night before he died in a car accident.

A St. Louis judge dismissed the lawsuit last year, citing the 2002 state law that allows liability suits only against those who sell liquor by the drink for consumption on site -- and even then, only when certain criteria are met.

But St. Louis attorney James Parrot, who represents the mother of Terry Keown, argued that allowing relatives of a minor sold alcohol by a bar or restaurant to sue but not relatives of a minor who bought alcohol from a convenience or grocery store violates the state constitution's equal protection clause. In either case, selling the minor alcohol is illegal, he said.

"That distinction is irrational and arbitrary," Parrot told Supreme Court judges.

But some judges seemed skeptical of his argument.

Judge William Ray Price Jr. commented that the equal protection clause applies to people. In the liquor liability law, it's classifications of business, not people, that are being treated differently, Price said.

St. Louis attorney Gary Wiseman, who represents the Huck's Convenience Food Store in St. Peters that sold Keown the beer, argued that legislators did make a rational distinction -- even if it's not the one some people would have preferred.

Additionally, Wiseman said, so-called "dram shop" laws have historically applied only to those who sell individual alcoholic drinks -- not bulk quantities that are taken elsewhere and for which the seller has no knowledge of when or by whom it will be consumed.

Chief Justice Michael Wolff concurred in that historical interpretation. And Judge Richard Teitelman praised Wiseman for expressing his case well.

Trade associations representing restaurants, gas stations and convenience stores also filed court briefs urging the Supreme Court to uphold the 2002 Missouri law, which generally prohibits liability lawsuits against businesses when intoxicated people later injure or kill someone. The law makes exceptions "when it is proven by clear and convincing evidence that the seller knew or should have known" that the alcohol was served to someone younger than 21 or to a "visibly intoxicated person."

The law was a rewritten in response to a 2000 Supreme Court decision that struck down Missouri's previous alcohol liability law dating to 1985. That law allowed lawsuits only if there was a criminal conviction of serving a minor or intoxicated person. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutionally limited people's access to the courts, because the ability to file a civil suit was contingent upon a prosecutor's actions.

In the current case before the court, Elois Snodgras asserts that the clerk at Huck's never checked her son's driver's license to know if he was old enough to legally buy beer on Oct. 1, 2004. Early the next morning, after drinking all or much of the beer, Keown was killed in a one-car crash in St. Charles County. A medical examiner concluded he died of head trauma and acute alcohol intoxication, according to the mother's court briefs.

Snodgras said her son had graduated from a Fort Zumwalt high school and was taking welding classes at Vatterott College.