WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - The Kansas Appeals Court has upheld the theft conviction of a man who repeatedly returned to a Walmart self-checkout machine that was mistakenly spitting out $20 bills instead of $1s, eventually receiving nearly $500 in extra change,
The Wichita Eagle report that a three-judge panel wrote Friday in its ruling rejecting Nicholas Ryan Morris’ appeal that “Sometimes, things are too good to be true.”
Morris’ conviction for theft of property delivered by mistake stems from a January 2019 shopping trip in which he discovered a self-checkout machine at the Walmart in Wellington was giving incorrect change. Besides returning to the same self-checkout machine at least six more times, Morris also convinced his girlfriend and an acquaintance to use the machine.
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.
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.”
But 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.
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