Wrongly accused in theft, worker awarded $7.5 Million

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports:

Six years ago, when a manager of the auto parts chain AutoZone extracted a confession from an employee accused of stealing, he did everything by the book.

He held the employee in a back office, showed him evidence props and threatened to have him fired and arrested unless he confessed. The confession, he promised, would allow the employee to keep his job and pay the company back, and the matter would be kept quiet – procedures outlined in a 200-page handbook for managers.



Joaquin Robles, a former AutoZone employee, was awarded $7.5 million in punitive damages by a jury last week.
The employee, Joaquin Robles, insisted he was innocent for nearly three hours. But then he accepted the company's terms and confessed, fearing he would go to jail and be unable to support his two young children.

“I thought it was a small price to pay for keeping my family out of harm,” Robles said yesterday.

Robles was suspended, and when he returned to work a few days later, he was promptly fired. The money that Robles was accused of stealing was taken out of his last paycheck.

Robles sued, and began a journey through the courts that culminated on Thursday when a jury awarded him $7.5 million in punitive damages. The jurors were read excerpts from the current manual used by AutoZone's loss prevention managers and heard testimony from other employees who said they were similarly coerced.

You can probably guess why companies really don't want to talk about their employees.