BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) ? A student's old money got him handcuffed and hauled away from a drive-through lane in a squad car.
That shouldn't happen, and Alfred Kennedy III must get a trial on his defamation charge against the Jack in the Box restaurant chain and and false arrest charges against the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, a state appeal court has ruled.
Kennedy was arrested after he paid for meals for himself and four female students with a $100 Federal Reserve Note from 1974 ? one his great-grandmother had mailed to him.
Neither the workers at the restaurant on Dec. 7, 2001, nor the sheriff's deputies who answered their call recognized it as real money.
"'Old' currency is still legal tender of the United States," Judge Jefferson D. Hughes III wrote in the 3-0 decision for the 1st Circuit Court of Appeal. "Citizens should not be at risk for spending legal tender."
The 1st Circuit found that District Judge William A. Morvant incorrectly dismissed the lawsuit which Kennedy brought in December 2003, the month he graduated from Southern University with an engineering degree.
Kennedy ? who had a 2.8 average at Southern and had been an honors high-school student ? is working as an assistant accountant for the Orleans Parish School board while he looks for work in engineering, said his attorney, Harley M. Brown.
He said that the restaurant employees stalled Kennedy ? sending out just the drinks, then the wrong items ? until deputies showed up. The deputies, Brown said, "didn't ask questions ? just took him out of the car. Placed cuffs on him. When he asked what was happening, they told him to keep his mouth shut."
Kennedy was cuffed and taken to the Scotlandville substation while deputies looked at nearby convenience stores for a "counterfeit detector pen" ? one that makes an amber mark on the paper used for legitimate currency but a dark one on most other high-quality paper.
Kennedy testified that, while he was being taken to the substation, a deputy told him the bill would be tested, and he would get it back if it proved to be genuine.
That did eventually happen.
However, the 1st Circuit ruled, the sheriff's office and restaurant didn't show any evidence that anyone who looked at Kennedy's money had the knowledge needed to evaluate it and decide Kennedy should be held while it was tested.
"There was no explanation as to why counterfeit markers, which were admittedly readily available at local convenience stores, were not available to the defendants' employees," Judge Jefferson D. Hughes wrote for himself and Judges Vanessa G. Whipple and Bob Downing.
Leu Ann Greco, a sheriff's office attorney, said the court "missed the point."
She said Kennedy wasn't arrested ? just held long enough for deputies to verify the bill was legal. "They were justified in holding him a total of 30 to 40 minutes while they checked out the bill," she said.
Stephen Wilson, the attorney for Jack in the Box, said he would recommend that the company appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Reporting a suspicious bill wasn't defamation, he said. "We didn't even know who tendered the bill. We certainly didn't accuse this gentleman of a crime."
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