Legal Question in Personal Injury in California

Re: DO I have a case? Police escort me from theater?

Your situation was very unfortunate. It's even more unfortunate that there is probably very little that you can do. The manager was within his right to act although he did seem unreasonable. My advice is not legal, but I would simply recommend that you write the corporate offices and complain about what had transpired. In addition assuming that this was the only movie theater in your community, rent DVDs.

Perhaps another can add an angle that I did not find. Good Luck.

Best regards,

David B. Lupoff, Esq.

Re: DO I have a case? Police escort me from theater?

I don't see how you could win such a suit. The theater and the manager have the right to refuse your business and to tell you to leave. When you didn't leave, they had the right to apply some pressure so you would change your mind and, ultimately, to have the police remove you.

You had become a trespasser when you refused the manager's instruction to leave. The theater does not have to tolerate trespassers, so calling the police was the only way it could make you leave. What else should the manager have done? Physically pushing you out the door would have been battery, so his only choices were to let you stay despite being a trespasser or to call the police. Letting you stay would have been the more appropriate choice, but the law does not require it and the decision was his. After all, if trespassers can decide whether they stay or go, they will usually choose to stay.

Property owners have the right to exclude others from their property as long as they do so on a legal basis. Illegal bases generally take the form of discrimination -- whether on racial, ethnic, religious or other such grounds. Few other bases are forbidden by law.

You thus can only win if you can show that your possession of bottled water in violation of theater policy was not a legally sufficient reason to deny you service. Since you needed the water for a medical condition I suppose the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or some comparable state law might work to your advantage, but I doubt it. Temporary medical conditions are not usually seen as disabilities. Besides, you were not being denied access to water -- you could have purchased water from the theatre or used its drinking fountains.

I don't think that any law barred the theater from forbidding you to bring refreshments -- including water -- from the outside, so I don't think the theater acted illegally by forcing you to leave. I have no special expertise in this area, though, and there are other lawyers who do. Perhaps one of them will see things differently.