A Florida appeals court has sided with an injured contractor and left a jury’s verdict against Wal‑Mart Stores East, LP intact, after a nasty electrical shock inside a locked back room at a Hillsborough County Walmart.
Today, the court affirmed a damages judgment for Joseph Johnson, a service technician who sued over a July 2020 accident that unfolded while he was installing a new door in the store’s order‑pick‑up area. Jurors had already found Walmart liable, and the appeals panel agreed that the retail giant could not hide behind an independent‑contractor defense to dodge responsibility for an ungrounded metal junction box.
Johnson, who worked for D.H. Pace Door Company, told jurors he climbed a ladder to remove a metal box cover when he was “instantly getting shocked,” then tumbled off the ladder and hit his head on the concrete floor. Before starting the job, he had checked the store’s breaker room and found roughly 200 breakers with no labels, which led him to use a voltmeter rather than shut off power at random. After the incident, investigators discovered the junction box uncapped with a loose grounding wire, a setup that experts said violated the National Electrical Code, according to the Tampa Free Press.
Engineers Told Jurors the Box Was ‘Electrically Dangerous’
Forensic electrical engineers on both sides agreed on the basics: the metal junction box should have been grounded, and in the condition Johnson encountered it, it was hazardous to touch. Curtis E. Falany, a board‑certified forensic electrical engineer, testified that the ungrounded box was “electrically dangerous” and that making contact with it “should be as safe as turning on a light switch,” according to the appeals court record. His professional profile with J.B. Shepherd & Company notes decades of experience as a forensic electrical expert.
Why the Court Rejected Walmart’s Defense
The appeals panel was not persuaded by Walmart’s independent‑contractor defense. The judges focused on the fact that the hazardous junction box had apparently gone unchanged for years inside a locked room that Walmart controlled, which gave the retailer constructive knowledge of the problem and a duty to fix it.
That reasoning tracks long‑standing Florida premises‑liability law. Property owners that hire independent contractors can still be on the hook when they retain control over areas where work is performed or when they negligently maintain dangerous conditions that injure workers on site, as outlined by Taylor Day.
The ruling leaves the jury’s findings untouched and sends a clear signal to big-box operators and commercial landlords alike: problems hiding in staff‑only spaces can turn into serious liability when they hurt the outside crews invited in to work. In Johnson’s case, the fight was never really about how he did his job, but about the dangerous condition waiting for him in Walmart’s back room.
