Every brief, order, affidavit, and exhibit in this litigation—from the November 2023 Complaint to the May 2026 Petition for Writ of Certiorari—organized chronologically by court. Download individual filings, the consolidated briefing compendiums, or the entire 2,114‑page Master Case File.
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Why this entry exists. Defendant attached this YouTube video to its opening MSJ as Exhibit material, and the District Court relied on it as the primary basis for its initial "shopkeeper's privilege" finding — before any affidavit or receipt was even submitted by Defendant. The Court of Appeals carried that reliance forward in its Opinion. Because the video features so prominently in the lower courts' reasoning, amici reviewing this case are entitled to the video itself, in full context.
Five points to keep in mind while watching:
Taken in full context, the video shows what Mr. Montgomery has consistently said he is: a passive rights‑auditor who shops, leaves, and says "no" when asked to consent to a receipt search. He is not a "steal‑faking," "baiting," "entrapping," "lawsuit‑scammer." Across more than a thousand shopping trips at three‑hundred‑plus merchants over a decade, he has been detained roughly ten times — a one‑in‑a‑hundred rate that is the opposite of what a fabrication scheme would produce.
And of those ten detentions: zero convictions.
A "lawsuit‑scammer" theory has a numerical premise built into it: to "induce" a payable detention, a person would have to manufacture conduct that looks enough like real shoplifting to give the detainer at least colorable probable cause. If that were what Mr. Montgomery was actually doing, his detentions would convert to convictions at roughly the rate that any other set of probable‑cause shoplifting detentions does. They do not.
Published mainstream criminal‑justice statistics place the post‑arrest conviction rate for theft offenses in a wide but well‑documented band: approximately 37% of theft incidents that are pursued result in conviction; Pennsylvania retail‑theft prosecutions ran a 42% conviction rate from 2019‑2023; New York repeat‑offender retail‑theft cases convicted at 57% in 2023; and the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics reports a 68% conviction rate for felony defendants overall. Pick any number in that range as the baseline.
Apply that baseline to ten detentions and the math is unforgiving. At the most defendant‑friendly end of the range — 37% — the probability that ten genuine probable‑cause shoplifting detentions would happen to produce zero convictions by chance is approximately (0.63)10 ≈ 1.0%. At the BJS felony baseline, it is approximately (0.32)10 ≈ one in 100,000. Mr. Montgomery's conviction rate across those ten detentions is 0%.
A 0% conviction rate is not a feature of someone manufacturing real‑looking shoplifting for paydays. It is the statistical signature of someone who is being detained without a factual basis — which is the entire civil claim he was bringing in this case. Defendant's "lawsuit‑scammer" framing, the YouTube video Defendant attached, and the prior‑litigation footnote the Panel built on top of them, all collapse against a single arithmetic fact in the underlying record: the merchants who detain Mr. Montgomery cannot prove he stole anything, because he didn't.
For a fuller treatment of why this video cannot serve as evidence of November 25, 2022 conduct — and for the diametric distinctions between the Walmart facts the video discusses and the Best Buy facts at issue here — see The Record.
The Court of Appeals' opinion below leans on a YouTube video about Mr. Montgomery's prior Walmart litigation. The first two filings below are the most complete contemporaneous record of why that prior litigation has nothing to do with this Best Buy case — and why the prior cases were never adjudicated as frivolous, vexatious, or in bad faith. Together they walk through the entire ten‑incident, four‑proceeding Walmart history and the diametric distinctions that make Best Buy structurally different. The third filing is the opposing counsel's active attack currently in flight in a fourth Best Buy case — the downstream weaponization the cert petition warned about, in real time. Start with the narrative on The Record →
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