Ever heard of the Stella Awards?
No? Pity, because better than most things they give an idea of the insanity that increasingly has the legal system in its grip.
The Stella Awards were started in 1992 on behalf of ridiculous lawsuits.
They've sort of been taken over by Randy Cassingham whose 2005 book, The True Stella Awards, separates genuine cases from fabricated ones -- sometimes difficult to figure out -- the courts and juries being what they are.
The awards are named after Stella Liebeck who spilled a cup of McDonald's coffee on her lap while in a car driven by her grandson in New Mexico and suffered third-degree burns. She sued, and the jury awarded her $2.9 million, which the judge reduced to $640,000, because she was found to be 20% responsible for her injuries.
Stella died in 2004 at age 91, but her memory lives on in the Stella Awards.
As a point of interest, in the court case McDonald's testified that coffee should be brewed at between 195 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit, and the coffee maintained at around 180 degrees.
Apparently over a 10-year span, some 700 people were scalded in varying degrees by McDonald's coffee.
However, in that same period, some 23,999,999 people drank their coffee without injury.
Anyway, Stella has since become something of an American icon -- a symbol of the American tort system gone awry. Cassingham has a website: stellaawards.com.
Summaries of cases make charming reading -- even those that are bogus. Here are several -- see if you can figure out the real ones from the make-believe:
1. Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas was awarded $780,000 after breaking her ankle tripping over a youngster in a furniture store. The store's argument -- that the kid was her own out-of-control son -- was rejected
2. When shopping at a mall, Marcy Meckler was "attacked" by a squirrel. In trying to escape, Meckler fell and suffered severe injuries. She sued the mall for $50,000 for their "failure to warn" that squirrels lived in the area.
3. When Howard Grazinski purchased his new motorhome and entered the freeway to drive it home, he set the cruise control at 70 miles an hour and left the driver's seat to make a cup of coffee in the back. The vehicle crashed and overturned. Grazinski was awarded $1,750,000 on grounds that the handbook should have warned drivers not to leave the seat.
4. Shawn Perkins sued after being hit by lightning in a parking lot. He felt the parking lot management should have warned people not to be outside during a thunderstorm.
5. Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles won $74,000 in medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with his Honda, having failed to notice that Truman was trying to steal a hubcap from the Honda at the time.
6. Wanda Hudson , 44, of Mobile, Ala., sued for $10 million when she was searching in her storage locker for some papers and the store yard manager noticed the door ajar and locked it. The formerly plump 150-pound woman was found 63 days later, and weighed 83 pounds. The jury was not told she had mental problems and awarded her $100,000.
7. A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson $113,500 After she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tail bone -- a soft drink she'd hurled at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier in an argument.
8. When the four-year-old son of Ron and Kristie Simmons was killed in a lawnmower accident at a daycare facility, the parents sued the manufacturer of the 16-year-old lawnmower because it didn't have a safety device -- which hadn't been invented when the lawnmower was manufactured.
And so it goes.
For those interested the odd numbers are bogus cases, the even numbers real.
No comments:
Post a Comment