Topic: Stella 2007 Awards

[cleveland]

I got this email today.  I have no idea if it's true or not, sadly with society today it may be true.  At any rate it's a funny read.  Enjoy!

It's time again for the annual "Stella 2007 Awards"!

For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself  and successfully sued the McDonald's in New Mexico where she purchased the coffee.

You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?
         
That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your hand on your head.
 
    Here are the Stella's for the past year:
 
     7TH PLACE :

     Kathleen Robertson of Austin , Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her
ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.
 
     6TH PLACE:

    Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles , California  won $74,000 plus medicalexpenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps.
 
        Go ahead, scratch your head or grab your head scratcher.
 
    5TH PLACE:

    Terrence Dickson, of Bristol , Pennsylvania who was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the  Automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he Could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn't re-enter  the house  Because the door connecting the garage to the  house locked when  Dickson pulled it shut.  Forced to sit for eight, count 'em, EIGHT, days on a case of Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner's insurance company claiming undue mental Anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish.

     Keep scratching. There are more...
 
     4TH PLACE :
 
     Jerry Williams, of Little Rock , Arkansas, garnered 4th Place in the Stella's when he was awarded 14,500 plus medical expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor's beagle - even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.
 
Grrrrr ... Scratch, scratch.
 
    3RD PLACE :
    Amber Carson of Lancaster , Pennsylvania because a jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay her
 $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the floor: Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

          What ever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?
 
         Scratch, scratch, scratch. Hang in there;  there are  Only two more Stella's to go...
 
     2ND PLACE :
     Kara Walton, of Claymont , Delaware sued the owner of a night club in a nearby city because she fell
 from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000....oh, yeah, plus dental expenses.
 
Go figure.
 
 
    1ST PLACE :       This year's runaway First Place Stella Award winner
 was Mrs. Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City ,Oklahoma , who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise
control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go to the back of  the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich.  Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway,  crashed and overturned. Also not surprisingly,
Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually leave the driver's seat while the cruise  control was set.   The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home.
        Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski
 has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.
 
      Are we, as a society, getting more stupid...?  I'd like to get a bat and hit these jurors on
 the side of their head and ask," What were you thinking?"

[Joel]

I've heard #1 as a joke.  Makes me wonder if any of those are true.  Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if they are.

[toycollector10]

In New Zealand it has to be very, very bad before one can sue. Here we have the Accident Compensation Corporation as part of our socialist state. If you get injured say, and can't work, you get 80 percent of your weekly wage until you can get back to work. I read about the dude who had been on ACC for 28 years straight.

This means that if you lose an arm or a leg say, ACC has a dollar value on these. It's about 20 or 30 grand for a leg I think.

The prisoner breaking out of a local jail about 10 years ago got 30 grand because when he landed off the top of the security fence he broke his leg and femur.

It's all F*ucked up down here. And as ACC is a government department, don't expect any sort of service that is speedy or accurate. They try and mislead "clients" as to their entitlements and all that sort of crap. 

[Geeto67]

I think this is all bull crap...I don't think some of them are real and the few that might be I think have been oversimplified to make a point and do not truly reflect the case. The problem with america is not the judicial system, is it that most americans are complete ignorant as to how their own laws and system of government work.

The real issue with the mcdonalds case was not whether mcdonalds owed a duty of care to warn their customers if they had been "superheating" their coffee. Had mcdonalds not been heating their coffee to 180 degrees (coffee is normally served between 120 -140) because they wanted it to stay hot for longer. at 180 degrees, a person sustains third degree burns in 2 to 7 seconds, @ 120 -140 the burns a person will sustain won't get anywhere near third degree reguardless of duration. At the time of the case mcdonalds had 700 other complaints about third degree burns regarding their coffee. And the monye? well that was reduced after the initial award ($480,000 down from $2.7 in punitive alone, and mcdonalds still refused to pay so the parties had to enter into a secret settlement to get resolution).

here is a good quick synopsis of all the things most people don't realize about the mcdonalds case.

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm

you wanna talk about personal responsibility? where is mcdonalds sense of personal responsibility?

[Rushoid]

This is what we've been bombarded with here lately: 

SHEPHERDSVILLE, Kentucky —  A lawsuit filed by a woman who was forced to strip in a McDonald's back office at the behest of a caller posing as a police officer is in the hands of a jury.

Louise Ogborn, 21, is suing the fast-food giant, accusing it of failing to warn her and other employees about the hoaxer, who had already struck other McDonald's stores and other fast-food restaurants across the country.

The jury was to begin deliberating Thursday.

Ogborn is seeking $200 million in compensatory and punitive damages. McDonald's has said Ogborn is responsible for whatever damages she suffered for not realizing the incident was a hoax.

Ogborn was 18 and working at a McDonald's in April 2004 when she was forced to strip after a man called the store, claiming he was investigating a theft. At one point during the 3 1/2-hour search, the assistant manager's boyfriend was left to handle the phone call.

Donna Jean Summers, the assistant manager, was convicted of unlawful imprisonment. Her former fiancee, Walter Nix Jr., is serving a 5-year sentence for sexual abuse and other crimes.

Summers and Kim Dockery, who also was an assistant manager at the restaurant, are named as defendants in Ogborn's civil suit. Summers also has sued McDonald's over the incident and is asking the jury to award her $50 million.

A Florida man, David Stewart, was acquitted last year on charges of impersonating an officer, soliciting sodomy and soliciting sexual abuse in the incident.

During the trial, jurors watched more than an hour of a security video of the hoax call. On the video, a nude Ogborn is shown performing sex acts on herself and Nix.

Ogborn's attorney, Ann Oldfather, asked Ogborn why she simply didn't leave the manager's office at some point during the assault, particularly when she was left alone.

"I was scared, and I was petrified," Ogborn said. "I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if this was my last day on Earth."

During closing arguments on Wednesday, McDonald's attorney, W.R. "Pat" Patterson, said McDonald's is a good corporate citizen that cannot be held responsible for mistakes made by employees.

"McDonald's is not the evil empire they'll make it out to be," Patterson said. "It should not be punished by giving them millions of dollars."

Summers' attorney, Glenn Cohen, said McDonald's made multiple mistakes in not sufficiently warning managers and said the restaurant chain's claim that it couldn't tell all 800,000 employees about the hoax isn't believable.

"They get the word out when there is a McRib special," Cohen said. "They get the word out on how to detect a counterfeit bill. They certainly can get the word out on that."

 - From Fox News

[Joel]

http://www.stellaawards.com/stella.html

[Rushoid]

Yeah, according to Joel's link, those are all bogus. The real ones might be worse.

The 2006 True Stella Awards Winners
by Randy Cassingham
Issued 31 January 2007

#5: Marcy Meckler. While shopping at a mall, Meckler stepped outside and was "attacked" by a squirrel that lived among the trees and bushes. And "while frantically attempting to escape from the squirrel and detach it from her leg, [Meckler] fell and suffered severe injuries," her resulting lawsuit says. That's the mall's fault, the lawsuit claims, demanding in excess of $50,000, based on the mall's "failure to warn" her that squirrels live outside.

#4: Ron and Kristie Simmons. The couple's 4-year-old son, Justin, was killed in a tragic lawnmower accident in a licensed daycare facility, and the death was clearly the result of negligence by the daycare providers. The providers were clearly deserving of being sued, yet when the Simmons's discovered the daycare only had $100,000 in insurance, they dropped the case against them and instead sued the manufacturer of the 16-year-old lawn mower because the mower didn't have a safety device that 1) had not been invented at the time of the mower's manufacture, and 2) no safety agency had even suggested needed to be invented. A sympathetic jury still awarded the family $2 million.

#3: Robert Clymer. An FBI agent working a high-profile case in Las Vegas, Clymer allegedly created a disturbance, lost the magazine from his pistol, then crashed his pickup truck in a drunken stupor -- his blood-alcohol level was 0.306 percent, more than three times the legal limit for driving in Nevada. He pled guilty to drunk driving because, his lawyer explained, "With public officials, we expect them to own up to their mistakes and correct them." Yet Clymer had the gall to sue the manufacturer of his pickup truck, and the dealer he bought it from, because he "somehow lost consciousness" and the truck "somehow produced a heavy smoke that filled the passenger cab." Yep: the drunk-driving accident wasn't his fault, but the truck's fault. Just the kind of guy you want carrying a gun in the name of the law.

#2: KinderStart.com. The specialty search engine says Google should be forced to include the KinderStart site in its listings, reveal how its "Page Rank" system works, and pay them lots of money because they're a competitor. They claim by not being ranked higher in Google, Google is somehow infringing KinderStart's Constitutional right to free speech. Even if by some stretch they were a competitor of Google, why in the world would they think it's Google's responsibility to help them succeed? And if Google's "review" of their site is negative, wouldn't a government court order forcing them to change it infringe on Google's Constitutional right to free speech?

And the winner of the 2006 True Stella Award: Allen Ray Heckard. Even though Heckard is 3 inches shorter, 25 pounds lighter, and 8 years older than former basketball star Michael Jordan, the Portland, Oregon, man says he looks a lot like Jordan, and is often confused for him -- and thus he deserves $52 million "for defamation and permanent injury" -- plus $364 million in "punitive damage for emotional pain and suffering", plus the SAME amount from Nike co-founder Phil Knight, for a grand total of $832 million. He dropped the suit after Nike's lawyers chatted with him, where they presumably explained how they'd counter-sue if he pressed on.