The annual "Stella Awards" have been announced for this year. The Stella Awards were inspired by 81 year-old Stella Liebeck of New Mexico, who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's for her injuries. That lawsuit inspired the Stella Awards, which recognize the most frivolous, ridiculous, and successful lawsuits in the United States. Even though these awards recognize truly outrageous examples of people successfully abusing the system, ask yourself; are these reports true? Or are they simply a way to sell books?
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This year's Stella Awards Winners;
- 7th Place: â¨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 owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.
- 6th Place: â¨19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr.. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps.
- 5th Place: â¨Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr.. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.
- 4th Place: â¨Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams, who had climbed over the fence into the yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.
- 3rd Place: â¨A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.
- 2nd Place: â¨Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.
- 1st Place: â¨This year's runaway winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mrs. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, (from an OU football game), having driven onto the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back & make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising her in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded her $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons around.
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Okay, now that you've had your laugh, let me point out that a google search reveals that these cases are all lies. Yes, every one is a lie. But we still like to pass these stories around, and laugh at their silliness. Why? Why do we so easily believe stories like these?
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Included in the 39th issue of the Skeptics Circle.
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tags: Stella Awards, lawsuits, legal system abuse
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Not only that, but the Stella Liebeck case is not as frivolous as it appears at first glance. Liebeck suffered third degree burns from the coffee, and had considerable medical expenses relating to the injury.
If you spill coffee on yourself and you have to go home and change clothes, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you spill coffee and it melts your flesh, the person who made the coffee should be held liable. There's no reason to make coffee that hot.
Just to add to the Stella case, normal hot coffee is served about 150-160 degrees. This will hurt if spilled, but not damage. The McDonalds coffee was served at 185-190 degrees.
But, people say, you ought to know not to spill hot coffee on yourself.
Yes, but just because you are involved in a dangerous activity, that does not give others the right to make it even more dangerous, and then claim no liability. For instance, we all know that skiing is dangerous. However, if the ski lodge operator makes their snow fences out of barbed wire, they cannot escape liability by claiming they everybody knows you're not supposed to ski into a snow fence.
Same principle.
I am so relieved that all of these are false. I was beginning to get my britches in a knot just thinking about it...and my britches are not the kind that knot easily.
I've no notion why we are so ready to believe trash like this, but anti-judicial elements of our society have been leveraging lies like these to devastating effect.
Those examples were so obviously fake that it is easy to dismiss them. But now they will live on the internet, possibly for years. I wonder when we will see them cited as "fact" in some speech or screed on tort reform.
The next time the prez or some other politician starts yammering on about "frivolous lawsuits," I would like someone from the press to stand up and challenge: "Define the term 'frivolous lawsuit' and, based on that definition, what statistics can you provide to demonstrate they are a problem?"
Frivolous lawsuit: anything brought by the RIAA or MPAA
Actually, those aren't really frivolous, any more than the bully taking your lunch money on the schoolyard is frivolous. The real abuses of the legal system don't come from one stupid person suing another person, but from a large entity (corporation, whatever) using its phalanx of lawyers to force a bad deal on a small entity (e.g. individual). If you can't afford the risk of losing, you may just settle. If you can't afford to fight, you settle.
The closest I've ever come to that personally is a landlord who tried to screw over the former roommate of my wife just after we got married. By any reasonable reading of the Oakland, CA rent control laws, the landlord was in the wrong. Our lawyer agreed. Some rent control advocacy group or another agreed. In the end, though, we settled with a "compromise" position that gave the landlord most of what they wanted. (A smaller-than-demanded rent raise with an agreement that the roommate would move out in 9 months, instead of the exorbitant raise in rent that the landlord watned, and the actual-obeying-of-the-laws keeping the rent the same that we wanted.) Why? There was no way we could really afford to fight it, and it wasn't clear that we were going to win because in practice, laws are "interpreted" by lawyers and written in languages that people with out JDs aren't really able to fully parse. It's nuts.
-Rob
You cite the Stella Awards website as the source of these myths. In fact that website debunks them.
Try this:
http://www.stellaawards.com/
Randy also does a newsletter called "This is True" which can be subscribed at:
http://www.thisistrue.com/
He researches the court stuff for Stella, and gets the news stories for True for the edification of all who wish to read it. Free subscription is good for a taste of True, but the Premium has more stories and is delivered earlier in the week.
I have a hoax/virus info. link on my quicklinks bar - I was just about to hit it when I got to the end of your post. Thanks for the final word - that these are all hoaxes. Nowadays, whenever I read anything, I check to see if it's an urban legend. Mostly it is. Sometimes, esp. in the case of our president and/or administration, it's unfortunately not.
Ok. Here's one from today's Oregonian that I would definitely call a frivolous lawsuit:
"Man didn't ask to be like Mike, so he's suing
Allen Ray Heckard says his resemblance to Michael Jordan is distressing, and he wants the star and Phil Knight to pay"
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/115232552…
More: Acting as his own attorney [no surprise there], Heckard plunked down the $206 fee on June 29 to file the lawsuit. He is demanding $52 million from each defendant for "defamation and permanent injury" and $364 million from each in punitive damages for "emotional pain and suffering."
Gerry L linked to a frivolous lawsuit in Oregon, but the key thing to notice is "Acting as his own attorney...". A lawyer could be dis-barred for crap like this and wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Also, a case like this would almost always be handled on a contingency fee basis. No lawyer wants to put in tens or hundreds of hours of work, only to lose and not get a dime. This is why virtually every truly frivolous lawsuit you see does not involve an attorney representing the plaintiff. The system is self-regulating and effective as far as lawyer involvement goes. As far as individuals who bring these lawsuits, well, they get tossed out of court before they ever get to trial, and they get made fun of in newspapers and on blogs.
There are two "issues" here:
1) Truly frivolous lawsuits. These almost inevitably wind up getting dismissed with prejudice (meaning that the plaintiff can't re-file the suit after correcting technical deficiencies) on grounds of failure to state a claim. Such suits are generally filed only against "big pockets" defendants, and the expense that the defendant goes through to have the suit dismissed is generally small compared to the amount the defendant spends buying paperclips. It's just a consequence of the fact that in the US, anyone can sue anyone else, which is quite different from being able to proceed with one's lawsuit.
2) Large jury awards which, in successful cases, bear absolutely no resemblance to the amounts of actual judgments awarded. Judges routinely reduce jury awards by at least an order of magnitude. Note that these aren't reductions based on the defendant appealing the award; they're part of the original case. IIRC, the biggest Vioxx liability case involved a jury award of around $200,000,000, but purely based on local law, the maximum damages the court could actually award would be less than one-hundredth of that amount.
3) Under Federal law, damages awarded for anything other than physical injury are considered taxable income to the plaintiff, and in fact the portion of the damages that go to lawyers as contingency fees are taxable both to the plaintiffs and the lawyers. A few years back, a woman in Cook County, IL won damages in what everyone agreed was a particularly egregious sexual-harassment case. She actually had to take out personal loans to pay the taxes due.