Still, it’s unfair to pick on poor Miss Stella of the McDonald’s Coffee Lawsuit fame.  They did serve to her a cup of coffee at over 180-degrees F.  That’s not a beverage; that’s a weapon.  She placed the beverage between her legs to hold it and that’s how she got burned – third degree burns that required surgery.  McDonald’s was at fault – no one should reasonably expect their coffee to be paint-peeling hot.

Some complain that the jury award for Miss Stella was way too high.  But they forget that damage awards are meant to be disincentives for the company that did wrong.  If McDonald’s were only fined $5,000, do you think they’d even bat an eye?  No, they’d do cost-benefit analysis and determine that cooler coffee would cost them more profits than paying out $5,000 every now and then.  So the award needs to be high enough to hurt the multinational billion-dollar corporation in order to force them to change.

A great review of the Stella case can be found at http://caoc.com/CA/i…

After receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped momentarily so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee; neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.

The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.

During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds’ knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.

McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultant’s advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste. He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.

That’s why I cringe every time I see this email and hear the calls for “tort reform”.  This email is supposed to make us hate the jury trial system and see these monetary damages as “out of control”, when, in fact, they are nearly always fair and just.  It’s just that Multinational Inc. doesn’t see it that way, and they want to spend a lot of campaign cash to create “tort reform”, which is another way of saying “cap the damages so low that we can get away with poisoning, burning, mutilating, or killing our customers without feeling any financial punishment.”

Oh, and by the way: this email and the cases it mentions (except for Stella) are complete fakes that have been floating around the internets since 2001 (http://www.snopes.co…):

Origins: This “and you wonder what’s wrong with the world today?” whinge appeared on the Internet in May 2001. All of the entries in the list are fabrications: a search for news stories about each of these cases failed to turn up anything, as did a search for each law case.

The earliest version concluded with a seventh item that has since been snipped away, likely after someone noticed it was the venerable microwaved poodle legend. Its inclusion would have immediately called into question the truthfulness of the other six cases for any number of folks familiar with urban legends. The remaining six were still false, but they weren’t as obviously false as the following poodle tale and thus wouldn’t have set the alarm bells ringing:

7. And just so you know that cooler heads do occasionally prevail: Kenmore Inc., the makers of Dorothy Johnson’s microwave, were found not liable for the death of Mrs. Johnson’s poodle after she gave it a bath and attempted to dry it by putting the poor creature in her microwave for, “just a few minutes, on low,”  The case was quickly dismissed.

A version of the list that began circulating in the spring of 2002 has yet another urban legend included as its final item, the venerable legend:

In November 2000, Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32 foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, having joined the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the Winnie left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the handbook that he could not actually do this. He was awarded  $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago.