OT: the annual Stella Awards

[3ric]

It's time once again to consider the candidates for the annual
Stella Awards. The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella
Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued
McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella awards for the most
frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States...


The following are this year's candidates:


1. Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 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.


2. A 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 neighbour's hub
caps.


3. 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 caused him
undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.


4. Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500
and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next
door neighbour'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 was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.


5. 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.


6. Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner
of a night club in a neighbouring 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.


7. This year's favourite could easily be Mr. Merv Grazinski of
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot
Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, having driven onto 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 R.V. left the freeway, crashed and overturned.
Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's
manual that he couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded him
$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 buying their recreation vehicles.

-----------------
Let me get this straight. These people was actually AWARDED money for being complete idiots?

[Fritz]

it seems like this list is used every year.

[vex]

Who are these juries anyways?

[3ric]

Seems you are right, Fritz: Snopes.com claims all these lawsuits are false: http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.htm

Funny, though.

[Edit:]
found the real Stella Awards website, with a list of the 2002 nominees:
http://www.stellaawards.com/2002.html

[FBPro]

MY GOSH you've got to be kidding......yet when folks get "hurt on the job" or what have you they get "squat or close to it" and these COMPLETE MORONS rake it in.

What a crock!!! The juries need to be thrown in jail and or sued for awarding this kinda crap. My money says that once they serve on one of the juries then they go out and pull one of these stunts to get the green.

[albionmoonlight]

Notice that, in most cases, the bad REAL lawsuits are thrown out of court. The plaintiffs do not get their award. People are always going to try to game the legal system.

As long as people are greedy, the system will be gamed. Don't blame the system, and don't blame the vast majority of attorneys. Blame the greedy people suing and the few lawyers willing to take a case that they know should not succeed on the merits.

The only legal system that would abolish this practice is one that simply did not allow for people to receive compensation when they are injured by other people.

Of course, in that world, private and public insurance would spring up to fill in the gaps, but I wonder how successful that system would be because the people directly causing the costs (through engaging in dangerous activity that injures others) would not have a direct incentive to stop their behavior.

Tort reform and devising the most efficient system for dealing with personal injury presents a pretty interesting discussion if you can get past the "I heard that my cousin's boyfriend's roommate knew a guy at work that slipped on his own banana peel and got 20 billion dollars--Lawyer's suck!" stage of it.

An editorial from the snopes site listed above:


Fake or not, a list of outrageous awards bestowed upon those whose actions -- nay, misbehaviors -- had brought them to grief would fall upon very receptive ears because current feeling is very much against large jury awards for frivolous claims. This e-mail preaches to the choir in that it "confirms" what is already deeply believed.

Numerous states have enacted measures to reform their civil law systems in response to the problem of frivolous lawsuits and runaway jury awards. Tort reform usually amounts to placing a cap on punitive damage awards, making the state's joint-and-several liability law more equitable, and limiting judge and court shopping (which means cases are tried in front of whomever they've been assigned to rather than the judge the plaintiff figures will be most sympathetic).

Our current overly-litigious society is not merely an offense to common sense -- it costs everyone money, though most are not aware they pay to support this madness through a trickle down to consumers in the form of markedly higher prices. This trickle down accounts, for example, for $8 of an $11.50 diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus (DPT) vaccine, $191 of a $578 tonsillectomy, $170 of a $1,000 motorized wheelchair, and $3,000 of an $18,000 heart pacemaker.

Though the cases described in the e-mail are fake, real lawsuits of equal silliness can be found in abundance. An equally impressive list could easily have been compiled by anyone with access to a news database and a few moments to spare. For instance:


In March 1995, a San Diego man unsuccessfully attempted to sue the city and Jack Murphy Stadium for $5.4 million over something than can only be described as a wee problem -- Robert Glaser claimed the stadium's unisex bathroom policy at a Billy Joel and Elton John concert caused him embarrassment and emotional distress thanks to the sight of a woman using a urinal in front of him. He subsequently tried "six or seven" other bathrooms in the stadium only to find women in all of them. He asserted he "had to hold it in for four hours" because he was too embarrassed to share the public bathrooms with women.

A San Carlos, California, man is suing the Escondido Public Library for $1.5 million. His dog, a 50-pound Labrador mix, was attacked by the library's 12-pound feline mascot, L.C., (also known as Library Cat).

In 1994, a student at the University of Idaho unsuccessfully sued that institution over his fall from a third-floor dorm window. He'd been mooning other students when the window gave way. It was contended the University failed to provide a safe environment for students or to properly warn them of the dangers inherent to upper-story windows.

In 1993, McDonald's was unsuccessfully sued over a car accident in New Jersey. While driving, a man who had placed a milkshake between his legs, leaned over to reach into his bag of food and squeezed the milkshake container in the process. When the lid popped off and spilled half the drink in his lap, this driver became distracted and ran into another man's car. That man in turn tried to sue McDonald's for causing the accident, saying the restaurant should have cautioned the man who had hit him against eating while driving.
Although the cases cited above were all eventually dismissed, they still managed to work their way to the highest levels of our court system. When we hear such stories, it's hard not to be rabidly in favor of tort reform -- these kinds of cases make it appear that the idiots have taken over the asylum and only the rapid institution of some rules is going to bring things back into a semblance of sanity. Yet this solution is not all skittles and beer; many see such changes as potentially denying those in need of legal remedy their day in court and refusing them their right to be heard. The cap on jury awards is also viewed by some as unfair to the seriously injured, who may well require a large sum to afford the cost of living with whatever disability someone else's negligence or recklessness left them with. Capped awards are also scant deterrent to large corporations who could easily afford the judgements against them and therefore have little reason to mend their ways. Big Business is poised to benefit under tort reform in that it will no longer need to fear the courts.

It can also be argued that the need for tort reform is overblown. Only rarely do ridiculous lawsuits result in windfalls for the plaintiff; these cases are almost always either thrown out or the judgement goes for the defendant. Some celebrated "outrageous" suits wherein judgement went for the plaintiff prove upon closer examination to be far less "outrageous" than originally presented in the media. (For example, the "woman scalded by hot coffee" suit, which at first blush looked like the height of frivolity proved to be a perfectly legitimate action taken against a corporation that knew, thanks to a string of similar scaldings it had quietly been paying off, that its coffee was not just hot, but dangerously hot. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America provides an excellent description of this case).

Tort reform thus has both its advocates and its adversaries. On the one hand, we bridle at the thought of the terminally clueless being rewarded for their folly -- that strikes us as just plain wrong. We also fear for the continued wellbeing of the small- to mid-sized business which can ill afford to fend off one frivolous lawsuit after another and thus stands in danger of being litigated to death. Also, even when litigants do not prevail, costs associated with their suits rain down onto the average citizen through his taxes (some of which underwrite the judicial system) and through increased prices for goods produced by firms who had to mount legal defences. Yet on the other hand, we don't want to see those who have legitimate cause denied their right to sue (or in the case of the seriously injured, their right to sue for an appropriate amount). We also don't want to see corporations run unchecked, free to turn out whatever dangerous product they like because the combination of capped awards and their deep pockets render them bulletproof.

It's a complicated issue, one not made any easier to make sense of by lists of fake cases of horrendous miscarriages of justice. One has to wonder why someone is so busy trying to stir up outrage and who or what that outrage would ultimately benefit.

Barbara "herded through the grapevine" Mikkelson

Additional Information: George W. Bush's first act upon becoming the Governor of Texas was to reform that state's civil justice system. In January 1995, just after being sworn in, he convened a session of the Legislature to tackle tort reform. Within weeks he signed bills to limit punitive damages to $750,000, cut down on "venue shopping" for favorable judges and juries, and made it easier for judges to impose sanctions on plaintiffs who file frivolous suits.

Last updated: 31 July 2002

[GoldenEagle]

Mississippi has new laws to protect companies against this kind of stuff. It is a very good law for small business owners.

I would hope all these lawsuits are false.