US Lawsuits

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nasadus
  • 12 comments
  • 1,166 views
Nasadus

Nasadus

Premium
Messages
2,109
Netherlands
Netherlands
Messages
Nasadus-NL
Messages
Nasadus
It's time once again to review the winners of the annual "Stella
Awards." (The Stella's are named after 81-year old Stella
Liebeck,who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's.
That case inspired the Stella awards for the most frivolous successful
lawsuits in the United States. Here are this year's winners.
==============================================
7th Place
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.

6th Place
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
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:
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:
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:
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:
This year's run away winner was Mrs Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. Mrs Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot
Winnebago motorhome. 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 to 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.

:dunce: :dunce:
 
It's times like this which makle me proud to be British!! Not that we are without our morons - just we don't normally pay them to be moronic on a day to day basis.

The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit
Click to expand...

My car has something like that - its advises you not to operate the immobiliser/alarm system while there are people in the car (as it stops you from unlocking the doors from the inside - wouldn't that be cool - you go back to your car to find the thief locked in!!) as they may be subjected to "extreme temperatures" and "can result in death". I'm sorry but where exactly is the car going to be parked in temperatures so extreme that it can fry the occupants and how long are you planning to leave it there!!! I know it acts like a greenhouse etc. but come on!!

Btw - nice find GTC :D
 
The RV story, at the very least, is totally apocryphal. And I doubt most of the others... PLUS this is at least 2 years old if not older. Gotta love email forwards.
 
I tried searching for several of these cases to see if they were real and all I got was other joke sites. I don't think any of these is credible - which kinda takes the humor out of it.
 
danoff
I tried searching for several of these cases to see if they were real and all I got was other joke sites. I don't think any of these is credible - which kinda takes the humor out of it.
Click to expand...

You're probably right but I disagree that it takes the humour out of it. Just the fact that they need checking up says too much about the world we are now living in...
 
Thanks for pointing me there Random, here's what I found:

The following advisory originally appeared Aug. 27, 2001 on Overlawyered in slightly different form. It is reprinted here because it is among the information most often requested by visitors to the site.

You've probably seen it in your inbox: a fast-circulating email, often labeled "Stella Awards", which lists six awful-sounding damage awards (to a hubcap thief injured when the car drives off, a burglar trapped in a house who had to eat dog food, etc.). Circumstantial details such as dates, names, and places make the cases sound more real, but all signs indicate that the list is fictitious from beginning to end, reports the urban-legends site Snopes.com (Barbara Mikkelson, "Inboxer rebellion: tortuous torts"). Snopes also has posted detailed discussions of two of the other urban legends we get sent often, the "contraceptive jelly" yarn, which originated with a tabloid ("A woman sued a pharmacy from which she bought contraceptive jelly because she became pregnant even after eating the jelly (with toast)." -- "Jelly babied") and the cigar-arson fable ("A cigar aficionado insures his stogies against fire, then tries to collect from his insurance company after he smokes them." -- "Cigarson"). And the story about the man setting the cruise control in his new Winnebago recreational vehicle, leaving the driver's seat, and then suing the company after the resulting accident? That's an urban legend too. What we wonder is, why would people want to compile lists of made-up legal bizarreries when they can find a vast stockpile of all-too-real ones just by visiting this website [and in particular its personal responsibility archives, older and newer series]?

NAMES IN STORIES: The never-happened stories include tales about "Kathleen Robertson of Austin Texas" (trips on her toddler in furniture store); "Carl Truman of Los Angeles" (hubcap theft) "Terrence Dickson of Bristol Pennsylvania" (trapped in house), "Jerry Williams of Little Rock Arkansas" (bit by dog after shooting it with pellet gun), "Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania" (slips on drink she threw), and "Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware" (breaks teeth while sneaking through window into club). All these incidents, to repeat, appear to be completely fictitious and unrelated to any actual persons with these names.
 
I actually found it on another forum.I thought some of those were real untill reading the above. :)
 
danoff
Of course, unlike the McDonalds case I don't think even one of these is real.
Click to expand...
The one from California is definetly not real. People who commit crimes cannot benefit from a lawsuit if they get hurt on injured while commiting it. The case would be thrown out of court. Nor could a family member benefit from a lawsuit.

For example. A man enters a home to steal items. The homeowner attacks him with a golf club and turns him into a vegetable. The wife of the vegetable sues the homeowner for damages and her case is thrown out of court because her husband was commiting a crime at the time. However, the criminal must be charged with the crime and convicted, because he's innocent until proven guilty.
 
As for the theif that had to subsist on dog food because he was trapped in the garage...
Those of you with garage door openers:
1. get up from the keyboard.
2. go to the garage
3. pull the string hanging from the ceiling in the area of the garage door opener's central track.
4. lift door effortlessly.

There is a spring loaded pin that you can release by pulling on the string. It allows the door to be opened when there is a power outage.
Barring that, most intelligent home-owners know that they may be locked out when going to the garage (in their undies) to get something from the freezer, and have a key secreted away in the garage somewhere, so that they may re-enter the house.
My garage, has a walkthru door on the side so that you may exit the garage without raising the big door.
If he got stuck, in the garage, it's because he was a brainless twit. If he was able to break into the house, he should have been able to break out.

However, the jury is still out for me on the Winnebago case. I have little faith in parts of the so-called "justice" system. I also know some people dumb enough to try that bit with the cruise control.
 

Latest Posts

Back