Nofsdad
Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 8377
Location: Central CA
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Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 4:08 pm Post subject: The Stella Awards
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From time to time I've made posts on this forum that may have given some of you the idea that I don't care much for many of the practitioners of law in this country and actually rank them right down there with (in descending order of approval) politicians, advertising execs, hedge fund managers, child molesters, murderers and the various and sundry forms of thieves out there. You're right.
Here's a small part of the reason in the form of an annual email I get from the people who organized what have come to be known as the "Stella Awards".
So it's time once again to review the winners of the Annual "Stella Awards",
named after 79 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself after having placed a container of same between her legs to free up both hands for driving maybe. and then, for some forgotten or possibly unnamed but totally unfathomable reason, squeezed her thighs together, forcing the coffee out of the cup and onto her delicate regions and who thereafter successfully sued McDonald's because their coffee was too hot (in NM).
That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous yet nonetheless successful lawsuits in the United States and also caused the term "Stella Award" to be applied to the awards in any successful such lawsuit.
Here are this year's winners:
5th Place (tie):
[quote]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 own out of control son.
5th Place (tie):
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 (tie):
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.
2ndPlace:
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 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 driver's 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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