It's time again for the annual 'Stella Awards'!
For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in New Mexico where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?
That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head scratcher handy.
Here are the Stella's for the past year:
7TH PLACE: 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 store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.
6TH PLACE:
Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles, California won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbour ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbour’s hubcaps.
5TH PLACE: Terrence Dickson, of Bristol, Pennsylvania , was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. Forced to sit for eight, count 'em, EIGHT, days on a case of Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner's insurance company claiming undue mental anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish.
4TH PLACE: Jerry Williams, of Little Rock , Arkansas , garnered 4th Place in the Stella 's when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbour’s beagle - even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.
3RD PLACE: Third place goes to Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, because a jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay her $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the floor: Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument. What ever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?
2ND PLACE: Kara Walton, of Claymont, Delaware, sued the owner of a night club in a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000 ...oh, yeah, plus dental expenses. Go figure.
1ST PLACE: This year's runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City , Oklahoma , who purchased a 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 to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually leave the driver's seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.
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OK....I seriously want to know if any of this sh*t is real. Did these people really get rewarded for being criminals and idiots???? If you know that any of this is true, let me know. And give me a link to a story if you have one. I may have to try to do some research on my own too. This just tweaks me a little bit!
We had a case kind of similar to these here. A young girl and some friends broke into an abandoned and boarded up building. The lower level was so secured that they had to climb up and break into the second floor. This building was scheduled to be demolished, so the police department got to go in and do training in the building before the scheduled tear down. The police department was able to in with flash/bang grenades and bash through walls and all kinds of destructive stuff because the building was being torn down. So get this....the girl and a group of friends broke into the building. It was marked with signs "No Trespassing" and like I said earlier, the entire bottom level was completely secured. So they broke in and found a left over flash/bang grenade that was missed when the police took all of their stuff away. It went off and blew off the girl's hand. A tragedy no doubt. Her family sued the city because the police missed that one item, and won. And not just won, but won a LOT of money. People around here were not too happy. She broke in! Everyone agrees that it is horrible that a young girl lost her hand, but she would not have blown it off if she had not broken the law! I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who has to deal with the consequences of their poor decisions. She made the decision to break the law. She can live with the consequences of that poor decision. You can say that she was just a young girl, but my kids would have never tried a stunt like that. **bryan i swear if you come on here and confess some horrible idiotic thing that you did that i dont know about yet i will not mail your valentine gift!!!**
So my last thought on this is....Why was she raised to think breaking and entering was an OK thing to do????
