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UPDATED: I extend to you a (bone-crushing) hearty handclasp
Posted By katie allison granju
I suspect this lawsuit, in which a local woman accuses a restaurant manager of unlawfully restraining her and causing permanent injury via an especially enthusiastic handshake may become as infamous online as the legendary “McDonald’s too-hot coffee lawsuit” of a couple of years back.
Of course, as silly as the handshake lawsuit sounds on its face, it’s possible that the guy did, in fact, grab a woman’s hand and proceed to crush it - calling it a handshake. After all, the McDonald’s lawsuit sounded pretty dumb too, until you heard the rest of the story:
On February 27, 1992, Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman from Albuquerque, New Mexico, ordered a 49¢ cup of coffee from the drive-thru of a local McDonald’s restaurant. Liebeck was in the passenger’s seat of her Ford Probe, and her grandson Chris parked the car so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.[7]
Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin as she sat in the puddle of hot liquid for over 90 seconds, scalding her thighs, buttocks, and groin.[8] Liebeck was taken to the hospital, where it was determined that she had suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent.[9] She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed.
Liebeck sought to settle with McDonald’s for US $20,000 to cover her medical costs, which were $11,000, but the company offered only $800. When McDonald’s refused to raise its offer, Liebeck retained Texas attorney Reed Morgan. Morgan filed suit in a New Mexico District Court accusing McDonald’s of “gross negligence” for selling coffee that was “unreasonably dangerous” and “defectively manufactured.” McDonald’s refused Morgan’s offer to settle for $90,000.[4]
Morgan offered to settle for $300,000, and a mediator suggested $225,000 just before trial, but McDonald’s refused these final pre-trial attempts to settle.[4]
McDonald’s refused to settle perhaps because, though there had been numerous lawsuits alleging that hot coffee was “defectively manufactured,” courts had consistently dismissed the cases before trial on the grounds that coffee burns were an open and obvious danger.
During the case, Liebeck’s attorneys discovered that McDonald’s required franchises to serve coffee at 180–190 °F (82–88 °C). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds. Stella Liebeck’s attorney argued that coffee should never be served hotter than 140 °F (60 °C), and that a number of other establishments served coffee at a substantially lower temperature than McDonald’s…. Other documents obtained from McDonald’s showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burnt by McDonald’s coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.
UPDATE: Scott McNutt reminds me of Knoxville’s own McDonald’s lawsuit, this one involving a burning hot pickle. Back when this happened, Scott ruminated about these sorts of lawsuits in the pages of Metro Pulse:
God’s all-powerful; isn’t He ultimately liable? True, it’s a fiery pickle, so it may be a servant of Satan. But whether the pickle is devilish or divine, shouldn’t churches be held accountable for not having said prayers for all pickle-eaters to safely consume their salty treats?
And still to be considered is this incident’s central figure, whose actions precipitated the whole chain of events: the pickle itself. Perhaps it was a rogue pickle, one that enjoyed inflicting misery on unsuspecting gourmands. If this is the case, and we fail to prosecute this briny brigand, we may unwittingly give license to hooligan “hot” pickles to go on rampages in restaurants and drive-thrus around the globe.
Mar 14th, 2008
The hot coffee case, as you summarized above, turned on the notion that because McDonald’s coffee was hotter than other some other vendors’ hot coffees, it was somehow defective. To hold water (hot or otherwise), the argument should have to establish that sitting in a pool of most hot coffees would not cause similar serious injuries. The case never proved that. It couldn’t. The case should have been dismissed just as McDonald’s clearly expected it would. The biggest winner in the fallout of the McDonald’s case was comedian Bill Engvald who got a literal wealth of material for his “stupid people” routine from all the gratuitous warning labels that immediately began to spring up on packages everywhere as a result. “Do not use this blow dryer in the shower” is a classic.
Comparing this lady’s hand injury to the McDonald’s case does a disservice to the “handshake” lawsuit, which I believe would seem to have merit on the surface of it. Her hand was provably damaged by his handshake. He would seem to need to establish either that all handshakes are inherently dangerous and everyone should be reasonably aware of this fact, or that he could not reasonably be expected to have known that the application that much force in a handshake could cause injury. Since millions of handshakes happen every day without injury, and since human beings have an innate understanding of how much force is required to cause pain/injury to other humans, I think he has a tough road ahead of him.