The Stella award in the US - Bizarre Lawsuits

[Paule]

This stuff is quite bizzare !!
How do these people get away with it ??

It's once again time 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 Macdonald's . That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States. Unfortunately the most recent lawsuit implicating Macdonald's, the Teens who allege that eating at Macdonald's has made them fat, was filed After the 2002 award voting was closed. This suit will top the 2003 awards List without question.

5th place (Tied).
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 toddler was Ms Robertson's son.

5th place (Tied).
19 year old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won 74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbour ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr Truman apparently did not notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal the hubcaps.

5th place (Tied).
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 could not re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family were on vacation and Mr Dickson found himself locked in the garage for 8 days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the houseowner'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 neighbours Beagle dog. The Beagle was on a chain in its owners fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been a little provoked at the time as Mr Williams who had climbed over the Fence into the yard 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 sued the owner of a Night Club in a neighbouring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred whilst Ms.Walton was trying to sneak out of 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 Mr Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City Oklahoma. Mr Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, 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 RV left the Freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr.Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him that in the owner's manual that he could not actually do this. The jury awarded him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there was any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

Americans Eh!!!!!! LMFAO

[Paule]

2006 results:

2006 Runners-Up and Winner:

#5: Marcy Meckler. While shopping at a mall, Meckler stepped outside and
was "attacked" by a squirrel that lived among the trees and bushes.
And "while frantically attempting to escape from the squirrel and
detach it from her leg, [Meckler] fell and suffered severe injuries,"
her resulting lawsuit says. That's the mall's fault, the lawsuit
claims, demanding in excess of $50,000, based on the mall's "failure
to warn" her that squirrels live outside.

#4: Ron and Kristie Simmons. The couple's 4-year-old son, Justin, was
killed in a tragic lawnmower accident in a licensed daycare facility,
and the death was clearly the result of negligence by the daycare
providers. The providers were clearly deserving of being sued, yet
when the Simmons's discovered the daycare only had $100,000 in
insurance, they dropped the case against them and instead sued the
manufacturer of the 16-year-old lawn mower because the mower didn't
have a safety device that 1) had not been invented at the time of the
mower's manufacture, and 2) no safety agency had even suggested needed
to be invented. A sympathetic jury still awarded the family $2
million.

#3: Robert Clymer. An FBI agent working a high-profile case in Las Vegas,
Clymer allegedly created a disturbance, lost the magazine from his
pistol, then crashed his pickup truck in a drunken stupor -- his
blood-alcohol level was 0.306 percent, more than three times the legal
limit for driving in Nevada. He pled guilty to drunk driving because,
his lawyer explained, "With public officials, we expect them to own up
to their mistakes and correct them." Yet Clymer had the gall to sue
the manufacturer of his pickup truck, and the dealer he bought it
from, because he "somehow lost consciousness" and the truck "somehow
produced a heavy smoke that filled the passenger cab." Yep: the drunk-
driving accident wasn't his fault, but the truck's fault. Just the
kind of guy you want carrying a gun in the name of the law.

#2: KinderStart.com. The specialty search engine says Google should be
forced to include the KinderStart site in its listings, reveal how its
"Page Rank" system works, and pay them lots of money because they're a
competitor. They claim by not being ranked higher in Google, Google is
somehow infringing KinderStart's Constitutional right to free speech.
Even if by some stretch they were a competitor of Google, why in the
world would they think it's Google's responsibility to help them
succeed? And if Google's "review" of their site is negative, wouldn't
a government court order forcing them to change it infringe on
Google's Constitutional right to free speech?

AND THE WINNER of the 2006 Stella Award: Allen Ray Heckard. Even though
Heckard is 3 inches shorter, 25 pounds lighter, and 8 years older than
former basketball star Michael ******, the Portland, Oregon, man says
he looks a lot like ******, and is often confused for him -- and thus
he deserves $52 million "for defamation and permanent injury" -- plus
$364 million in "punitive damage for emotional pain and suffering",
plus the SAME amount from **** co-founder Phil Knight, for a grand
total of $832 million. He dropped the suit after ****'s lawyers
chatted with him, where they presumably explained how they'd counter-
sue if he pressed on.

Copyright 2007 The TRUE Stella Awards -- Exposing Lawsuit Abuse with Real Cases . This message may be forwarded as
long as it remains complete and unaltered.

[Paule]

2005 Runners-Up and Winner:

#7: Bob Dougherty. A prankster smeared glue on the toilet seat at the
Home Depot store in Louisville, Colo., causing Dougherty to stick to
it when he sat down. "This is not Home Depot's fault," he proclaimed,
yet the store graciously offered him $2,000 anyway. Dougherty
complained that offer is "insulting" and filed suit demanding $3
million.

#6: Barbara Connors of Medfield, Mass. Connors was riding in a car driven
by her 70-year-old(!) son-in-law when they crashed into the
Connecticut River, and Connors sank with the car. Rescue divers
arrived within minutes and got her out alive, but Connors suffered
brain damage from her near-drowning. Sue the driver? Sure, we guess
that's reasonable. But she also sued the brave rescue workers who
risked their lives to save hers.

#5: Michelle Knepper of Vancouver, Wash. Knepper picked a doctor out of
the phone book to do her liposuction, and went ahead with the
procedure even though the doctor was only a dermatologist, not a
plastic surgeon. After having complications, she complained she never
would have chosen that doctor had she known he wasn't Board Certified
in the procedure. (She relied on the phonebook listing over asking the
doctor, or looking for a certificate on his wall?!) So she sued ...the
phone company! She won $1.2 million PLUS $375,000 for her husband for
"loss of spousal services and companionship."

#4: Rhonda Nichols. She says a wild bird "attacked" her outside a home
improvement store in Fairview Heights, Ill., causing head injuries.
That's right: OUTSIDE the store. Yet Nichols still held the Lowe's
store responsible for "allowing" wild birds to fly around free in the
air. She never reported the incident to the store, but still sued for
"at least" $100,000 in damages. In January 2006, the case was thrown
out of court.

#3: Barnard Lorence of Stuart, Fla. Lorence managed to overdraw his own
bank account. When the bank charged him a service fee for the
overdraft, he filed suit over his "stress and pain" and loss of sleep
over the fee. A few hundred thousand bucks, he says, will only amount
to a "slap on the wrist", whereas the $2 million he's suing for is
more like being "paddled". Kinky!

#2: Wanita "Renea" Young of Durango, Colo. Two neighborhood teens baked
cookies for their neighbors as an anonymous gesture of good will, but
Young got scared when she heard them on her front porch. They
apologized, in writing, but Young sued them anyway for causing her
distress, demanding $3,000. When she won(!!) $900, she crowed about it
in the newspaper and on national TV. Now, she's shocked (shocked!)
that everyone in town hates her for her spite, and is afraid she may
have to move. But hey: she won.

AND THE WINNER of the 2005 Stella Award: Christopher Roller of
Burnsville, Minn. Roller is mystified by professional magicians, so he
sued David Blaine and David Copperfield to demand they reveal their
secrets to him -- or else pay him 10 percent of their lifelong
earnings, which he figures amounts to $50 million for Copperfield and
$2 million for Blaine. The basis for his suit: Roller claims that the
magicians defy the laws of physics, and thus must be using "godly
powers" -- and since ROLLER is god (according to him), they're
"somehow" stealing that power from him.

TO CONFIRM THE VALIDITY OF THESE CASES, get more information on the True
Stella Awards, or sign up for a free e-mail subscription to new cases
as they are issued, see True Stella Awards: the 2005 Winners

Copyright 2006 The TRUE Stella Awards -- Exposing Lawsuit Abuse with Real Cases . This message may be forwarded as
long as it remains complete and unaltered.

[Mochamoos]

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 neighbours Beagle dog. The Beagle was on a chain in its owners fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been a little provoked at the time as Mr Williams who had climbed over the Fence into the yard was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

Poor Beagle. I thought all beagles were well behaved in spite of being repeatedly injured

[Paule]

Re: The Stella award in the US - Bizarre Lawsuits

Ok another great lawsuit

Imagine that someone has LOST YOUR PANTS.

That's the horrific, unending nightmare that Roy L. Pearson Jr., 57, suffered for two and a half years. When his hard work as a longtime legal aid lawyer in Washington, DC paid off with a probationary two-year appointment as an Administrative Law Judge in 2005, he brought all five of his suits to Custom Dry Cleaners in for alterations. But when he returned to pick them up, one pair of pants was missing.

MISSING!!

To add insult to injury, when Pearson returned later, the proprietors
-- Jin and Soo Chung -- tried, he claims, to pass off a cheaper pair of pants as his. He demanded $1,150 for a replacement suit; Pearson wants to look his best, so he is very particular about his suits despite a limited budget, and always buys the same style of suit from Hickey Freeman. The Chungs did not respond.

Luckily, Washington, D.C., has the Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA), a law designed to protect consumers from being cheated by local businesses' broken promises. This law goes beyond simply reporting someone to the Better Business Bureau, and grants a private right of action to sue for damages to be made whole again. After all, Custom Dry Cleaners brazenly displays signs claiming "Same Day Service" and "Satisfaction Guaranteed" in their store, despite Pearson's catastrophic experience to the contrary. So he decided to avail himself of these rights. He did what any one of us would do: he sued the Chungs -- for $65,462,500. That's right, more than $65 million.

OK, now it's not so funny anymore.

Judge Pearson represented himself, casting himself as the victim of an enormous, malicious fraud, and telling the court with a straight face, "You will search the D.C. archives in vain for a case of more egregious or willful conduct." He even began to cry while testifying about the day he says the Chungs tried to substitute a cheaper pair of pants for his, then he asked for a break and dabbed away tears as he left the courtroom.

But if it's sympathy he wants, perhaps Pearson should not have included the cost of renting a car every weekend for ten years in the amount of damages he's seeking. Why a car? Oh, that's for driving to another cleaner, since he doesn't have a car of his own. But that accounts for only $15,000 of the absurd total; the rest is to compensate him and the rest of the Chungs' customers for $1,500 per "violation" per day, times twelve violations, times 1,200 days, times three defendants, plus the over one thousand hours he claims to have devoted to prosecuting this case. If it makes you feel better, though, Pearson also indicated that $51 million of these theoretical damages would be used to help similarly aggrieved consumers sue other business in the District.

By the time the case went to trial, the Chungs had offered to settle it for $3,000 -- then for $4,000 -- and finally for $12,000? Pearson could have bought ten new suits for that, but he rejected the offer.
Cloaked in the CPPA, he styled himself a "private attorney general"
fighting for the rights of the over 26,000 customers the Chungs had bamboozled over the years with their "false promises" of "satisfaction guaranteed".

"This case shocks me on a daily basis," said the Chungs' attorney, Chris Manning, before the trial. "Pearson has a lot of time on his hands, and the Chungs have been abused in a ghastly way. It's going to cost them tens of thousands to defend this case."

As to trying to bring in all of the Chungs 26,000 customers into the case, D.C. Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz said that "the court has significant concerns that the plaintiff is acting in bad faith" due to "the breathtaking magnitude of the expansion he seeks." Among the questions Pearson demanded the Chungs answer: "Please identify by name, full address and telephone number, all cleaners known to you on May 1,
2005 in the District of Columbia, the United States and the world that advertise 'SATISFACTION GUARANTEED.'" Got that? All the dry cleaners in the world. Since they didn't have personal knowledge of any, the Chungs were able to answer "None." before they went on to answer the rest of the interrogatories....

The trial ended as you might expect (or at least hope) it would:
Superior Court Judge Judith Barnoff ruled in favor of the Chungs, even awarding them court costs on the grounds that Pearson had "engaged in bad faith and vexatious litigation." But naturally, that wasn't the end of
it: Pearson filed a motion for reconsideration, which claimed that Judge Barnoff had "committed a fundamental legal error" and failed to address his claims. He argued that the court had substituted its own interpretation of "satisfaction guaranteed" rather than accepting his argument that the signs were unconditional. The court disagreed and denied the motion.

The Chungs later withdrew their motion for court costs, attorneys'
fees, and sanctions, as supporters -- including the American Tort Reform Association, the Institute for Legal Reform of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and Washington Post newspaper readers -- had raised nearly $100,000 to help cover their defense. They said they also hoped that withdrawing the motion would persuade Pearson to stop litigating.

But it didn't: a day before the deadline, Pearson filed a notice of appeal in the pants lawsuit -- so the Chungs are not yet completely off the hook.

The loss wasn't the only blow to Pearson. In August, the Commission on Selection and Tenure of Administrative Law Judges was charged with deciding whether he should receive a full, 10-year term to continue his work as a judge. Reports from inside indicate that even after Chief Administrative Law Judge Tyrone Butler had submitted a letter recommending Pearson's reappointment, Pearson sent a number of e-mails within the ALJ staff calling Butler "evil" and "mean-spirited." Butler changed his recommendation. Based on that, and on questions about Pearson's judicial temperament and ethics arising from the lawsuit, the commission came back with a unanimous decision not to recommend his reappointment. After two months of foot dragging (it's unclear whether by Pearson or by the Commission -- but we can guess), this week the Commission hand-delivered a letter ordering Pearson to clean out his office and get out within 90 minutes. He was paid about $100,000 year as a judge.

The Chungs sold the Custom Dry Cleaners shop in question in September, citing emotional strain and a loss of revenue. They still own one other dry cleaning shop, and have said they will be focusing on that one for the future. The infamous pants, meanwhile, have hung in their attorney's closet for well over a year -- turned over to him because Pearson wouldn't accept them. "We believe the pants are his," Manning said. "The tag matches his receipt."

The True Stella Awards has often said that judges should work harder to keep frivolous, and especially vexatious, suits out of the courts. How shocking, then, to find a judge who not only brings such an action to court himself, but keeps it going even in the face of unanimous condemnation. The unanimous action by the Commission on Selection and Tenure of Administrative Law Judges is heartening, but now it's time for Judge Pearson to lose his license to practice law.

SOURCES:

1) "Lawyer's Price for Missing Pants: $65 Million", Washington Post, 26 April 2007

2) "Kick in the Pants", Washington Post, 3 May 2007

3) "Judge Tries Suing Pangs Off Dry Cleaners", New York Times, 13 June 2007

4) "Judge Who Filed Suit Plans to Appeal Defeat", Washington Post, 15 August 2007

5) "Judge Who Lost Pant Suit Loses Job", Washington Post, 31 October 2007

[iancognito]

Re: The Stella award in the US - Bizarre Lawsuits

Footnote

We suspect Roy L. Pearson Jr is now representing Natwest Bank in financial hardship cases msl: