The $800K McNugget: A Legal Discussion
Society has gone soft, some folks claim, especially on the interwebs. Can you imagine if any of these folks had to deal with a late 80’s McDonald’s apple pie that, prior to being passed through the drive thru window was used to temper rolled steel with?
In all seriousness though, where was the adult supervision here post-drive thru window? Nevertheless, here are the particulars:
A Broward jury has awarded $800,000 in damages in a lawsuit that alleged hot chicken McNuggets from a local McDonald’s franchise left a young girl severely burned.
A jury in May delivered a split verdict in the suit, finding fault with McDonald’s and the franchise owner for the burns then 4-year-old Olivia Caraballo suffered when she went to the Tamarac fast food restaurant back in 2019.
After hearing closing arguments Wednesday, a jury deliberated for just two hours over how much money the family should receive for the child’s pain and suffering, and quickly reached the $800,000 amount.
Philana Holmes and Humberto Caraballo Estevez, the parents of Olivia Caraballo, sued the McDonald’s Corporation and the franchisee Upchurch Foods, Incorporated, also known as Upchurch Management, claiming the girl suffered second-degree burns from the “unreasonably and dangerously” hot nuggets in her “Happy Meal.”
One nugget got stuck in her car seat and burned the child’s leg, the suit said.
“I’m actually just happy they listened to Olivia’s voice and she, the jury was able to decide a fair judgement, I’m happy with that,” Holmes said Wednesday.
The family had been asking for $15 million, but their attorneys called the outcome “fair and just.”
This is the latest in the now-long tradition of McLitigation that really got rolling in the modern era with the infamous “hot coffee” McDonalds lawsuit. But that case had a lot more going on than folks remember, when 79-year-old Stella Liebeck burnt herself so badly with her Mickey D’s cup of joe she was in the hospital for eight days. At trial, McDonald’s was shown to know they kept their coffee much hotter than standard coffee machines, along with other testimony. Thus, Stella got paid, and folks got to react to the headlines without all the facts.
So, is a second degree burn on a kid’s leg from a lodged McNugget worth $800K? This jury seemed to think so.
Discuss.
I had a coworker go off for jury duty once. It was a case similar to this. She said that when the jury got the case and began deliberations, everyone else had already decided the defendant was guilty and they were talking about how much to award for damages…..you know, without actually deliberating…..
They didn’t care about whether or not the defendant was really guilty….of course they were, they were sued. So, the only thing they needed to do was award as much as they could.Report
It isn’t that people do not remember the full story. Right-wing blow hard radio just presented it as “this dumb woman spilled hot coffee on herself and received money from McDonalds. Isn’t the tort system stupid?” That was the story that made it to the popular imagination. There are tens of thousands of tort suits going across the country at any single time, maybe more. Most of them do not make the news even with similar facts. The ones that do often make it because someone has an agenda and ax to grind.Report
Let’s remember that a jury say through a trial which lasted days or weeks and heard evidence and testimony, saw documents and emails, etc. We are just getting a snippet and our biases fill in the blanks.Report
The popular imagination is that consumer lawsuits, or any lawsuit, is just an easy road to a jackpot. Like, y’know, you go down to the courthouse, fill out some papers, and whammo, a few days later you’re standing in front of a judge who bangs the gavel and hands you a sack of cash.
It’s darkly amusing to see people discover the reality.Report
But also the average person is kind of dumb and has an irrational hatred of big corporations. Just because they saw evidence we didn’t see doesn’t mean they interpreted it correctly and acted on it in a reasonable manner. Comically oversized jury awards often come down on appeal.Report
On the one hand, this seems dumb. On the other hand I’m not in the jury.
On the policy hand- I argue with libertarians in meatspace and virtual space a bit. Some of them are emphatically against regulations saying “if there’s any harm, they should sue” but then at later times always go off about tort reform. I get the biggest shit eating grins from them when I point out the dichotomy there- and then they wonder why it is that the ignorant masses never seriously give libertarianism a chance.Report
See BB’s comment above. Libertarians are big believers in caveat emptor and tend to be more sympathetic to corporations or businesspeople, so would prefer a system where the due diligence is placed on individual consumers and if an individual consumer gets hurt that is their choice even if Big Corporate ice cream deliberately made their products at freeze burn levels.Report
The big societal question is how do we insure for these kinds of risks. The libertarian position is fundamentally dumb, to the extent it suggests ‘at the individual level.’ There’s no advanced society that does that and indeed our experience with that kind of approach is exactly why consumer protection law and the tort system developed into the forms that they have.
Now, the alternative, and the reason the tort system in continental Europe doesn’t seem so crazy is because serious injuries to individuals are covered by the social welfare state. When that’s the case there’s just a lot less to sue for. But then ask the pseudo libertarian about that trade off. This is a fundamental area where I think it’s right to say that libertarianism is more of a critique (and sometimes a very useful one, that I myself have some sympathy for in a number of areas) but not a real political philosophy. There are entire areas of policy where it’s approach to reality is simply not to engage with it.Report
Libertarianism is not going to allow the kind of taxation needed for a comprehensive welfare state and it is true that Europe has much less tort suits and those that exist tend to get lower damages.
The libertarian position appears to be just “it is all on you buddy” There are some loonier ones out there who are starting to argue that the existence of insurance itself is bad and so is the existence of credit. Never mind that humans have had insurance and credit in one form or another for thousands of years.Report
Purchasing on credit was generally always more common than purchasing with cash because very few people had cash on hand even for a simple drink at a tavern .Report
Playing games with known boiling coffee with a cup an inch away from your genitals seems a self inflicted risk.
Her medical expenses were $20,000.
The part that inflated the award was the punitive damages. If McDonalds was doing something that needed to be punished, we need to face squarely that McDonalds has not lowered the temp at which their coffee is made+sold.
So they’re still engaged in the “crime” of selling hot coffee.Report
I’m going to come out and say it but I think what libertarians want is a society that looks more like a market oriented developing country rather than a developed democracy. You can do all sorts of risky things in the former then the latter and this appeals to them romantically. It is why you get some libertarians that go ga-ga over informal but permanent settlements like favelas or street markets and people having lots of side-hustles. They see it as more free than what exists in developed country, where social tolerance for this sort of informalism goes down a lot.Report
Coffee is made with boiling water. Water boils at 210 degrees. Ergo the coffee that comes out of everyone’s home machine is 210.
McDonalds still serves Coffee at the same temperature.
Anyone who has ever gotten a fresh cup of coffee understands that part of “fresh” means “too hot to be safely touched”.
The woman in question was badly burned by putting the coffee between her legs and then spilling it all over her genitals. This is terrible, but it’s also the expected outcome if you pour fresh hot coffee on your genitals.
The jury saw someone truly suffering and wanted to help her.Report
Respectfully although admittedly pedantically, coffee is neither made with actually-boiling water nor served at the boiling point of water.
Water’s boiling point is 212 degrees. At this point, small bubbles of the liquid vaporize as steam into the solution and rise as bubbles. Actually boiling water causes second degree burns with only a few seconds’ contact with skin, and prolonged contact can cause third degree burns (the difference between second and third degree burns is that the necrotization of tissue penetrates through the skin into muscles beneath).
A lot of coffee snobs and trade associations advise against using actually boiling (212 degree) water for a typical drip-through-the-grounds coffee maker because doing so releases too much tannic acid into the coffee and creates a stronger-than-desirable (for most people) bitter flavor. Many describe this flavor as “metallic.”
So most modern coffee makers heat water to 192 degrees, 20 degrees shy of boiling. Still plenty hot; drinking it will painfully damage the more delicate and less covered tissues of your gums, cheeks, and soft palate. But a carafe of coffee sitting on an activated heating element in a Mr. Coffee maker or something similar is not typically observed to be actually boiling — there are no bubbles of vapor percolating to the surface of the liquid.
As we learned in the Liebeck case, McDonald’s used large commercial coffee makers, which had been set by the manufacturer for 192 degrees. But McDonald’s sent out instructions to its restaurants to take the machines apart and use small screwdrivers to re-set the heating element controls to raise that temperature to 202 degrees — 7 degrees shy of actually boiling. They did this for purely mercenary reasons: to sell more coffee and more Egg McMuffins along with the coffee.
And as we learned, Stella Liebeck was not the first person to report being badly burned by coffee from these altered-from-manufacturer-spec machines: she was more like the sixth hundredth person to report such burns. The process of receiving this many reports of this many people being hurt by the unusually hot coffee took months.
So it’s not surprising that a jury not only felt sorry for Stella Liebeck, who as you point out had second- and third-degree burns on her genitals from it, but it seems very likely that the jury also felt righteous moral outrage at McDonald’s. Her medical bills and pain and suffering were valued by the jury at $200,000, and the jury awarded 20% comparative negligence on Ms. Liebeck for putting the coffee between her legs in the first place, so her compensatory damages were $160,000.
The remaining $2.7 million was punitive damages and those were reduced to $480,000 on McDonald’s successful motion for remittitur. Punitive damages are not supposed to have anything to do with compensating the plaintiff, they are to punish the defendant’s bad behavior and deter the defendant and others similarly situated from engaging in similar conduct in the future.
McDonald’s does not still serve coffee at the same temperature as it did before the Liebeck case. McDonald’s coffee is [supposed to be] 192 degrees, just like what your coffee maker at home will give you. Do individual operators still tinker with temperature? I’d not doubt it, but if so, it’s at their own peril. Corporate won’t be held responsible for a franchisee defying corporate’s instructions and the franchisee is required to indemnify corporate in such an instance.Report
This kind of thing always reminds me of a Dave Barry bit:
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“At trial, McDonald’s was shown to know they kept their coffee much hotter than standard coffee machines, along with other testimony.”
Sigh. The lawyer faked that research.Report
That’s new info to me – can you share the source? All my searches just turn up the standard story.Report
Echoing Ken. What I wrote responding to Dark Matter above was from memory based on numerous reports, many from various bar associations and legal societies, providing apologia for the “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case.” If there’s evidence that the plaintiff’s lawyer fabricated this evidence I’d be very interested in learning of that. But I also am skeptical — the same folks who pushed the “litigation madness” urban myth would have an obvious interest in making it known that the plaintiff’s lawyer had Just Made It All Up. And this isn’t a usual part of the myth.Report