Stella Awards

It's time once again to consider the candidates for the annual Stella Awards. The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits in the United States.

The following are this year's candidates:

1. Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a nightclub 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.

2. 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 was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3. A 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 hub caps.

4. A. Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 a! after she slipped on a soft drink spill 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.

5. 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 reenter 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.

6. A jury of her peers awarded Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, $780,000 after breaking her ankle by 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 son.

7. This year's favorite could easily be Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, 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 R.V. left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the owner's manual that he couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded him $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 buying their recreation vehicles.



I really can't believe any of these. They should have been forced to pay up themselves for wasting the courts time.

the only one that could be even close to getting a settlelemt here would be number 6 and since it would be duly noted that brat numbver six was the resonsibility of the parent then that's ll that's left to say.

if any of these actually went to court and succeended then the problem lies within the founadations of mthe US legal system.

Tell me these are jokes?? Its just plain insane .....

nope for the most part they are true but as ive said before. they do little more than gouge massive holes in the US legal system.

Welcome to "United Stupids of America".

Here's something even more staggering than the stupidity of the accusers and the size of the payouts - that not one judge threw these suits out, that lawyers were willing to prosecute these cases, and that a majority of a randomly selected jury was willing to side with the accuser. That's a whole lot of people who enabled this insanity.

Adrian

Those people were really stupid. Especially the first one.

the thing is. the basics of the law is black and white, you literally can't say, this is a stupid woman tryign to sneak into a ngithclub so **** her. She's hurt herself on someones property and that's the way the law looks at it.

And there's always the fact that all of the people involved have played a part in the outcome so due to contributory negligience they'll have got much less than they would have.

I've always wondered how these people pull these things off! this shows how stupid the people on the other side of the Atlantic ocean really are..

mhmm obviously this is only something that happens in the USA.