The Bench · August 1994 · A jury room in Albuquerque
The McDonald’s hot coffee case: what the jury heard
Who is mostly to blame?
The case
Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.
- A woman of 79 buys a coffee at a drive-through. In the parked car she takes off the lid, and it spills in her lap.
- She sues the restaurant chain. The papers call it the silliest lawsuit in the country. You are on the jury.
- You learn the company’s rule was to serve coffee at 180 to 190 degrees. She needed skin grafts and eight days in hospital.
- And you learn the company had more than 700 earlier complaints of burns, and had not changed anything.
The two calls
- Mostly her.She spilled it. Coffee is hot. Anyone can spill a coffee. She pays for her own burns.
- Mostly the company.It knew, and it did not change. Now you must put a number on it.
Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.
What happened
Mostly the company. The jury put 80% of the blame on the company and 20% on her.
It offered 800 dollars. Days before the trial a mediator told the company to settle for 225,000. It refused.
It awarded her 160,000 dollars for her injuries, and 2.7 million dollars to punish the company: about two days of its coffee sales.
The judge cut that to 480,000 dollars, and the two sides then settled in private.
Source: Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc. (N.M. Dist. Ct. 1994). Account: Public Citizen, “Legal myths: the McDonald’s ‘hot coffee’ case”. www.citizen.org/?p=18786
How to read this
History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.
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