Jury Burns McDonald's Again - Hot Coffee Then, Hot Chicken Now

WASHINGTON - May 15, 2023 - PRLog -- A jury found McDonald's liable for burning a toddler because it sold, as part of a Happy Meal, "dangerously hot" chicken McNuggets.

This parallels a case in which a jury found McDonald's  liable for burning an adult woman - leaving her "disfigured and scarred" - by serving her coffee which was "dangerously hot," says law professor John Banzhaf.

While many suggested that the earlier case was wrong, a then recent graduate of the GWU Law school proved the opposite in an award-winning movie entitled "Hot Coffee."

Susan Saladoff's movie explained that:
* McDonald's served its coffee at 180 degrees, much hotter than all other fast food outlets
* The burn the woman suffered was so serious that her doctors worried she might not survive
* Many other McDonald's customers had also reported being burned
* Despite this, McDonald's did not provide a written or other warning about this unusual and clearly foreseeable risk
* Providing such a warning would have cost very little

When a company sells a product which is far more dangerous than the same product sold widely elsewhere, is on notice that many customers have been injured by it so that such an accident is clearly reasonable foreseeable, and the foreseeable danger is so serious that it could kill a customer, the company has a legal duty either to reduce the danger or, at least, to issue a simple warning, says Banzhaf.

Otherwise people will continue to be seriously injured, and everyone but the clearly negligent company will have to bear the medical costs in the form of higher taxes (for patients on Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs) and/or inflated fees for medical care insurance.

Such awards are also supposed to remind companies that they should not create unusual and unnecessary dangers.

It appears, from this most recent case, that McDonald's didn't learn that simple lesson, says Banzhaf, who forced McDonald's to settle for over $12 million in a law suit for misrepresenting its french fries.

He says that the McNuggets' suit is in many ways more serious that the earlier coffee one because the victim was a young innocent child, and because she was disfigured as a result.

When Banzhaf successfully applied the legal tactics he used so successfully against the tobacco industry to food sellers, he was called "the Ralph Nader of Junk Food," "The Man Who Is Taking Fat to Court," "a Major Crusader Against Big Tobacco and Now Among Those Targeting the Food Industry," and he created a new legal industry of trying to protect food companies against the new and very successful sue-fat lawsuit movement.

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