Absurd Lawsuits

•  The city of Greenwich, Connecticut, takes a tough one-two punch:
• A local resident is murdered by  a deranged stalker, and his widow sues the community for not doing more to prevent the murder, winning a $4.5 million settlement. Then a local urologist collides with a drainage ditch while sledding in the snow. The city should have done something about the ditch, he argues in his lawsuit, and a jury awards him $6 million. Greenwich leaders, desperate to shield themselves from ravenous lawyers, announce they may have to ban sledding, ice-skating, and “other high risk activities.”

•  A hungry husband and wife in Utah are dining at an open buffet restaurant (appropriately named the “Chuck-a-Rama”) and are told they are eating too much sliced roast beef and are asked to leave the restaurant. The couple announces plans to sue the restaurant for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

•  In a case of national notoriety, a customer of a McDonald’s restaurant is scalded by a spilled cup of coffee and hits the jury jackpot with an award in the millions.

• Two boys dive into the ocean off a pier in Santa Monica, are injured when they land in the shallow water, and sue the pier owner (and win!) for failure to post a sign warning of the danger.

•  A student is caught cheating on a test; when he is disciplined, his parents sue school officials for damages.

•  A youth baseball coach is sued when he refuses to put a player on an all-star squad.

•  A high school PE teacher is sued for verbally abusing an overweight female student in his class, and the jury awards $1.47 million because the young woman claims the teachers behavior caused her to develop an eating disorder.

• Televangelist Jim Bakker’s “Praise the Lord” ministries settle a class action with nearly 165,000 defrauded Christians for $3.7 million after 16 years of litigation. The lawyers get $2.5 million and each victim gets $6.54.