McDonald's hot coffee case
Stella Liebeck, 79, purchased the coffee and while driving her car, placed the coffee cup between her legs and tried to remove the lid. The cup spilled and coffee ran into her lap. Wearing a sweatsuit and sitting in a bucket seat, she received second- and third-degree burns across her buttocks, thighs, and labia.
After the spill, Liebeck spent seven days in the hospital and three weeks recuperating at home with her daughter in attendance. This was followed by skin grafts. During this period, she lost 20 pounds—to 83 pounds—almost 20% of her body weight.
Liebeck wrote to McDonald’s and asked them to turn down the coffee temperature, which was set at 170 degrees. She also asked for her out-of-pocket medical expenses of about $2,000 plus the lost wages of her daughter. McDonald’s offered $800. She sued, asking for no less than $100,000 in compensatory damages, including pain and suffering, and triple punitive damages. Just before trial, she offered to settle for $300,000, but McDonald’s rejected the offer.
The case went to trial in August, 1994. After the trial one juror said, “I was just insulted. The whole thing sounded ridiculous to me.” McDonald’s moved for summary dismissal, defending the heat of its coffee and blaming Liebeck for spilling it. She was, according to McDonald’s, the “proximate cause” of the injury.
Photos were shown of Liebeck’s burned skin, and a burn expert, Dr. Charles Baxter (Southwestern Medical School), testified that 170-degree coffee would cause second-degree burns within 3.5 seconds of hitting the skin. Christopher Appleton, a quality assurance supervisor at McDonald’s headquarters testified that the company had not lowered the heat under the coffee despite receiving 700 burn complaints in 10 years. Safety consultant Robert Knall said that 700 complaints was about 1 in 24 million cups and "basically trivially different from zero."
A juror's response, "Each statistic is somebody badly burned. That really made me angry." The juror also was not impressed with the CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT label on the cup. She said she needed her glasses to read it.
After four hours of deliberation, the jury found for Liebeck. She was awarded $200,000 for compensatory damages, reduced by 20 percent because Liebeck had contributed to the accident. They also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages. One juror said, “It was our way of saying, ‘Hey, open your eyes. People are getting burned’.”
Trial Judge Robert Scott reduced the award to $640,000, calculating the punitive damages at three times the compensatory damages. He stated that it “was appropriate to punish and deter” McDonald’s corporate coffee policy. Scott, a self-described conservative Republican, says the case “was not a runaway. I was there.”
The two sides ultimately settled for an undisclosed amount.
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