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Garage Jumping and Personal Responsibility
Drudge has linked to this “dangerous new trend” called Garage Jumping. Kids are jumping between parking garages 80 feet up for the thrill of it. One kid didn’t make it across, fell, and miraculously didn’t die. Now, check out this paragraph:
D’Assaro [the attorney of the family of the boy who didn’t make it] is filing a lawsuit against the city of Orlando and the private garage owner for making little effort to correct a potential deadly risk.
“There was a very, very short length of fence that was completely ineffective in preventing this from happening,” D’Assaro said.
Once again we must ask, where is the personal responsibility? Next we’re going to have to have fences on every road with tunnels under them so no one is able to jump out in front of a bus. Or only be able to buy luke warm coffee at McDonalds so no one can burn themselves… oh, wait… nevermind.
http://myopiczeal.blogsome.com/2005/03/01/garage-jumping-and-personal-responsibility/trackback/
Working off of memory…
The McDonalds case was more complex than that. They actually kept their coffee at an extremely high temperature, hotter than anything you’d find in a home coffee maker. Futhermore, they knew that the temperature was dangerous and that it could still scald flesh if spilled not long after containerization. There was hundreds of cases prior to that one where McD’s settled out of court for the same issue, and never took steps to correct the problem. The guidelines to keep the coffee dangerously hot was approved in the senior management level of McD’s.
I always found their coffee back then very hot, but it never occurred to me that spilling it on my lap would cause serious burns to my groin and hospitalize me for two weeks, with reconstructive surgery to follow.
The women asked for a settlement of less than $100,000, was turned down, sued, got millions, and saw the award reduced to (I think) $425,000 afterwards. She was assigned some blame as she had place the cup between her legs while in the car as a passenger (but this was when the car was parked). But it was completely unreasonable for her to suspect that a simple cup of coffee, ready for consumption, could cause serious burns. McD’s is responsible for that, and furthermore admitted that it had foreknowledge of the problem.
Understand, this was not a simple hot cup of coffee. Hot water in our taps typically are set somehwere around 140 degress F. The McD’s coffee was somewhere around 180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, according to corporate guidelines. This is nuts, and no reasonable person would expect that.
But the kids jumping over the parking garages? I’d have to read the accusation. Everyone is theoretically responsible for what happens on their property, so the particulars matter. My gut reaction certainly screams ‘case dismissed!’
Comment by Mark — March 1, 2005 @ 1:26 pm
Oh, a good site for legal silliness: overlawyered
Comment by Mark — March 1, 2005 @ 1:32 pm
March 1, 2005
Some Parents Taking Responsibility!
Since I’ve been harping on the lack of personal responsibility recently, I […]
Pingback by Myopic Zeal :: Some Parents Taking Responsibility! — March 1, 2005 @ 3:41 pm
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