Bestowing the first Chucklehead Award

Don't blame poor Stella for loony litigation, whether it's factual or fiction

By Chuck Thomas
December 18, 2004

As a spinoff from the old Stella Awards for frivolous lawsuits, we now have the new Chucklehead Awards for cockamamie columns.

The winner of the first Chucklehead Award was last week's column in this space on the Stella Awards -- and my omelet-on-face thanks go to the dozens of readers who responded to that column.

Their letters provided a real educational experience -- not only in Stella Awards, but also in urban legends and Internet myths.

It seems that Stella Awards come in two flavors -- true and bogus -- and both flavors can be considered unfair to Stella Liebeck. She's the 79-year-old woman who sued McDonald's after she scalded herself with a McCup of coffee.

One reader, Randy Green, said that McDonald's filed the suit, but, according to Tony Reynolds and most other sources, Stella filed the suit seeking medical expenses, since she was hospitalized and required skin grafts. McDonald's refused an out-of-court settlement and went to trial -- where Stella won a huge judgment, when it was established that McDonald's had paid off in previous cases involving coffee that was scaldingly hot.

We've been assured that McDonald's has cooled it on the temperature of coffee, since the Stella Awards hit the fan.

According to Gracia Marks, "Instead of ridiculing Stella, you should be thanking her. She may have saved you from the same fate."

So "honoring" Stella with an award for loony litigation can be seen as unfair to her. Unfair or not, the Stella Awards come as either true or bogus -- take your pick.

The ones that appeared in last week's column are so bogus, they were circulated by a law firm that doesn't exist -- Hogelman, Hogelman and Thomas (no relation, honest) of Dayton, Ohio.

Evidently, this law firm deserves to be listed alongside National Public Radio's put-on firm of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe.

The tipoff on the bogus Stellas should have been the case of the guy who set his RV on cruise control and went in back to make some coffee -- followed by a crash, a lawsuit and a huge settlement. Several readers said that story has been around for so many years, it's now passed into the pantheon of "urban legends."

Tom Harris passes along a Web site that specializes in tracking "urban legends and Internet myths": http://www.snopes.com.

Elinor Hood sent along a piece debunking the bogus Stella Awards, including one case that was removed from the list of "winners" because it was so unbelievable: A woman who washed her poodle and tried to dry it in the microwave oven -- with fatal results -- and then sued the maker of the oven.

The nuked poodle and the cruise-control coffee are such priceless stories that people want to believe they're true -- like we want to believe in Santa Claus -- but with or without Stella, those stories are fiction.

Randy Cassingham of Ridgway, Colo., writes, "The very reason I started the True Stella Awards was I was sick and tired of made-up -- completely false -- cases being used to illustrate a real problem: the abuse of our civil courts."

Cassingham's Web site for truth can be found at http://www.StellaAwards.com.

Michael Lief writes: "As an attorney -- not involved in civil litigation -- I'm the first to admit that our legal system is chock-full of examples of greedy plaintiffs, unscrupulous lawyers, addle-brained judges and gullible juries.

"There are countless examples of real lawsuits that are guaranteed to make you spit your coffee onto your morning paper. But there are even more instances of legitimately injured plaintiffs, aided by conscientious advocates, in trials presided over by knowledgeable judges and decided by jurors doing their best to follow the law. Does the legal system need improvement? Of course it does. But presenting urban legends as fact does nothing to advance the cause of tort reform."

James Prosser compared last week's column to Dan Rather's report on President Bush's National Guard duty, suggesting that, like Rather, I owe the public an apology and a retraction. I'm hoping that this column will serve as both.

As penance, Kyle Carmona suggests that I award myself "the Darwin Award for dumbest act of the year."

The Darwin Award is meant to "honor" dumbness comparable to the Chucklehead Award, so I hereby accept that award as well. If you're interested in the Darwin Awards, go to http://www.darwinawards.com.

About last week's column, LeeAnne Clark wrote, "This is exactly the type of shoddy journalism that can destroy reputations and ruin lives." Well, the column certainly hasn't enhanced my reputation, but I'm trying not to let it ruin my life.

Randy Green wrote, "Do you let your columnists just make this stuff up or does The Star have any standards at all?"

We do try to be accurate, sticking to what some letter to the editor letter writers call "the true facts." Clearly, we don't always succeed.

Green, Cassingham and Tom Chronister are among several readers, including Glenn Slensker, Frank Heinisch, Ben Coats, Dan Rubesh and Melissa Donia who said there's no excuse for a columnist to publish bogus material in this high-tech world, when everything can be checked out so readily on the Internet.

But the bogus Stella Awards came right off the Internet. There's so much stuff on the Internet -- so much of it with no attribution that you have no idea where it originated -- and it almost seems that half the stuff on the Internet contradicts the other half. How do we know which half is real and which half is fake?

When you go online, you need what James Reston, the revered New York Times columnist, called a "manure detector." He was talking about politics, but you need one on the Internet, too.

If there were such a device, I can only hope this column wouldn't set it off.

-- Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.net..

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