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Serving Justice: Exploring the Legal Standard for Negligence in Personal Injury Cases
You may have seen in the news recently of Holmes v. Upchurch Foods, Inc., in which a Florida jury found that McDonald’s and its franchise owner were liable for second-degree burns to a four-year-old girl when an unusually hot chicken nugget became trapped between her bare thigh and her car seat for at least two minutes. Many reactions blamed the mother for not knowing fried food was hot and called this a cash grab. Those who are old enough to remember made comparisons to the 1994 case, Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, in which a 79-year-old New Mexico woman was awarded nearly $3 million dollars after she suffered third-degree burns to her genitals from accidentally spilling coffee on her lap, resulting in eight days of hospitalization, skin grafting, and two years of medical treatment. Like the Holmes mother, Liebeck was publicly blamed for “not knowing that coffee should be hot.”
Subsequent media portrayals have revealed that McDonald’s had received hundreds of reports of injuries from unreasonably hot coffee, that Liebeck initially requested just $20,000 to cover medical cost and McDonald’s countered at $800, and that Liebeck was the victim of a smear campaign disproportionately placing the blame on her for circumstances that were mostly outside her control. This seems like a good time to review the legal standard for negligence.
Broadly speaking, negligence is the absence of a duty of care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in similar circumstances. To succeed in a suit for negligence, a plaintiff must prove that the defendant owed a duty of care to the plaintiff, the defendant breached that duty, the breach resulted in injury to the plaintiff, and that the plaintiff suffered an actual loss or damage.
As applied to either McDonald’s case, it should be reasonable to expect a restaurant to not serve a product that would cause severe injury to a customer. In each case, the product caused injury to the plaintiff, which incurred medical costs. The real dispute is whether McDonald’s breached its duty to the customers. Of course, both coffee and chicken nuggets should be hot when consumed, simplistically summarized by critics as a binary “hot” or “cold.” In the case of a chicken nugget, it must maintain an internal temperature of at least 165° F for food safety. To reach that internal temperature, it must be cooked at over 350° F. Those two hundred degrees is the difference between safe hot and unsafe hot, a fact that falls outside critics’ binary view.
Ordinarily, the nuggets cool to a safe temperature before being served. Otherwise, we’d have heard about similar injuries earlier. The plaintiffs argued that the nugget exceeded 200° F when served, while the defendants argued it was just 160° F, again the difference between unsafe hot and safe hot. The jury apparently believed plaintiffs and agreed that 200° F, near boiling, was a dangerously hot temperature at which to serve the nuggets. This is how the jury found the defendants to be liable for negligence.
As stated, some blamed the Holmes mother for not checking the temperature of the food before handing it to her daughter. Though this does not appear to have been a legal issue in the case, at least not yet, this raises the defense of contributory negligence: how much is the victim (or a third party) to be blamed for her harm? Liebeck was found to have contributed 20% of the harm to her, which she did not dispute. But that 20% did not negate the 80% that McDonald’s was found to be at fault. The Holmes family did not control the temperature at which the chicken nuggets were cooked, the time between the cooking and serving of the nuggets, the temperature at which the nuggets were served, or whether the employee gave a special warning, such as “These came right out of the fryer, so they’re hotter than normal. Please be careful.” Using Liebeck as an analogy, it is likely that any contribution from the Holmes mother would be negligible. After all, people aren’t normally burned by chicken nuggets, so there’s no known hazard to expect one to ordinarily check.
If you’re harmed by someone’s negligence, we at PJR Law will advocate for making you whole.
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