A jury in Florida has awarded a family $800,000 after finding a McDonalds franchise was responsible for second-degree burns suffered by a toddler given overheated chicken nuggets.
In a statement, attorneys for the family said, “This momentous decision brings meaningful closure to an arduous and protracted legal process. Having previously established the defendants, Upchurch Foods Inc and McDonald’s USA LLC, as liable for their wrongful actions, this verdict reaffirms that they must now face the consequences and provide full justice.”
CNN has reached out to attorneys for Upchurch Foods and McDonald’s for comment.
A nadir of modern journalism was Liebeck v. McDonald’s case, in which a franchisee served an elderly woman scalding-hot coffee and refused to pay for the relatively modest cost of treating the severe, life-changing burns that hospitalized her for a week. The media en masse decided, for no good reason at all beyond their own internalization of reactionary nonsense, that she was a gold-digger out to defraud a noble American corporation and turned on her, fingers steepled and eyebrows raised, to help it ensure she would never be made whole.
Some are trying again with this case. The Hot Coffee stock story and its effortless tone of “this must be some kind of scam” all but floats off the fingers, aided as ever by the comically harmless names McDonalds uses to market its food. A McDonalds served overheated food to child and must now pay an award of unremarkable size for her pain and suffering. That should be the end of it.