Americans love to litigate. There’s a whole subculture of fringe folks who seek their fortunes by suing mega-corporations over products the plaintiffs claim injured them in some way. But a new lawsuit against McDonald’s is different…
Not quite a case for the Law & Order SVU squad: Unless, somewhere in the proceedings,
someone uncovers proof that McDonald’s intended to harm the plaintiff…
This one involves not some outright, defineable, provable harm, as the original McSuit did. Everyone recalls that infamous case, in which a woman claimed McDonald’s coffee was too hot and burned her seriously. She spilled it in her lap on the way home from the drive-thru.
The idea is to badger the company until it settles out of court – just to get the plaintiff out of its corporate hair. And big outfites such as McD’s, Burger King and other well-known Fast Food chains often resort to this less than perfect solution to the ‘problem’. For them, a long, drawn-out lawsuit that makes embarrassing media coverage every time a new development emerges, is potentially more-serious as a PR issue than the cost to get rid of it.
But this time…
A Texas woman is claiming that a ‘bad’ Egg McMuffin put her in the hospital with severe gastro-intestinal issues that took a long time to resolve, and racked hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills.
In her suit, Yvette Hinds describes the sandwich that took her out as having contained, “contam-inants, poisons, toxins, parasites, bacteria, germs and/or organisms which would and did cause various serious personal injuries.”
Hinds goes on to recount that she became, “violently ill and nauseated,” suffering, “severe pains and distress throughout her body.”
To complicate the matter further, Hinds’ physical resources and abilities have been permanently compromised, which she claims will cause her untold extra expenses, and ‘pain and suffereing’ for the rest of her life.
What went down…
Hinds’ odyssey started March 25, 2023, when she consumed a Sausage and Egg McMuffin at the Broadway and 55th St. McD’s in Manhattan, NYC.
But she became ‘dangerously ill’ shortly therafter, ‘through no fault of her own’. Now, she claims the McMuffin was, “not reasonably safe, good, sound, fit, proper, healthful, wholesome food, [and] free from contaminants,” but rather, “contaminated, tainted, poisonous, injurious and wholly unfit for human consumption.”
It’s complicted…
I have some observations to make about this potentially unprovable case. But I must first remid y’all that I am not a lawyer nor a doctor. Nor any other kind of legal expert- except, maybe, as someone who has watched too many streaming seasons of Law and Order – SUV.
But here goes…
As I hinted in my preamble, this case is far more hazy and problematic than the usual direct-cause-and-effect injuries claimed in the vast majority of Fast Food l;awsuits.
Thenissue that rears its fuzzy head here is that favourite of legal show scriptwriters – Corpus Delicti– literally, the ‘body of the crime’. While real-life orhave now perfected the art of convicting murderers in spite of the fact that no body was every found, that’s apparently not the case in lawsuits such as Hinds’.
Let’s not forget, amid all the enormity of Hinds’ suferings, and the events of the alleged crime, that all the evidence is purely circumstantial. Does Hines have documeted, hard evidence that the McFood directly – or even indirectly – caused her illness?
There’s your problem…
There’s no Corpus Dilicti. Hines ate the evidence. And it was long-ago thoroughly degraded and cor-rupted by the extreme conditions present in the plaintiff’s gastrointestinal tract at the time of the alleged infection.
Much less are there any finger prints or DNA or anything concrete available to bolster her case.
McD’s defense counsel could easily claim that Hines’ illness was merely coincidental with her con-sumption of the allegedly poisonous McMuffin.
In a really good, intriguing police procedutal TV episode, an intrepid investigator might have jumped into McD’s dumpster to find the wrapper off of Hines’ McMuffin, and had it tested for the, “contam-inants, poisons, toxins, parasites, bacteria, germs and/or organisms which would and did cause various serious personal injuries.”
But the sleuth would still have to secure proof that he wrapper came from Hines’ particular McMuffin. That’s where DNA screening would come in, giving the script writers something really good to chew on…
My take
I’ll be really intereted to see how this particular Fast Food lawsuit pans out. If it’s a jury trial, anything could happen. NETFLIX might even make a true-crime flik out of it!
~ Maggie J.