One of the worst verdicts in a civil suit ever

[Opoponax]

You have not told us what exactly police did was wrong. We know that civil cases often are nothing but extortion, that's a fact.

My point was that we don't know. We get a simple article and a result. That's it.

As to civil cases being extortion, well, I hope that you never get injured and have to sue for it. It's a fucking nightmare.

You seem to think that civil cases, by their very nature, are without merit. How are people who have been harmed supposed to recover for injuries? Should people not be held liable for foreseeable acts that injure others? Say you go into a Dennys (I happen to love Dennys btw) and you're served a Grand Slam breakfast that seething with e-coli. You become ill, several of your organs are damaged permanently. Then it turns out the managers and employees knew the place was filthy, but did nothing about it. Meanwhile, you've been unable to work, your house is going into foreclosure, and you have a mountain of medical bills to pay.

Now, what Dennys did doesn't rise to criminal liability. So do you just say, "Oh well, them's the breaks!" Fuck no you don't. You sue them because they owed a duty to provide you, a foreseeable plaintiff with safe food. They knowingly breached that duty, the result of which was foreseeable, and now your life and the quality of it has been made a helluva lot worse.

The same goes for workplace accidents. What if a $4,000 safety mechanism on a $500,000 machine isn't used and a worker gets permanently physically injured from it. Is it extortion for him to want compensation for his injuries?

I could go on and on and on, but plaintiff's attorneys in tort cases probably do the most to benefit society as a whole than any other type of lawyer because they help otherwise helpless people get compensation for harm done to them. They hold entities and individuals accountable when no one else can. And they do it on a contingency basis; they work for free unless they win. Do you have any idea the costs incurred in filing, proceeding with, and trying a case?

Are you gonna stand up to X-Corp or PlanetCo Insurance all by yourself? Good luck with that.

 

[Opoponax]

In this case, with an award this size, the cops must've done something seriously wrong. Commenting on without substantive knowledge regarding the outcome of a case is fine, as long as one understands they're speaking from a very ignorant position.

That seems to have set off my contradiction-detector.

That's me speculating, but I should have modified the statement with, "I don't know for sure, but it seems that the outcome would not have been what it was had the police not done something provably wrong."

 

[laughing dog]

You have not told us what exactly police did was wrong. We know that civil cases often are nothing but extortion, that's a fact.

The jury found for the plaintiff in less than 3 hours. It is up to those who disagree with the verdict to use all the facts in explaining why it is wrong. So far, all I see is outrage and ignorance-driven generalizations from the naysayers.

 

[Derec]

The jury came back with its verdict in less than 3 hours. Lawyers tell me that such quick verdicts almost always indicate that the winning side has an excellent case and the losing side has a terrible case.

Lawyers say a lot of things, most of them not true. A quick verdict merely means that there wasn't much disagreement between jurors and they agreed quickly. Nothing more. It could be due to a strong case, but it could be due to the jury makeup.

 

[RavenSky]

I’m thinkig of the BUndy Gang. And how they pointed guns at police in Nevada, and then in Oregon had a standoff with police patience of, what was it, weeks? What was different about those people? How come they got so much patience?

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/hw_bundy_militia_sniper_42-57566985_1280x720.jpg

Exactly what I was thinking of, too.

 

[Toni]

I’m thinkig of the BUndy Gang. And how they pointed guns at police in Nevada, and then in Oregon had a standoff with police patience of, what was it, weeks? What was different about those people? How come they got so much patience?

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/hw_bundy_militia_sniper_42-57566985_1280x720.jpg

Exactly what I was thinking of, too.

Yup.

 

[Derec]

The NYTimes piece about this said that the police shot her in the back and then shot her three more times. Why was that?

Which NY Times piece would that be? I do not think she was shot in the back. Citation needed.

The Baltimore Police Department is one of the most corrupt in the country, or didn't you bother to read the thread I posted a week or so ago about this?

This is Baltimore County PD, not City.

The child was also shot by the police.

Unfortunate yes, but ultimately the fault of the mother. She is the one who caused the police stop (where she told her 5 year old son that he should fight police) by willfully refusing to register and insure her car ("I do not participate in any of you guys' laws"), she ignored the citation given to her which led to the FTA warrant, and she escalated the warrant being served by engaging police in an armed standoff with her child present. This is all on her, not the police.

Are the police so cowardly and stupid that they didn't bother to make sure the child was safe before they shot at his mother?

Why not ask why this mother was endangering her child's safety?

Were they wearing protective vests?

Vests protect from center-of-mass hits as they cover the torso but they do not protect the extremities or the head.

Did they bother to call in someone who has experience in dealing with a very emotionally charged person, who exhibits signs of a mental illness?

There was a negotiator, but their effectiveness depends on the perp being amenable to surrender. Gaines was not.

Ask yourself why you have a habit of stereotyping women!

It's not a stereotype. There are differences between men and women. As you said, men are more aggressive than women, on average. You have no problem saying that about men. So why is it anathema to say that women are more emotional than men in the sense that would make them more susceptible to emotional arguments by the plaintiffs' shyster.

And, your comment that some of the jury must have been mothers, can be taken as an insult to fathers. Don't you think that a father might be very sympathetic towards a child that watched the police kill his mother?

They may be very sympathetic. I am sympathetic as well. The poor kid was brainwashed by his "sovereign citizen" mother into a police-hating attitude and then the actions of his mother led to him being injured. But being sympathetic is different from thinking police must have done something wrong or that the kid deserves over $30 million from the taxpayers.
In one of the articles on the verdict, I read

Do you think a father wouldn't be emotionally impacted by a young child being accidentally shot during this standoff? Apparently, the women on the jury took all of these things into consideration. I imagine there were a lot more details that weren't covered in the news too. I would hope that an all male jury would come to a similar conclusion.

I would have hoped the all-female jury would have come to a very different conclusion. But alas it did not.
Trial lawyers actually practice jury selection with great care. That the jury had 6 women is certainly not accidental. The defense lawyers dropped the ball by not counteracting the plaintiffs' jury selection strategy. Perhaps they were bit by the PC bug and refused to think gender played a role. Big mistake.

Now you want to end the jury system?

Yes, it's arbitrary, capricious, preposterous. Your chances often have more to do with who the 6 or 12 random people trying your case are than with the law or the facts. Random people who have no legal training and often no common sense either.

I agree that it's not perfect but it's better than having an appointed or elected judge having the power to make decisions involving crimes and civil rights violations.

I disagree.

You know what else Derec, the city is already appealing the verdict, so at this point, we don't even know if it will stand.

Again, not the city, but the county. And I do hope they prevail. That greedy family and their even greedier shysters deserve not one red cent. Korryn Gaines caused the entire situation, from not having a tag on her vehicle to the armed standoff.

Yet, you've already gotten yourself so worked up that you felt the need to start another thread supporting the police when they shoot a civilian.

Well, thread attacking the verdict.

You even felt the need to use hyperbole by describing it as "one of the worst verdicts".

I can't think of many that are worse.

Why is it that you don't start discussions about the many times that people, especially minorities, have their civil rights violated and the government doesn't do a thing? Hopefully, if this verdict stands, the city of Baltimore will do something about their poorly trained, ineffective police department.

Police did not violate Korryn Gaines' civil rights. You have no civil right to engage police in an armed standoff. And what do you think Baltimore County police should do? Let her go? Allow her to drive around in an uninsured and unregistered vehicle?

 

[Derec]

You didn't fix anything.

You just described the crazy thing this crazy person did.

You think being crazy gives the police the right to kill you.

That's crazy.

Pointing this at the police gave the police the right to shoot her.

And about the use of "crazy". I do not think she was diagnosed with any particular mental illness. She just had some very nutty beliefs about not having to follow laws.

 

[Derec]

Every time I read something like this, I first think of the McDonald's case where the elderly lady was burned by coffee and awarded a fairly large sum.

Conservatives blew that up like it was the downfall of western civilization. But if one took time to learn even the basic facts, it turns out the reward probably wasn't sufficient.

Not sufficient? The original sum awarded by the jury was several million dollars.
There is a lot of apologetics about the hot coffee case, mostly written by trial lawyers who have a vested interest in claiming that it was not an outrageous case.
But let's look at the facts:

- The woman placed the cup between her thighs in order to add sugar and creamer to her coffee. In the process of doing that she poured hot coffee on herself. McDonalds employees did not pour hot coffee on her, she did it to herself.
- Coffee is supposed to be hot. Now the apologists for the verdict will say that it was unreasonably hot, but that is not really the case. Remember, coffee might be kept at temperature T in the machine, but once it is poured it starts cooling. And if you have to add sugar and creamer, as most people do, the temperature will drop even more.
- The oft cited "it takes 3s for 180°F liquid to cause third degree burns" or something to that effect applies only to liquid that can be assumed to be at constant temperature during that time. If you spill a relatively small quantity on your skin the liquid will cool rapidly in those three seconds:
* you have a huge increase in surface area relative to when it was in the cup. Heat transfer is proportional to surface area. The average thickness of the liquid layer would not be more than 1.5mm if she got all the coffee against her skin and closer to 1mm if some of the liquid ended up on the seat and the floor.
* the woman was wearing sweat pants. When the liquid soaked through the sweat pants, it transferred heat to the cotton fabric. Since the liquid would surround the fibers, area of contact would be quite large meaning the two would reach thermal equilibrium almost instantly. That would cool the liquid further.
* The reason hot liquid scalds you is that it heats up your skin. To do that it must transfer heat to the skin via conduction which reduces temperature of the liquid. At the same time, there is a second interface between liquid and air where heat transfer also takes place.
If the coffee was 180°F when she first spilled it, within 3s it was probably less than 120°F. All that is to say that either her injuries were exaggerated or her age made her skin especially thin and vulnerable, and her grandson, for example, would have fared much better if he spilled that same coffee on himself. But if she had such fragile skin, why did she do something as reckless as balance the cup between her thighs? And why should McD be liable for her carelessness?

In this case, with an award this size, the cops must've done something seriously wrong.

But they did not. You are assuming jurors are infallible, but they are literally 6-12 random people.

Commenting on without substantive knowledge regarding the outcome of a case is fine, as long as one understands they're speaking from a very ignorant position.

This case was extensively covered in the media. And trials are public, not secret. If there was any important information that came out at trial that meant that police did "something seriously wrong", it would have been made public.

If a defendant fails to accept a 998 offer and the plaintiff then obtains a “more favorable judgment or award,” the court has discretion to order Defendant to pay reasonable post-offer expert witness fees incurred by Plaintiff in connection with trial or arbitration.

This by itself can amount to a shitload of money. So one thing that may have contributed to the amount of the lawsuit was that the plaintiff's attorney offered the City X amount and City turned it down, and now they're paying the price for that. Good luck finding that in a newspaper article.

But that does not mean that the jury award was correct. It is basically blackmail to force cities to settle on these types of cases because juries, susceptible to emotional manipulation, can come up with a ridiculous verdict like $27 million for shooting an armed perp who repeatedly threatened to shoot at police.

The point is that without knowing all the details, the procedural law, the state substantive law, precedent for such cases, the facts, the testimony, etc., it's really hard to comment with any accuracy.

That's just argument from ignorance. We rarely have all the facts in any particular instance. But in this case, there was extensive coverage. We might not know everything, but we know a lot. And without showing some evidence that the $37 million verdict was justified why should I assume it was?

But the point stands. You have to know that you don't know.

And you have to know what you know and we know a lot.

 

[Juma]

Which NY Times piece would that be? I do not think she was shot in the back. Citation needed.


This is Baltimore County PD, not City.

The child was also shot by the police.

Unfortunate yes, but ultimately the fault of the mother. She is the one who caused the police stop (where she told her 5 year old son that he should fight police) by willfully refusing to register and insure her car ("I do not participate in any of you guys' laws"), she ignored the citation given to her which led to the FTA warrant, and she escalated the warrant being served by engaging police in an armed standoff with her child present. This is all on her, not the police.

Are the police so cowardly and stupid that they didn't bother to make sure the child was safe before they shot at his mother?

Why not ask why this mother was endangering her child's safety?

Were they wearing protective vests?

Vests protect from center-of-mass hits as they cover the torso but they do not protect the extremities or the head.

Did they bother to call in someone who has experience in dealing with a very emotionally charged person, who exhibits signs of a mental illness?

There was a negotiator, but their effectiveness depends on the perp being amenable to surrender. Gaines was not.

Ask yourself why you have a habit of stereotyping women!

It's not a stereotype. There are differences between men and women. As you said, men are more aggressive than women, on average. You have no problem saying that about men. So why is it anathema to say that women are more emotional than men in the sense that would make them more susceptible to emotional arguments by the plaintiffs' shyster.

And, your comment that some of the jury must have been mothers, can be taken as an insult to fathers. Don't you think that a father might be very sympathetic towards a child that watched the police kill his mother?

They may be very sympathetic. I am sympathetic as well. The poor kid was brainwashed by his "sovereign citizen" mother into a police-hating attitude and then the actions of his mother led to him being injured. But being sympathetic is different from thinking police must have done something wrong or that the kid deserves over $30 million from the taxpayers.
In one of the articles on the verdict, I read

Do you think a father wouldn't be emotionally impacted by a young child being accidentally shot during this standoff? Apparently, the women on the jury took all of these things into consideration. I imagine there were a lot more details that weren't covered in the news too. I would hope that an all male jury would come to a similar conclusion.

I would have hoped the all-female jury would have come to a very different conclusion. But alas it did not.
Trial lawyers actually practice jury selection with great care. That the jury had 6 women is certainly not accidental. The defense lawyers dropped the ball by not counteracting the plaintiffs' jury selection strategy. Perhaps they were bit by the PC bug and refused to think gender played a role. Big mistake.

Now you want to end the jury system?

Yes, it's arbitrary, capricious, preposterous. Your chances often have more to do with who the 6 or 12 random people trying your case are than with the law or the facts. Random people who have no legal training and often no common sense either.

I agree that it's not perfect but it's better than having an appointed or elected judge having the power to make decisions involving crimes and civil rights violations.

I disagree.

You know what else Derec, the city is already appealing the verdict, so at this point, we don't even know if it will stand.

Again, not the city, but the county. And I do hope they prevail. That greedy family and their even greedier shysters deserve not one red cent. Korryn Gaines caused the entire situation, from not having a tag on her vehicle to the armed standoff.

Yet, you've already gotten yourself so worked up that you felt the need to start another thread supporting the police when they shoot a civilian.

Well, thread attacking the verdict.

You even felt the need to use hyperbole by describing it as "one of the worst verdicts".

I can't think of many that are worse.

Why is it that you don't start discussions about the many times that people, especially minorities, have their civil rights violated and the government doesn't do a thing? Hopefully, if this verdict stands, the city of Baltimore will do something about their poorly trained, ineffective police department.

Police did not violate Korryn Gaines' civil rights. You have no civil right to engage police in an armed standoff. And what do you think Baltimore County police should do? Let her go? Allow her to drive around in an uninsured and unregistered vehicle?

Since when is there a death penalty to drive an uninsured car without plates?

 

[Juma]

Not sufficient? The original sum awarded by the jury was several million dollars.
There is a lot of apologetics about the hot coffee case, mostly written by trial lawyers who have a vested interest in claiming that it was not an outrageous case.
But let's look at the facts:

- The woman placed the cup between her thighs in order to add sugar and creamer to her coffee. In the process of doing that she poured hot coffee on herself. McDonalds employees did not pour hot coffee on her, she did it to herself.
- Coffee is supposed to be hot. Now the apologists for the verdict will say that it was unreasonably hot, but that is not really the case. Remember, coffee might be kept at temperature T in the machine, but once it is poured it starts cooling. And if you have to add sugar and creamer, as most people do, the temperature will drop even more.
- The oft cited "it takes 3s for 180°F liquid to cause third degree burns" or something to that effect applies only to liquid that can be assumed to be at constant temperature during that time. If you spill a relatively small quantity on your skin the liquid will cool rapidly in those three seconds:
* you have a huge increase in surface area relative to when it was in the cup. Heat transfer is proportional to surface area.
* the woman was wearing sweat pants. When the liquid soaked through the sweat pants, it transferred heat to the cotton fabric. Since the liquid would surround the fibers, area of contact would be quite large meaning the two would reach thermal equilibrium almost instantly. That would cool the liquid further.
* The reason hot liquid scalds you is that it heats up your skin. To do that it must transfer heat to the skin via conduction which reduces temperature of the liquid. At the same time, there is a second interface between liquid and air where heat transfer also takes place.
If the coffee was 180°F when she first spilled it, within 3s it was probably less than 120°F. All that is to say that either her injuries were exaggerated or her age made her skin especially thin and vulnerable, and her grandson, for example, would have fared much better if he spilled that same coffee on himself. But if she had such fragile skin, why did she do something as reckless as balance the cup between her thighs? And why should McD be liable for her carelessness?

In this case, with an award this size, the cops must've done something seriously wrong.

But they did not. You are assuming jurors are infallible, but they are literally 6-12 random people.

Commenting on without substantive knowledge regarding the outcome of a case is fine, as long as one understands they're speaking from a very ignorant position.

This case was extensively covered in the media. And trials are public, not secret. If there was any important information that came out at trial that meant that police did "something seriously wrong", it would have been made public.

If a defendant fails to accept a 998 offer and the plaintiff then obtains a “more favorable judgment or award,” the court has discretion to order Defendant to pay reasonable post-offer expert witness fees incurred by Plaintiff in connection with trial or arbitration.

This by itself can amount to a shitload of money. So one thing that may have contributed to the amount of the lawsuit was that the plaintiff's attorney offered the City X amount and City turned it down, and now they're paying the price for that. Good luck finding that in a newspaper article.

But that does not mean that the jury award was correct. It is basically blackmail to force cities to settle on these types of cases because juries, susceptible to emotional manipulation, can come up with a ridiculous verdict like $27 million for shooting an armed perp who repeatedly threatened to shoot at police.

The point is that without knowing all the details, the procedural law, the state substantive law, precedent for such cases, the facts, the testimony, etc., it's really hard to comment with any accuracy.

That's just argument from ignorance. We rarely have all the facts in any particular instance. But in this case, there was extensive coverage. We might not know everything, but we know a lot. And without showing some evidence that the $37 million verdict was justified why should I assume it was?

But the point stands. You have to know that you don't know.

And you have to know what you know and we know a lot.

Stop pretending that you have anything useful to say about the physics of heat in the coffer case. The physics really doesnt matter: what matters is the actual result. Very severe burns. And the sum didnt get so big because of the hot coffee but because mcdonalds refused to pay hospital costs.

 

[Derec]

Stop pretending that you have anything useful to say about the physics of heat in the coffer case.

I am not pretending. Did you find any errors in my physics?

The physics really doesnt matter: what matters is the actual result. Very severe burns.

But if "very severe burns" are due more to the fragility of her skin than to the not really excessive temperature of the coffee, shouldn't the onus be on her to be more careful when handling hot liquids rather than to claim that McD should serve coffee at much reduced temperatures?

And the sum didnt get so big because of the hot coffee but because mcdonalds refused to pay hospital costs.

I will refer back to my first point: She poured coffee on herself. McDonalds did not pour coffee on her. Why should McD have to pay for what she did to herself?

Hot coffee is hot and supposed to be hot. Maybe Liebeck should have ordered some iced coffee, but then she probably would have claimed she got frostbite or something.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The police claim she threatened them later. But if the jury believed that the police should have taken steps to de-escalate the situation, had the means to do so at their disposal, and failed to do so, then yeah, the jury is going to fault the police for failing to handle the situation properly. Also, the jury might not believe police claims that she suddenly decided to shoot it out with them, the one of her against the several of them and with her kid in the room.

I have no problem believing she decided to shoot it out. These sovereign citizen types are nuts and are prone to getting violent when it becomes apparent they can't bullshit their way out of the situation and are going to go to jail for what they've done.

Meanwhile, this gives us a clear indication of why cities pay millions when the dead person was clearly in the wrong--juries sometimes do stupid things like this.

Such deaths are not inevitable.

You think because sometimes they can be talked down they always can.

This is the real world, not liberal-land where everyone is stamped out with a cookie cutter!

Perhaps the jury's verdict and award was designed to send a message: train officers to better avoid the use of deadly force! Certainly that would have been cheaper and no doubt everyone would have been much happier.

And they're listening--avoiding getting involved unless they're responding to a call and have to. And the murder rate is going up. Never mind, the underdog is always in the right.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I’m thinkig of the BUndy Gang. And how they pointed guns at police in Nevada, and then in Oregon had a standoff with police patience of, what was it, weeks? What was different about those people? How come they got so much patience?

https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/hw_bundy_militia_sniper_42-57566985_1280x720.jpg

Because dealing with them will likely turn into a bloodbath. When all the dead hostages (family members who don't realize they are human shields) are paraded in front of the TV screen it will go very badly. Think of what happened with Waco when the nutters suicided rather than surrender. The police bend over backwards to avoid such cases, even at the cost of letting the assholes get away with an awful lot.

 

[laughing dog]

The jury came back with its verdict in less than 3 hours. Lawyers tell me that such quick verdicts almost always indicate that the winning side has an excellent case and the losing side has a terrible case.

Lawyers say a lot of things, most of them not true.

That is not a trait restricted to lawyers.

A quick verdict merely means that there wasn't much disagreement between jurors and they agreed quickly. Nothing more.

According to people who do this for a living, that usually means the winning case is strong.
stricted to lawyers.

It could be due to a strong case, but it could be due to the jury makeup.

Hence the use of the term "usually". Do you have any factual reason(s) to believe that is was jury makeup instead of the facts of the case?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The NYTimes piece about this said that the police shot her in the back and then shot her three more times. Why was that? The Baltimore Police Department is one of the most corrupt in the country, or didn't you bother to read the thread I posted a week or so ago about this? The child was also shot by the police. Are the police so cowardly and stupid that they didn't bother to make sure the child was safe before they shot at his mother? Were they wearing protective vests? Did they bother to call in someone who has experience in dealing with a very emotionally charged person, who exhibits signs of a mental illness?

Try again.

1) Shooting her in the back means nothing--there were multiple police there. Just because one was behind her doesn't mean she wasn't a threat to others.

2) The police are not going to sacrifice themselves to avoid shooting a hostage.

3) You have shown you are utterly incapable of evaluating the situation properly by bringing up vests. Vests are nothing like 100% protection and even if the vest stops the round that doesn't stop all injury. Sometimes people even die of rounds that were stopped by the vest. (The thing is the vest simply prevents penetration by the bullet, it doesn't stop the energy. That energy does nasty things.)

You know what else Derec, the city is already appealing the verdict, so at this point, we don't even know if it will stand. Yet, you've already gotten yourself so worked up that you felt the need to start another thread supporting the police when they shoot a civilian. You even felt the need to use hyperbole by describing it as "one of the worst verdicts". Why is it that you don't start discussions about the many times that people, especially minorities, have their civil rights violated and the government doesn't do a thing? Hopefully, if this verdict stands, the city of Baltimore will do something about their poorly trained, ineffective police department.

It almost certainly won't stand. It's too high, it's going to be knocked down considerably even if it's not thrown out.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The same goes for workplace accidents. What if a $4,000 safety mechanism on a $500,000 machine isn't used and a worker gets permanently physically injured from it. Is it extortion for him to want compensation for his injuries?

It depends on why it wasn't used.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Since when is there a death penalty to drive an uninsured car without plates?

Since when is this a valid argument?

- - - Updated - - -

But if "very severe burns" are due more to the fragility of her skin than to the not really excessive temperature of the coffee, shouldn't the onus be on her to be more careful when handling hot liquids rather than to claim that McD should serve coffee at much reduced temperatures?

The fragility of her skin isn't her fault. It's a basic tenant of such matters that you take your victims as you find them.

However, her careless handling of the coffee is.

 

[bilby]

It's a basic tenant of such matters that you take your victims as you find them.

FFS.

Nobody is paying rent to live in such matters. The word you are looking for is 'tenet'.

tenet
ˈtɛnɪt,ˈtiːnɛt/
noun
noun: tenet; plural noun: tenets

a principle or belief



tenant
ˈtɛnənt/
noun
noun: tenant; plural noun: tenants

1.
a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.

2. Law
a person in possession of real property by any right or title.

verb
verb: tenant; 3rd person present: tenants; past tense: tenanted; past participle: tenanted; gerund or present participle: tenanting

1.
occupy (property) as a tenant



malapropism
ˈmaləprɒˌpɪz(ə)m/
noun
noun: malapropism; plural noun: malapropisms; noun: malaprop; plural noun: malaprops

the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one, often with an amusing effect

 

[Arctish]

I am not pretending. Did you find any errors in my physics?

You are overlooking several relevant facts.

- industry standard holding temperature for commercial coffee makers is ~165F. Home coffee makers usually hold the liquid at 125-135F, but some expensive models hold it at ~150F. McDonalds set their coffee makers to a holding temp of 195F and above. This was documented by more than one source, and McDonalds employees admitted to it in court.

- the excessive heat caused the cups to soften and fail. McDonalds employees risked severe scalding burns every time they passed the cups to customers. Some of them were unfortunate enough to have the cups fail as they handled them resulting in workman's comp claims. Customers like Ms. Liebeck were unwittingly handling coffee at a dangerously high temps in cups too soft to hold it. And customers who attempted to take a sip of coffee they'd just bought were getting burns so severe they needed plastic surgery to close the wounds and reduce the scarring. Attorneys found more than a hundred cases where McDonalds paid the medical bills of badly burned customers but only after the customers agreed to keep the matter confidential. It is suspected that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands more. One of the cases attorneys found was that of a woman with nearly identical burns as Ms. Liebeck suffered. The cup failed in the employee's hand as she handed the coffee to the customer at the drive through. Both the customer and the employee were injured.

- a McDonalds executive admitted on the stand that the coffee they were serving was "unfit for human consumption" due to the excessively high holding temperature. He was peddling a line about customers wanting to drink their coffee after they arrived at their destinations some 30-40 minutes later but I think most people saw through that bullshit.

But if "very severe burns" are due more to the fragility of her skin than to the not really excessive temperature of the coffee, shouldn't the onus be on her to be more careful when handling hot liquids rather than to claim that McD should serve coffee at much reduced temperatures?

And the sum didnt get so big because of the hot coffee but because mcdonalds refused to pay hospital costs.

I will refer back to my first point: She poured coffee on herself. McDonalds did not pour coffee on her. Why should McD have to pay for what she did to herself?

Hot coffee is hot and supposed to be hot. Maybe Liebeck should have ordered some iced coffee, but then she probably would have claimed she got frostbite or something.

Coffee is supposed to be hot, but it's not supposed to melt the cup it's in. It's not supposed to burn holes in the lips of customers who take at sip. It's supposed to be fit for human consumption. That stuff McDonalds was serving was dangerous, it was causing severe burns to employees and customers, and McDonalds knew it. McDonalds didn't care because the hotter the coffee, the farther the smell of hot coffee traveled and the more inspired people were to buy a cup of coffee. They made more in coffee sales than they paid out in damages, at least until the Liebeck case exposed their sociopathic business model.