Slashdot Mirror
Video Games Share Blame in Florida Murder Case
EH writes "Yet another article making the case that video games force young children to ruthlessly bludgeon people to death. Or at least a South Florida lawyer thinks so. 'Whatever happened [in JoLynn's death], it was not murder,' Thompson wrote in a news release. 'The American video industry must share the blame.' Articles like this make me so angry." I'm really getting sick of video games being used as the scapegoat for the evils of society. It's not like Nintendo is blamed everytime an Italian becomes a plumber.
He noted at some point that videogames moved fast in their evolution of control systems, then he said something like videogames cause violence in "real life". -Nothing to special here is there...
He then said that "If there weren't computer games there wouldn't be child pornography".
I was as stunned as you probably are now. =0
"It's not my fault I got burned by this McDonald's coffee, nobody told me it was hot!"
This one usually gets cited and laughed at, but what folks don't know is that the coffee in question was actually OBSCENELY hot, beyond the point of being safe because McDonalds likes to cut corners and keep an old pot of coffee around as long as they can by overheating it. Plus the suit was only for medical damages (to cover extensive skin grafts needed, not just a 'Oh, that hurt!' whine) and the jury are the ones who decided to inflate that to millions of dollars in order to punish McDonalds.
This is an important point, because that case is so often used to decry the legal system, even though the people using it are almost totally ignorant of the facts.
She was a 79 year old woman in the passenger side of the car, who opened the lid of the coffee to add cream (while the car was stationary) and spilled it, causing third degree (full-thickness) burns to 6% of her body, mostly in the genital and groin regions. It was shown during the trial that McDonald's had recieved more than 700 complaints about the temperature of their coffee within the proceeding ten years, that it was served well above industry standard temperatures, and that it was served a full 40 to 50 degrees above safe temperatures. McDonalds claimed that they needed to serve it that hot because people don't drink it until they arrive at their destination, but during trial it was shown that they had performed studies indicating that the majority of people intended to consume it immediately after purchase. She also did not make "millions" off the case, as many claim; McDonalds settled the case with her, presumably for less than the $480,000 that the judge had reduced the jury's award to.
Ironically, well before it went to trial she had offered to settle her claim with them for $20,000 - but McDonald's refused.