Girl Claims Price Scanner Gave Her Tourette's Syndrome

Attorneys for Dominica Juliano claim that she was burned and developed psychological problems after a store clerk aimed a hand-held price scanner at her face. Store attorneys say their scanners uses a harmless LED light and that the girl had serious health problems before she was scanned. From the article: "Dominica Juliano was 12 when she and her grandmother entered the Country Fair store in Erie in June 2004. A clerk allegedly called the girl 'grumpy' before flashing his hand-held bar code scanner over her face and telling her to smile. Attorneys for Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl was sensitive to light and burned, and later developed post-traumatic stress and Tourette's syndrome."

Comments

Fire that Judge

[h4rr4r]

The Judge that let this go to trial should be out of a job. Why waste the time of a jury and tax-dollars on such ridiculous claims?

Re:Fire that Judge

[mysidia]

The Judge his doing his job as set out by the laws. It is not generally within a Judge's responsibilities to simply block or prevent a case going to trial just because some people might feel it is a waste of time in their opinion.

"I think the claims are ridiculous" is not a valid legal reason for denying the person of their right to seek justice under the law.

Basically, this Judge is doing his job properly, and any judge which would deny a case going to trial, simply because someone thinks its ridiculous, is not properly executing the role of a Judge...

The Judge's responsibility is to analyze the claims put forward, and the show of evidence, based on the law, not based on some political opinion of the "proper cases" to come before the courts.

Re:Fire that Judge

[ehrichweiss]

I don't think you read GP's post well enough. The wavelength/absorption aren't going to matter if there isn't enough *energy* to cause a problem in the first place, regardless of wavelength. In other words, say it requires 30 milliwatts of power at 800nm and your scanner only supplies 1 milliwatt for its entire spectrum; there will not be enough energy to do any harm.

Re:Fire that Judge

[nomadic]

Then he did his job. My concern is that it is possible to even bring such a suit without any evidence.

Who do you want to be the gatekeeper? The clerk's office? You'd trust deputy court clerk to decide who gets to sue and who doesn't?

I'll Bet

[Mikkeles]

'Attorneys for Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl was sensitive to light and burned, and later developed post-traumatic stress and Tourette's syndrome.'

To fix that: "Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl deserves a Million Billion Gazillion dolars (and that she [Ms. Juliano] should be trustee)."

Um yeah, ok easy enough

[DnemoniX]

Easy to figure out, shoot her again and again to see if it still burns. Oh and never mind that Tourettes is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder. Don't let a little thing like that stop you from filing a lawsuit though.

Litigation Land

[muphin]

Welcome to the land of the "owe, i hurt myself, lets blame who's near my so i don't look like an idiot"
this is obviously a grab for cash, when genetic disorders like this cannot instantly be created from a flash of light, if she had a pre existing condition, light sensitivity, then i doubt she's gonna get that cash she so hope she would, poor girl is probably stuck in the middle of the greed from her parents.

Re:Litigation Land

[hoggoth]

Whether it's better or not, just because you really want to believe something doesn't make it true.

As Neitzsche said, "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

Re:Litigation Land

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Atheists believe in something that is obviously untrue (the non-existence of self).

Holy batman, that's an impressive strawman. You should take it to the burning man festival, it'll impress everyone there.

Re:Litigation Land

[n dot l]

I'm not framing their argument the way they would ("we're just collections of atoms, nothing special about us") in order to highlight the absurdity of it.

Yeah, I'm not seeing the absurdity.

The universe is fucking amazing. If there's anything absurd here, it's looking at the vastness of the cosmos and all of the ridiculously cool shit in it and thinking, "Oh, the fact that I vaguely understand the underlying principles renders this all meaningless. However, I assert (based on nothing but my own whims) that I am not meaningless. Therefore I must be composed of something more than mere energy. Ignore the fact that I'm treating a particularly human concept (meaning) like some sort of real (and for unexplained reasons desirable) substance."

Being reasonably certain that I'm a collection of atoms renders me (or anyone) no more meaningless, worthless, or absurd than being reasonably certain I know how Sol's light is made renders sunsets ugly.

Wonderous

[Spatial]

Burned by an LED?

What happens if she's exposed to direct sunlight? Presumably it causes her to burst into flame, being tens of thousands of times more energetic.

Sensitive to light

[wisnoskij]

I do not care how sensitive to light you are, if you can survive outside and in a normally lighted room you will have no trouble with a price scanner.

Re:From a neurological standpoint...

[NiteShaed]

Er, putting aside the fact that nearly everything in your post is pure nonsense, the claim is that the girl was burned by the price-gun, and then later developed PTSD and Tourette's. Unless you're trying to say that this burn was caused by the power of suggestion, this girl by all rights should go up in a poof of smoke every time she encounters sunlight, seeing as how the sun puts out a little more energy than your average LED. Assuming she's not a regular Slashdot reader, that's probably something that happens to her on a fairly regular basis.

But in my experience, mental problem are far easier fixed than most people think

I'm gonna guess your "experience" largely consists of talking about things you don't really understand. I've been around plenty of people with mental problems, and no, there are generally no easy fixes for them.

Reality is irrelevant for fixing such a problem. What counts is if that person believes it in her inner model, and if it makes her life bad from that point of view.

Unless of course they're making the story up, and trying to cash in on it. Since the claim involves a physical injury that seems to be impossible to be caused as they claim it was, that's not an unreasonable suspicion.

Re:From a neurological standpoint...

[Bazar]

Now if it happens, that the input signal is just right, it can e.g. raise the sensitivity of one neuron (or lower that of an inhibiting one), which then becomes able to trigger the swearing neurons for a lot of previously irrelevant input.

The signal in this case is just semi-random light. If that was enough for her to develop a problem, then she was a time-bomb waiting to go off.
If i was passing by, and i sneezed, and she "developed" her problem then, would I be libable for her problems.

Even if the scanner developed her problem (which i don't believe for even a second), i can't see how shes justified in persueing the store. Either learn to live with it, or seek help/aid via normal disabilitiy channels.