Things in news stories that bug you

[NoSoup4U]

There is almost always much more to the story than the simple write-up you get. I suspect that when you know the whole story relatively few of these cases would really upset you so much. The crux of the McD case was that they knew that these hoaxes were taking place over and over at their stores and didn't do anything to warn their managers. A simple memo that went to all stores telling them to hang up on this guy might well have stopped the whole thing.

McDonalds tried to conceal and deny the prior cases. Eventually they were sanctioned by the judge for lying about what they knew to him and the other attorneys. They wound up turning over the material on prior cases just a few days before the trial started (this fact was presented to the jury). They also refused to provide the information on past cases to criminal prosecutors, hindering the case against the guy who ran the hoax in the first place.

They eventually admitted that their head of security suggested that they warn all the stores, but that they didn't actualy do it. They also looked like the classic big company with so many lawyers at the table that one of them actually objected to a question posed by another defense attorney, which actually caused members of the jury to laugh at them (as reported in the papers).

In their defense phase, one of the witnesses (the janitor) testified that the statement the lawyers provided on his behalf was false and that he couldn't read or write. They admitted that they changed the victim's timecard in an attempt to get the case classified as worker's comp and the lawsuit thrown out (she wasn't actually working at the time this all went down). They also put on a psychologist who said that the victim had "grown in some ways" as a result of the hoax. I'm guessing that the jury didn't much buy that line of reasoning.

There was also something in the papers about detectives hired by McDonalds that threatened and intimidated witnesses and that the state was considering criminal charges against the detective. I don't know if the jury heard about that or not.

So you have the company hiding the information of the prior cases as hard as they can, eventually rising to the point where they were sanctioned by the judge (this is not a minor deal), you have them admitting that they falsified her timesheet to try to get the case thrown out (had she been on the clock, she would have been limited to workers comp) and claiming that she was actually better off. Add to this a phalanx of lawyers presenting mixed messages and a small town jury looking to find someone to pay for what happened, and the verdict is a lot easier to understand. The jury was angry at McDonalds and it appears to me that they had pretty good reason to be.