The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit weighed in today in the case of a sheriff's deputy who claims severe emotional trauma after two ex-cons working the drive-thru at a Burger King added an extra ingredient during his late-night burger break.
Suspecting the fast-food employees were ex-cons, Washington state Deputy Edward J. Bylsma pulled off the road, removed the burger bun to his Whopper and found a “slimy” white glob of phlegm atop the meat patty.
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Bylsma claims–hmmm–he inserted his finger into the glob and, horrified, called for backup and launched a crime-lab investigation.
Result?
DNA testings showed the glob originally belonged to the throat of ex-con/burger flipper Gary Herb. The sheriff's department arrested him for “felony assault.” After a guilty plea, Herb won a 90-day jail term and was fired from his job.
But
Bylsma wasn't satisfied. Even though he never took a bite of the nasty
burger, he claims that merely seeing the phlegm has given him a form of
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), including–according to
court records–“ongoing emotional trauma from the incident, vomiting,
nausea, food anxiety and sleeplessness.” He's even seeking professional
mental-health treatment.
Bylsma took Burger King to federal court
seeking financial damages under the theory that even though he didn't
consume the defective product and suffered no physical injury, he is
still entitled to win “mental-distress damages.”
A U.S. District judge
rejected the claim.
But today the Ninth Circuit–the powerful
judicial body that rules over Orange County and California, as well as
several other western states–considered the issues and punted. The
federal panel decided it's hesitant to expand product liability law on its
own.
The justices asked the Washington Supreme Court to answer this question:
“Does
the Washington Product Liability Act permit relief for emotional-distress damages, in the absence of physical injury, caused to the
direct purchaser by being served and touching, but not consuming, a
contaminated food product?”
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.