Free Republic

Sometimes it pays to be fired ... a Kentucky man who claims he was canned after suffering a panic attack over an unwanted office birthday party sued and a jury awarded him $450,000! The jury awarded the loot to Kevin Berling ... who sued his employer for disability discrimination, claiming he was fired 10 months into his job over a birthday party gone wrong. In his suit, Berling claimed he told his office manager NOT to throw him a BD party because he suffers from an anxiety disorder and a celebration would trigger bad childhood memories of his parents' divorce....

A unanimous Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies in a legal dispute stemming from 2010, when a couple of bystanders were shot while the deputies searched for a wanted man in Lancaster. The justices overturned an award of $4 million in damages to the couple and ordered a lower court to take another look at whether the deputies could be held liable for the shooting. ... Angel wasn’t the suspect they were searching for, and it turned out he was carrying a BB gun. Deputies had been told before they entered the cluttered backyard that...

An evangelical Christian who said he was forced to retire from his job as a general laborer at Consol Energy/Consolidation Coal Co.'s mining operations in Mannington, West Virginia, for his religious beliefs was awarded $150,000 in compensatory damages last Thursday by a federal jury. Senior Judge Frederick P. Stamp Jr. is also expected to determine other compensation owed to the ex-employee, Beverly R. Butcher, at a later hearing, according to a report in The Exponent Telegram. The U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit on behalf of Butcher against Consol Energy in September 2013 after the company refused...

A Sacramento Superior Court jury today awarded the survivors of Jennifer Lea Strange $16,577,118 as a result of her death nearly three years ago in a water-drinking contest conducted by a local radio station. In making the award, the seven-man, five-woman panel voted unanimously to find that Entercom Sacramento LLC, the local subsidiary of Entercom Communications Corp. of Philadelphia was negligent in putting on the contest that ultimately resulted in Strange's death.......Strange, 28, died Jan. 12, 2007, after participating in what KDND "The End" 107.9 promoted as its "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest that promised the popular Nintendo...

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., May 18 — In one of the largest judgments in a child sexual abuse suit against the Roman Catholic Church, a Long Island jury on Friday awarded a total of $11.45 million in damages to a young man and woman who were repeatedly raped by a youth minister as teenagers starting in the late 1990s. The jury deliberated for seven days before finding that the Diocese of Rockville Centre, the sixth-largest in the United States; a church in East Meadow; and its pastor were negligent by hiring and retaining the man who abused the plaintiffs over a...

A New Jersey jury has assessed $105 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Aramark Corp., the nation's leading arena concessionaire, in the case of a girl paralyzed in a crash with a driver drunk on beer served at a Giants football game. The father of the victim says the award will make liquor vendors and arenas do a better job of enforcing their rules against selling alcohol to fans who appear to be intoxicated. The evidence in the case against Aramark showed the driver had consumed the equivalent of 16 12-ounce beers, mostly at Giants Stadium in the Hackensack...

Jury awards Sanger man $23.4 million DALLAS (AP) — A jury has awarded $31.1 million to a Sanger man who became paralyzed after being discharged from a Dallas hospital's emergency room with a broken neck. John Edward Millichamp III and his children sued Baylor University Medical Center, an emergency room doctor and a radiologist, saying Millichamp was a quadriplegic as a result of the hospital's negligence after a 1999 traffic accident. Jurors on Wednesday found that Millichamp's paralysis could have been prevented with proper testing. They awarded $23.4 for loss, pain and suffering, and added another $7.7 million in punitive...