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Friday, September 07, 2007

Courts - "McDonald's sanctioned in strip-search case"

Remember the case in Indiana where a man posing as a radio disc jockey tricked other men into disrobing? See this June 23rd ILB entry titled "Court overturns conviction in disc jockey charade" for background.

Apparently someone or several people have done the same sort of thing up to 44 times at various McDonald's restaurants, according to a story today by Andrew Wolfson in the Louisville Courier Journal. Some quotes:

A judge has sanctioned McDonald's Corp. for withholding evidence in a lawsuit by a former employee who was the victim of a strip-search hoax at its Mount Washington store in 2004.

Senior Judge Tom McDonald [ILB - apparently no relation] said Wednesday that the company either engaged in "plausible deniability" or deliberately "hid the ball from the court, opposing counsel and its own lawyers" when it failed to disclose at least four prior hoaxes at other McDonald's restaurants around the country.

Noting that the company had been sued in three of the incidents, McDonald said: "it is inconceivable to the court how somebody could not know of cases in which they were sued."

Judge McDonald ordered the company to pay discovery costs for plaintiff Louise Ogborn, whose suit is scheduled to go to trial Monday in Bullitt Circuit Court. He also gave McDonald's 48 hours to disclose all information about 44 previous hoaxes at its restaurants before the incident at the Mount Washington store in April 2004.

As part of the sanction, McDonald ordered the company to also surrender material that would normally be protected by attorney-client privilege. He said he could have imposed more severe penalties, including striking the company's answer to Ogborn's lawsuit, which would allow her to win by default. * * *

Issuing the sanction from the bench, McDonald noted that in May he ordered the restaurant company to make an exhaustive search of its records and to check with its franchise stores. He said it wasn't until last month that McDonald's acknowledged the four additional hoaxes.

Ogborn, was 18 and working at the Mount Washington restaurant when she was detained and directed to remove her clothes by managers after a caller pretending to be a police officer accused her of stealing a purse from a customer. A man called in by an assistant manager to watch her forced her to do calisthenics in the nude and to perform oral sex on him, at the behest of the caller.

The incident finally came to an end 3½ hours later when a maintenance man realized the call was a hoax.

This sentence the ILB found of particular interest: "As part of the sanction, McDonald ordered the company to also surrender material that would normally be protected by attorney-client privilege."

See also this entry from the Kentucky Law Blog.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 7, 2007 01:38 PM
Posted to Courts in general