Frontier Airlines passenger Sean Miller is suing after being severely burned on a flight from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Philadelphia in September. He says that third degree burns and ongoing injuries are the result of spilling hot tea on his lap – disfiguring his penis.

He claims that a flight attendant handed him a cup of tea filled to the brim at an “unsafely and unreasonably high temperature” without a lid. He accidentally spilled the tea onto his groin area, and he argues that the tight seating configuration on Frontier prevented him from standing up to address the spill, leaving him trapped in “agonizing pain.”

Upon landing in Philadelphia, emergency medical responders met Miller and transported him to a hospital burn center. Despite treatment, he now has permanent discoloration and scarring on his penis and scrotum, significantly decreased sensation, and long-term sexual dysfunction. And he claims to suffer PTSD, self-esteem, and ongoing embarrassment. Then there’s the herniated disc and nerve damage from writhing in pain while unable to move. He is seeking $150,000 in damages.

Maybe this happened because Frontier Airlines planes just aren’t flown as smoothly as a luxury sedan drives?

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And of course this makes me think of the mohel in season 4, episode 10 of L.A. Law (“The Pay’s Lousy, But the Tips Are Great”) who performed a bris and said “oops.”

It’s especially on-point because of the theory in mitigation that the religious victim wouldn’t have sex until marriage, and would marry someone who was themselves a virgin, and therefore she wouldn’t have anything to compare the damage to! So unlike the Frontier victim, no ongoing embarrassment!

On the other hand, chuckle as though we might, this is probably most like the woman who sued McDonalds and won $2.7 million after spilling a cup of coffee in her own lap. It became an exhibit in how we desperately needed tort reform. And yet the judgment made a lot of sense to anyone who actually went and learned the facts of the case.

Stella Liebeck didn’t actually get $2.7 million. She wound up with $480,000. But the original verdict was for (very real) medical expenses and two days of coffee sales for McDonalds as a way of saying the fast food chain needed to change its behavior.

And they did! They stopped serving coffee at a temperature that immediately caused third degree burns. By dialing it back to 158 °F there’s 60 seconds – or enough time to react to a spill and avoid burns.

Leibeck wasn’t driving. The vehicle was stopped. She removed the coffee lid to add cream and sugar. The coffee spill caused extensive burns to her legs and groin. She needed skin grafts.

McDonald’s at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport

McDonald’s had received hundreds of documented complaints about the dangerous temperature at which they were serving coffee, and they conceded it was at a temperature where it couldn’t be consumed immediately. The jury found McDonald’s negligent.

Complaints about tort law are usually that judgments are too punitive against companies, not that they aren’t punitive enough. Lawsuits are frequently more effective than legislators and regulators in generating changed behavior, and companies have a harder time lobbying jury vedicts than capturing the latter. Stella Liebec deserved her tort judgment against McDonalds. Does this passenger similarly deserve one against Frontier?