It goes to little Dominica Juliano of Erie, Pennsylvania -- from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Girl claims injuries from price scanner
An Erie County jury has been asked to decide whether a 12-year-old girl was burned and later developed psychological problems when a convenience store clerk allegedly aimed a hand-held price scanner at her face.
Dominica Juliano was 12 when she and her grandmother entered the Country Fair store in Erie in June 2004.
A clerk allegedly called the girl "grumpy" before flashing his hand-held bar code scanner over her face and telling her to smile.
Attorneys for Ms. Juliano and her guardian say the girl was sensitive to light and burned, and later developed post-traumatic stress and Tourette's syndrome.
An attorney for the store says the scanner uses a harmless LED light and that the child had serious health problems before the incident. The trial began Monday.
Any scientist, any engineer, any 12-year-old electronics hobbyist would be able to call bullshit in a mater of moments and be able to cite the reasons. I could see the potential of a burn if it used UV LEDs and ran several tens of watts but the few hundred milliwatts of visible red will do nothing.
The lights of some scanners pulse and that could be scary to a kid being raised in a household that didn't assign any value to science, education or even just plain thinking.
I have bad skin and when I am stressed out, I can get patches of rash -- little Dominica is probably suffering from something like this.
If Dominica's guardian knows that she is sensitive to light, WTF was she doing outside. The radiation from the sun is millions of times more potent than the few hundred milliwatts of an LED.
It is a shame to be teaching the kid to become a professional victim and it is even more a shame for the lawyers to buy into such a patently bogus case.
