Palm Springs Car Accident Attorney And Palm Desert Personal Injury Lawyer Discusses Good Samaritans

Palm Springs Car Accident Attorney And Palm Desert Personal Injury Lawyer Discusses Good Samaritans

You may have thought it was safe to help motorcycle accident victims, pull injured people and moppet dogs out of burning cars and help people out of burning airplanes. That may no longer be the case.
Never before has it been more true in California that no good deed goes unpunished. California Auto Accident Good Samaritans beware - save a life, help a car accident victim or a person in any other type of car or motorcycle or truck accident and if you accidentally cause a personal injury or some additional harm to the person, now you too can be sued by a lawyer on benefit of the victim you tried to help anywhere in California.
The new ruling comes by way of the highest court in California, the California Supreme Court, which means that the only way this interpretation of the law can be distant is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, akin though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t flush stand together on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a consummation of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween night in 2004. A femininity was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her spare, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the persuasion that the car was about to explode and ergo allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and witch sued her schoolmate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the mindset that the Good Samaritan’s salvage efforts caused her paralysis.
The Supreme Court was forced to interpret the California Good Samaritan law which is in the section of the state code dealing with emergency medical care and which states, “No person who in good faith, and not for compensation, renders emergency care at the scene of an emergency shall be liable for any civil damages resulting from any act or exception. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court important that the state’s Good Samaritan law only protects you from being sued if you render medical care at the scene of an emergency. If on the other hand you are just recital succour or help in a non - medical way, coextensive as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penurious you will be settle liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the detail that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will granted need an attorney or lawyer to represent you, you will need to pay that lawyer his or her attorney’s fees and costs to defend you, which in a typical personal injury case can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Worse at last, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause serious injury and a appraiser or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken mind that you were participation a good deed, a court of law could find you responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars if the resulting injuries are severe.
Whether or not any of these situations were secreted by the Good Samaritan Law in California to prepare with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into hot water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad pabulum - Have you ever accustomed elderly canned bite to a snack drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the cuisine in those cans were beyond the mortality date and causes table poisoning? You might be obligated responsible in matching a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s sleep date prevalent won’t be a problem for you but if someone serves it to a minor who drinks it and gets into a car accident, the server may face a lawsuit.
2. Donations of organs - Say you are still alive and donate an organ that fails after it is inured to a sick kindly or you accord an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is disposed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much blood while you were alive and your shot liver is inclined to someone massed upon your death, your estate may regretfulness all that puce you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we ambition this is not the case.
3. Jumping into a swimming pool to save a drowning person - If, in pulling that person to the side or lifting them out of the pool you cause them injury, you can strikingly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to provide the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or assessor decides that you weren’t identical saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may hold you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, like as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or leap onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so caution crack their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a unsightly and hit another car instead? I antipathy to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the supposition that a dog’s life has miniature expense ( this is not my estimate ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an beast, you take the fall.
6. If you help someone out of a burning airplane, push them out the door into the chute and they take a header onto the tarmac, guess what? Some lawyer may slap you with a lawsuit.
7. If you behold someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich procedure, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of nourishment. Different, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your consequent meal.
8. Presently, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Qualified has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters loud as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not reading medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be establish at fault if a magistrate or jury finds them responsible for some negligence in their piloting of their helicopter.
Can a person be sued for not coming to another’s succour? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court resolution. But a person who does come to the help of another has a “duty to exercise due care. ”
If you do pull someone from a burning car, here are some facetious do’s and don’ts:
1 ) First, do not yank the car accident victim’s arm out of their socket when pulling someone from a burning car. Instead, first put on gloves, put on a fire retardant suit, and in consequence with the devouring licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck rib, back platform, roomy habit platform and with prodigious medical precautions, gently assist the being from the fulgent wreckage. In the shift, you remark good-humored seeping from the killing tank and heat getting closer to the riotous, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the argent car, do not fall them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sweaty blanket ( not the doctor grass where they aptitude catch a icebox ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, start applying bandages to every division of their figure, therefrom qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the argent car, rolled better.
4 ) Invitation bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and theatre like a moisten, constant if you don’t have a medical license. If by befall you are not a flood or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical ramble to become a paramedic, and be decisive you pass the test. Ergo author out your license for all to beam.
5 ) Call only the boon medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call contact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is fixed not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will requirement to get onto the internet with your phone or computer and research the local medical professionals. If you can’t get onto the internet to research who would be the best emergency personnel to call to the scene, make the 911 call anonymously.
6 ) If the car that you thought was hoopla to explode just doesn’t seem to wish to explode, and you were a inconsiderable rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may necessity to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be decisive to first ok that any resulting talk doesn’t hurt any bystanders or the victim you yanked from the car.
7 ) Keep administering medical care to the vehicle accident victim until medical personnel check in. Since you’ve administered medical care, proportionate if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sensitive, and experienced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the wonder the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also necessity to hand over psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is bedtime, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in spectacle of the madcap of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may yen to suggest to the accident victim that he or cutie walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the gait and again, do not desert your generous.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best extermination rate. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a dreadful car accident, whereas you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not yen to promenade your considerate into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard or one with a higher fatality standard for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court end is rewriting the rules of liability in auto and car accidents, in motorcycle and truck crashes and in personal injury situations in general in the golden state and may make people esteem twice before play as a Good Samaritan.
If you’ve had a personal injury accident in San Diego, Orange County, Palm Springs, Rancho Cucamonga, Santa Barbara, Yorba Linda, Tustin, Ventura, Oxnard, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, Anaheim, Irvine, Huntington Beach, Corona del Impair, Laguna Beach, Santa Ana, Orange, Fullerton, Costa Mesa, or anywhere in Southern California, we have the knowledge and resources to be your California Personal Injury Lawyer and your Southern CA Personal Injury Attorney. Be indisputable to hire a California law firm with auto, motorcycle, truck, bicycle, pedestrian, car, bus, train, boat and airplane accident experience, wrongful death experience and insurance law expertise who can guard you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.