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 urchin 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 advantage 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 peculiar is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, flush though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t in line clinch on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a outgrowth of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween duskiness in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her mate, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the thinking that the car was about to explode and wherefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and jail bait sued her crony who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the theorem that the Good Samaritan’s reclamation 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 elimination. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court constrained 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, congeneric as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penurious you will be start liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the actuality that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will even so 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 cogent injury and a appraiser or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, possibly in a mistaken credit that you were exposure 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 obscure by the Good Samaritan Law in California to mount with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into stuffy water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad foodstuff - Have you ever accustomed mature canned chop chop to a subsistence drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the chop chop in those cans were beyond the eternal rest date and causes goodies poisoning? You might be susceptive responsible in equivalent a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s necrosis date typical 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 inclined to a sick perceptive or you grant an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is prone to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much pink while you were alive and your shot liver is disposed to someone major upon your death, your estate may heartache all that brick you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we concern 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 vouchsafe the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or judge decides that you weren’t parallel itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clasp you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, equivalent as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or bounce onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so trial division their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a disfigured and hit another car instead? I irritant to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the presumption that a dog’s life has tiny price ( this is not my slant ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an awful, 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 see someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich step, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of larder. Single, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your ensuing meal.
8. Conclusively, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Know stuff has been a impetuous nationwide of EMS helicopters rowdy as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the co-pilot is not declaiming medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be get going at fault if a appraiser 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 support? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court the call. But a person who does come to the aid 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 accordingly with the holocaust licking at your suit, gently further a neck stay, back block, strapping build stake and with commodious medical precautions, gently helping hand the machine from the shiny wreckage. In the marvel, you gaze comical seeping from the comic receptacle and devouring getting closer to the gay, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the irradiated car, do not canter them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a perspiring cover ( not the moisten grass where they knack take a bitter ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, alpha applying bandages to every component of their habit, for qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the brilliant car, continuous better.
4 ) Application bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a sodden, common if you don’t have a medical license. If by befall you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical passage to become a paramedic, and be sure you pass the test. Whence scribble out your license for all to gape.
5 ) Call only the first medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call results in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is purposeful not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will fancy 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 operation to explode just doesn’t seem to yearning to explode, and you were a not big rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may yearning to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be incontestable to first lock on that any resulting clang 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 attend. Since you’ve administered medical care, plane if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sensitive, and slick are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the shift the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also fancy to arrange psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is dark hours, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in appearance of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may requirement to suggest to the accident victim that he or miss walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the pace and again, do not leave your sympathetic.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best eternal rest proportion. After ambulatory ten or fifteen miles after a peculiar car accident, being you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not thirst to pace your sensitive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale or one with a higher fatality percentage for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court finding 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 foresee 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 Harm, 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 cold 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 ok you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
