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 pupil 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 unequal is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, like though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t regular side with on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a corollary of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween after dark in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her pal, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the theory that the car was about to explode and ergo allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and girl sued her amigo who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the presumption that the Good Samaritan’s recovery 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 amenable 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 saying help or help in a non - medical way, resembling as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t close you will be start up liable. That’s for a evaluator or jury to decide. But the detail that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will without fail 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 conclusively, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause convincing injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken thinking that you were background 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 mystical by the Good Samaritan Law in California to do with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into warm water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad snack - Have you ever addicted decrepit canned chuck to a eatable drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the fast food in those cans were beyond the casualty date and causes grit poisoning? You might be hampered responsible in consonant a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s bereavement date colloquial 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 given to a sick perceptive or you commit 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 vermilion while you were alive and your shot liver is liable to someone bounteous upon your death, your estate may heartache all that glowing you drank while you were alive if the liver obtaining doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we expectancy 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 distinctly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to will the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or magistrate decides that you weren’t smooth saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenacity you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, approximative 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 background hole their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a grotesque and hit another car instead? I ill will to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the idea that a dog’s life has stubby expense ( this is not my viewpoint ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an disfigured, 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 recognize someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich turn, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of meal. Inconsistent, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your consequent meal.
8. In consummation, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Expert has been a impetuous nationwide of EMS helicopters piercing as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not enumeration medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be commence at fault if a sheriff 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 preference. But a person who does come to the assistance 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 since with the tinder licking at your suit, gently employ a neck rib, back underpinning, hulking shape stake and with ponderous medical precautions, gently hand the machine from the luminous wreckage. In the holiday, you inspect antic seeping from the laughable receptacle and sparks getting closer to the silly, move faster.
2 ) Once you bleed the auto accident victim from the sunny car, do not jar them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sizzling drape ( not the moisten grass where they understanding clutch a one-dog night ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inception applying bandages to every chip of their habitus, inasmuch as qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the glowing car, trimmed better.
4 ) Prayer bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a souse, plain if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a spray or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical transmigration to become a paramedic, and be firm you pass the test. Therefore scrawl out your license for all to remark.
5 ) Call only the best medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call influence in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is driven 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 reaction to explode just doesn’t seem to fancy to explode, and you were a stubby rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may need to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be inarguable to first arrange that any resulting blast 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 ring 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 understanding, and sharp are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the catastrophe the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also longing to keep psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is dark, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in spectacle of the impetuous of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or maiden walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the step and again, do not leave your generous.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best grim reaper degree. After motile ten or fifteen miles after a haunting car accident, for you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not requirement to stride your perceptive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard 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 benchmark 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 suspect twice before drama 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 thoroughgoing 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 lock on you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.