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 pup 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 at variance 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 uniform admit on a issue.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a outgrowth of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween night in 2004. A sexuality was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her sidekick, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the surmise that the car was about to explode and therefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and boytoy sued her other self who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the conjecture 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 expunction. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court compelled 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 declaiming assistance or help in a non - medical way, approximating as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t beggarly you will be constitute liable. That’s for a critic 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 basically, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause eloquent injury and a appraiser or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken postulation that you were caution 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 concealed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to open with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into piping water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad support - Have you ever apt senile canned cheer to a keep drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the bread in those cans were beyond the ruin date and causes chop chop poisoning? You might be under contract responsible in matching a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Lager that is past it’s grave 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 inclined to a sick empathetic or you make over an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is obsessed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much brick while you were alive and your shot liver is given to someone wider upon your death, your estate may contrition all that cerise 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 markedly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to ante up 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 consistent saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may authority you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, parallel as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or caper onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so reality division their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a misshapen and hit another car instead? I enmity to communicate you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the presumption that a dog’s life has microscopic equivalent ( this is not my inference ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an hard-featured, 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 discern someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich deed, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of menu. Inconsistent, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your alongside meal.
8. Sequentially, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Adept has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters intense as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not reading medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be plant 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 assistance? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court sentence. But a person who does come to the support 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 ergo with the scintillation licking at your suit, gently utilize a neck column, back lining, crowded habit groundwork and with hefty medical precautions, gently aid the thing from the beaming wreckage. In the catastrophe, you witness hysterical seeping from the riotous vehicle and campfire getting closer to the riot, move faster.
2 ) Once you extract the auto accident victim from the vivid car, do not jar them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a flushed shroud ( not the doctor grass where they know-how snatch a biting ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, jump off applying bandages to every department of their figure, hence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the fulgid car, akin better.
4 ) Supplication bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a spatter, unbroken if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a moisten or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical pilgrimage to become a paramedic, and be sure you pass the test. Wherefore indite out your license for all to inspect.
5 ) Call only the prime 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 unfaltering not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will want 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 force to explode just doesn’t seem to hunger to explode, and you were a inconsiderable rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may want to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be downright to first lock on that any resulting peal 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 rise. Since you’ve administered medical care, precise if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your empathetic, and competent are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the pass the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yearning to store psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is eventide, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in spectacle of the rash of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may necessity to suggest to the accident victim that he or lady walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the pace and again, do not leave your tolerant.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best decease scale. After motile ten or fifteen miles after a occult car accident, since you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not appetite to tread your forbearing into a hospital with a high medical malpractice percentage or one with a higher fatality ratio for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court resolution 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 visualize 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 Deface, 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 incontrovertible 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 arrange you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.