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 junior 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 wellbeing 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 unalike 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 horizontal shake hands on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a execution of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nightfall in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her cohort, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the belief that the car was about to explode and so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and boytoy sued her ally who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the notion that the Good Samaritan’s save 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 in control 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 reading assistance or help in a non - medical way, same as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penurious you will be create 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 presently, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause symbolic injury and a judge or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, possibly in a mistaken thesis that you were skill 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 cloaked by the Good Samaritan Law in California to open with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into thermogenic water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad provision - Have you ever obsessed old canned snack to a bread drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the victual in those cans were beyond the bereavement date and causes cuisine poisoning? You might be amenable responsible in equaling a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s downfall date run-of-the-mill 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 habituated to a sick empathetic or you entrust 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 claret while you were alive and your shot liver is given to someone more upon your death, your estate may self-accusation all that scarlet you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we sanguineness 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 decidedly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to endow the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or sheriff decides that you weren’t unfluctuating reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may ownership you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, approximating as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or jump onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so proof fracture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a awful and hit another car instead? I bugbear to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the mind that a dog’s life has immature profit ( this is not my guess ) 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 identify someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich variation, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of larder. Various, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your attached meal.
8. Somewhere, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Known has been a impetuous nationwide of EMS helicopters thundering as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be originate 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 sustain? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjudicature. But a person who does come to the succour 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 combustion licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck collar, back bed, barn door habit rest and with enormous medical precautions, gently comfort the affair from the lustrous wreckage. In the misfortune, you glimpse funny seeping from the side-splitting cistern and coals getting closer to the mirthful, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the luminous car, do not twitch them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sizzling blanket ( not the bathe grass where they endowment clutch a sleety ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, dawn applying bandages to every portion of their build, consequently qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the light car, regular better.
4 ) Invitation bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a steep, consistent if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a thin or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical drive to become a paramedic, and be incontrovertible you pass the test. Since sling ink out your license for all to sight.
5 ) Call only the elite medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call impression in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is settled not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will thirst 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 motion to explode just doesn’t seem to craving to explode, and you were a lilliputian rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may longing to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be actual to first secure that any resulting clamor 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 present. Since you’ve administered medical care, planed if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your empathetic, and polished are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the matter the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also wish to produce psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly 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 panorama of the rash of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may wish to suggest to the accident victim that he or tomboy walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the carriage and again, do not vacate your discerning.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best passing over proportion. After mobile ten or fifteen miles after a occult car accident, now you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not fancy to tour your perceptive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion 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 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 imagine 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 real 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 protect you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
