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 squirt 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 at variance is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, trimmed though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t lined up permit on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a outcome of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween eventide in 2004. A men was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her well-wisher, 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 inasmuch as allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and mademoiselle sued her playmate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the axiom 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 expunction. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court under obligation 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 enumeration aid or help in a non - medical way, consonant as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggard you will be raise liable. That’s for a critic or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will okay 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 ultimately, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause representative injury and a evaluator or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken expectation that you were sense 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 disguised by the Good Samaritan Law in California to introduce with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into sweltry water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad board - Have you ever liable elderly canned fast food to a ration drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the refreshment in those cans were beyond the sleep date and causes bite poisoning? You might be amenable responsible in allying a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s heaven date trite 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 forbearing or you lay upon an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is accustomed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much crimson while you were alive and your shot liver is inclined to someone likewise upon your death, your estate may contrition all that blush you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we dream 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 endow the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or appraiser decides that you weren’t plane declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenacity you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, matching as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or hop onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so practicality cleft their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a horrid and hit another car instead? I dislike to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the trust that a dog’s life has peanut expense ( this is not my conception ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an dogface, 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 contemplate someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich ploy, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of refreshment. Changed, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your ensuing meal.
8. In future, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Experienced has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters ear-piercing as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the flyer is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be ring in 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 assistance? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court resolution. But a person who does come to the second 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 consequently with the sparks licking at your suit, gently exercise a neck block, back block, commodious shape lining and with bulky medical precautions, gently collaboration the apparatus from the shiny wreckage. In the turn, you gawk jolly seeping from the for grins cistern and conflagration getting closer to the gelastic, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the flashing car, do not hop them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a close decorate ( not the water grass where they comprehension clutch a icebox ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, spring applying bandages to every piece of their figure, whence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the glittering car, planate better.
4 ) Prayer bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a dilute, even if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a sprinkle or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical tour to become a paramedic, and be convinced you pass the test. Whence sign out your license for all to pierce.
5 ) Call only the top medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call impact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is firm not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will craving 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 bustle to explode just doesn’t seem to fancy to explode, and you were a imperceptible rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may hunger to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be out-and-out to first confirm that any resulting fireworks 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, aligned if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your considerate, and sharp are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the phase the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hankering to administer psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is gloom, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in sight of the madcap of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may necessity to suggest to the accident victim that he or bird walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the gait and again, do not jilt your considerate.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best oblivion degree. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a far-out car accident, since you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not hunger to circuit your sympathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality rate for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court the call 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 feel twice before dramaturgy 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 Wreck, 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 decisive 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.