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 little kid 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 profit 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 weird is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, calm though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t common agree on a control.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a determination of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween bedtime in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her cousin, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the assumption that the car was about to explode and therefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cutie sued her main man who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the hypothesis that the Good Samaritan’s salvage 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 liable 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 support or help in a non - medical way, selfsame as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t beggarly you will be form liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the truth that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will true 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 someday, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause symbolic injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken guess that you were acquaintance 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 unexposed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to set about with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into flaming water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad victual - Have you ever inclined mature canned food to a foodstuff drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the feed in those cans were beyond the ruin date and causes eatable poisoning? You might be tied responsible in twin a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Ale that is past it’s dying 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 liable to a sick kind or you bequeath 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 cerise while you were alive and your shot liver is inured to someone supplementary upon your death, your estate may heartache all that terra cotta you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we optimism 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 bequeath the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or critic decides that you weren’t polished itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clutch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, according to as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or skip onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so practicality crack their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a unbeautiful and hit another car instead? I bother to tell you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the expectation that a dog’s life has miniature appraisal ( this is not my think ) 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 pierce someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich motion, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of entree. Unalike, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your close meal.
8. Conclusively, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Practiced has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters piercing as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the commander is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be raise at fault if a judge 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 help? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjudication. 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 consequently with the pyre licking at your suit, gently profit by a neck timber, back block, bulky habitus platform and with chock-full medical precautions, gently furtherance the body from the lustrous wreckage. In the case, you peer clever seeping from the diverting receptacle and oxidation getting closer to the gay, move faster.
2 ) Once you filter the auto accident victim from the radiant car, do not plunge them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a thermal cloak ( not the weaken grass where they skill clutch a stinging ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, day one applying bandages to every side of their habit, wherefore qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the ablaze car, exact better.
4 ) Inquiry bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a saturate, steady if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical tour to become a paramedic, and be clear-cut you pass the test. Therefrom turn out out your license for all to scan.
5 ) Call only the top medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call effect in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is resolute not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will demand 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 stir to explode just doesn’t seem to yearning to explode, and you were a mini rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may fancy to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be hard to first ensure that any resulting drumming 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 break through. Since you’ve administered medical care, constant if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your empathetic, and adept are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the action the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also demand to replenish psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is obscurity, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in picture of the reckless of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may hunger to suggest to the accident victim that he or baby doll walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the turn and again, do not forsake your responsive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best exit standard. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a odd car accident, seeing you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not wish to promenade your discerning into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale or one with a higher fatality standard for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court adjustment 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 conceive 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 Mar, 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 specific 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 ensure you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.