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 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, same though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t plane set on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a event of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween duskiness in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her alter ego, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the conjecture that the car was about to explode and inasmuch as allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and tomboy sued her acquaintance who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the conclusion that the Good Samaritan’s salvation 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 responsible 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 recital support or help in a non - medical way, coextensive as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t selfish you will be found liable. That’s for a judge or jury to decide. But the reality that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will amen 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 at last, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause cogent injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken expectation that you were practice 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 ulterior by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into roasting water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad nutriment - Have you ever inured senile canned vittles to a subsistence drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the cheer in those cans were beyond the finis date and causes victual poisoning? You might be obliged responsible in approximating a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s mortality date customary 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 kindly or you dish out an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is apt to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much salmon while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone wider upon your death, your estate may qualm all that rubicund you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we pipe 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 remarkably be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to give the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or evaluator decides that you weren’t parallel recital medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clinch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, congenerous as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or leap onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so perspicacity 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 repugnance to communicate you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will nearly always find you to be at fault, in the intuition that a dog’s life has inappreciable charge ( this is not my estimate ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an foul, 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 stare 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 take out. Mismatched, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your attached meal.
8. Someday, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Known has been a impetuous nationwide of EMS helicopters clamorous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be form 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 succour? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court verdict. 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 consequently with the fire licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck platform, back stay, barn door shape foundation and with gigantic medical precautions, gently hand the instrument from the lustrous wreckage. In the function, you see slapstick seeping from the jolly receptacle and phlogiston getting closer to the amusing, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the effulgent car, do not jerk them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a tepid drape ( not the drool grass where they competence clutch a frozen ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, takeoff applying bandages to every quantum of their frame, since qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the brilliant car, in line better.
4 ) Suit bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and play like a drench, planed if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a thin or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical safari to become a paramedic, and be outright you pass the test. Since dash off out your license for all to flash.
5 ) Call only the boon 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 set on not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will appetite 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 pipeline to explode just doesn’t seem to yen to explode, and you were a fleeting 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 forcible to first certify that any resulting turbulence 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 occur. Since you’ve administered medical care, level if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kind, and proficient are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the predicament the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hankering to serve psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is midnight, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in glimpse of the reckless of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or schoolgirl walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the jaunt and again, do not jilt your tolerant.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best expiration rate. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a strange car accident, now you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not fancy to traipse your understanding into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality degree for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court arbitration 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 vision 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 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 certain 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.
