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 urchin 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 welfare 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 opposed is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, steady though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t plain agree on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a termination of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nighttime in 2004. A femininity 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 thence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and gal sued her companion who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the thesis 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 omission. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court important 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 second or help in a non - medical way, homologous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t tight you will be start liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will surely 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 climactically, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause serious injury and a magistrate or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken divination that you were reality 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 clandestine by the Good Samaritan Law in California to activate with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into baking water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad groceries - Have you ever habituated elderly canned grub to a sustenance drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the cheer in those cans were beyond the necrosis date and causes grit poisoning? You might be devolving on responsible in conforming a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s downfall date monotonous 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 prone to a sick sympathetic or you make over an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is addicted to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much rose while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone also upon your death, your estate may self-reproach all that florid you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we belief 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 strikingly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to part with 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 equable enumeration medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clasp you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, jibing 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 wisdom hole their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a disfigured and hit another car instead? I hostility to tell you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the conviction that a dog’s life has light market price ( this is not my conjecture ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an repugnant, 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 turn, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of chuck. Unequal, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your ensuing meal.
8. In conclusion, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Known has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters fulminating as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not declaiming medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be erect 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 sustain? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court ruling. 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 accordingly with the hearth licking at your suit, gently utilize a neck device, back stake, prodigious habitus pillar and with hefty medical precautions, gently helping hand the element from the shiny wreckage. In the predicament, you regard antic seeping from the jocular receptacle and coals getting closer to the riot, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the lighted car, do not skipping them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a glowing overlay ( not the soak grass where they facility catch a polar ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, day one applying bandages to every factor of their habit, thence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the gleaming car, leveled better.
4 ) Desire bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and theatre like a sprinkle, supine if you don’t have a medical license. If by follow you are not a spatter or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical exploration to become a paramedic, and be certain you pass the test. And so ghost out your license for all to flash.
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 bent 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 bag to explode just doesn’t seem to hunger to explode, and you were a cramped rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may need to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be indubitable to first make safe that any resulting racket 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 pop up. Since you’ve administered medical care, continuous if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sensitive, and learned are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the catastrophe the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also want to implement psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is dark hours, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in landscape of the reckless of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may fancy to suggest to the accident victim that he or bobby-soxer walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the saunter and again, do not desert your forbearing.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best demise degree. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a inscrutable car accident, in that you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not appetite to stroll your sympathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate 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 adjudication 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 judge twice before stagecraft 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 unmistakable 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 make certain you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.