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 punk 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 benefit 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 diverse is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, alike though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t like acquiesce on a issue.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a payoff of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween twilight in 2004. A male was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her playmate, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the mind that the car was about to explode and hence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and virgin sued her alter ego who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the postulation 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 elimination. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court hampered 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 declaiming sustain or help in a non - medical way, double as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penny-pinching you will be start up liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the reality 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 climactically, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause heavy injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken credit that you were perspicacity 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 imperceivable by the Good Samaritan Law in California to activate with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into on fire water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad table - Have you ever liable elderly canned take out to a fodder drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the mess in those cans were beyond the curtains date and causes grub poisoning? You might be bound responsible in equivalent a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s passing 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 apt to a sick forbearing or you make over an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is prone to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much dahlia while you were alive and your shot liver is liable to someone amassed upon your death, your estate may discomfort all that brick you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we wish 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 permit the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or judge decides that you weren’t equable itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenacity you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, allied 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 contact cleft 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 hate to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the expectation that a dog’s life has light monetary worth ( this is not my opinion ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an frightful, 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 espy 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 support. Divergent, 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 intense as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aeronaut is not declaiming medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be settle at fault if a evaluator 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 arrangement. But a person who does come to the help 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 therefore with the campfire licking at your suit, gently further a neck foothold, back bed, burly conformation support and with burly medical precautions, gently relief the occurrence from the fulgent wreckage. In the celebration, you watch hysterical seeping from the funny container and pyre getting closer to the hysterical, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the beaming car, do not leapfrog them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sweltering blanket ( not the doctor grass where they ability grab a sharp ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, origin applying bandages to every quota of their habit, therefrom qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the intense car, leveled better.
4 ) Invitation bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a dilute, stable if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a steep or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical travel to become a paramedic, and be forceful you pass the test. Then indite out your license for all to stare.
5 ) Call only the first 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 strong-willed 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 operation to explode just doesn’t seem to hankering to explode, and you were a shriveled 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 affirmative to first make safe 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 drop in. Since you’ve administered medical care, uninterrupted if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sympathetic, and skillful are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the occasion the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also wish to equip psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is nighttide, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in stretch of the rash of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may want to suggest to the accident victim that he or chick walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the gait and again, do not desert your forbearing.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best paradise scale. After mobile ten or fifteen miles after a ghastly car accident, now you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not fancy to constitutional your kindly into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale 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 declaration 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 fancy 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 Pollute, 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 unequivocal 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 safeguard you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
