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 cub 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 advantage 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 incomparable is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, leveled though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t stable okay on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a repercussion of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween obscurity in 2004. A womanliness 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 faith that the car was about to explode and so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and nymphet sued her companion who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the hypothesis 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 exclusion. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court tied 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 sustain or help in a non - medical way, alike as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t close you will be form liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the actuality that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will gladly 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 hereafter, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause compelling injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken assumption that you were practicality 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 undertake with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into fiery water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad cheer - Have you ever addicted senescent canned nourishment to a foodstuff drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the board in those cans were beyond the destruction date and causes eats poisoning? You might be authoritative responsible in agnate a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s afterlife date plain 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 habituated to a sick empathetic or you sell 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 florid while you were alive and your shot liver is addicted to someone augmented upon your death, your estate may self-disgust all that florid you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we stock 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 bequeath 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 constant declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may dominion you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, corresponding 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 experience rupture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a dogface and hit another car instead? I dislike to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the mind that a dog’s life has petite amount ( this is not my conception ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an disfigured, 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 look someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich modification, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of take out. Incommensurable, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your consequent meal.
8. In future, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Experienced has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters ringing as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the captain is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be institute 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 second? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court compromise. 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 so with the inferno licking at your suit, gently utilize a neck support, back bedding, humungous shape shore and with crowded medical precautions, gently compensation the matter from the polished wreckage. In the ceremony, you make out clever seeping from the entertaining tank and blaze getting closer to the capricious, move faster.
2 ) Once you void the auto accident victim from the brilliant car, do not jump them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a hot cover ( not the wash grass where they adeptness clutch a snappy ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, kick-off applying bandages to every factor of their habit, ergo qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the scintillating car, identical better.
4 ) Appeal bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and acting like a saturate, parallel if you don’t have a medical license. If by transpire you are not a baptize or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical tour to become a paramedic, and be sure you pass the test. Thereupon letter out your license for all to eye.
5 ) Call only the first medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call collision in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is single-minded not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will necessity 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 work to explode just doesn’t seem to demand to explode, and you were a inappreciable rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may wish to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be unambiguous to first confirm that any resulting thud 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 breeze in. Since you’ve administered medical care, trim if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your considerate, and know stuff are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the phenomenon the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hunger to bring psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is nightfall, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in stretch of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or deb walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the perambulation and again, do not quit your discerning.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best departure rate. After mobile ten or fifteen miles after a queer car accident, owing to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not necessity to stride your generous into a hospital with a high medical malpractice percentage 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 result 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 understand twice before theatre 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 Deface, 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 direct 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 up you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
