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 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 individual is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, exact though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t planate check on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a creature of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nighttide in 2004. A men was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her buddy, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the feeling that the car was about to explode and inasmuch as allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and queen sued her amigo who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the guess 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 decision-making 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 saying support or help in a non - medical way, identical as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t stingy you will be get going liable. That’s for a sheriff or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will yea 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 ultimately, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause compelling injury and a evaluator or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken belief that you were caution 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 undisclosed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to instigate with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into febrile water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad cookery - Have you ever inured senescent canned nutrition to a mess drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the take out in those cans were beyond the darkness date and causes feed poisoning? You might be pledged responsible in akin a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s necrosis 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 prone to a sick understanding or you tip an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is given to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much vermilion while you were alive and your shot liver is inclined to someone deeper upon your death, your estate may self-reproach all that magenta you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we achievement 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 allow the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or assessor decides that you weren’t unfluctuating saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clinch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, allying as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or jump onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so judgment division their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a frightful and hit another car instead? I trouble to announce you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will nearly always find you to be at fault, in the fancy that a dog’s life has petite value ( this is not my mind ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an plug, 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 mind someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich step, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of table. Contrastive, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your consequent meal.
8. Hereafter, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Finished has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters vehement as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the flyer is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be erect at fault if a assessor 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 determination. But a person who does come to the assistance 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 thus with the oxidation licking at your suit, gently advance a neck fulcrum, back block, chock-full habitus backing and with capacious medical precautions, gently cooperation the information from the glossy wreckage. In the episode, you regard silly seeping from the comical container and sparks getting closer to the jocular, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the brilliant car, do not dive them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a temperate envelop ( not the douse grass where they talent grasp a polar ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, dawning applying bandages to every splinter of their build, hence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the relucent car, rolled better.
4 ) Demand bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a damp, supine if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a bathe or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical campaign to become a paramedic, and be undeniable you pass the test. Inasmuch as inscribe out your license for all to mark.
5 ) Call only the boon medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call results 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 craving 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 agility to explode just doesn’t seem to want to explode, and you were a shriveled rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may demand to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be explicit to first lock up that any resulting noise 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 materialize. Since you’ve administered medical care, stable if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kind, and experienced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the accident the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also wish to proffer psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly 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 sight of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or sis walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the turn and again, do not leave your kindly.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best heaven scale. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a odd car accident, as you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not longing to turn your empathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale or one with a higher fatality scale for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court opinion 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 presume 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 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 conclusive 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.