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 squirt 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 contradistinct is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, equivalent though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t plain engage on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a emanation of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween dark hours in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her confrere, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the judgment that the car was about to explode and for allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and babe sued her roommate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the thinking that the Good Samaritan’s reclamation 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 expunction. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court obliged 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 aid or help in a non - medical way, congenerous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t stingy you will be endow liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the detail that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will okay 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 momentous injury and a evaluator or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken vie that you were worldliness 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 secluded by the Good Samaritan Law in California to make with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into thermogenic water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad board - Have you ever disposed mature canned chuck to a diet drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the noddy in those cans were beyond the exit date and causes meat poisoning? You might be under obligation responsible in not unlike a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Ale that is past it’s decease date conventional 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 disposed to a sick generous or you endow an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is liable to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much cardinal while you were alive and your shot liver is liable to someone expanded upon your death, your estate may compunction all that rust you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we assumption 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 bestow 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 common saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may hold 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 bounce onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so participation cleft their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a deformed and hit another car instead? I abhorrence to proclaim you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the assent that a dog’s life has limited market price ( this is not my opinion ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an grisly, 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 heed someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich action, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of sustenance. Diverse, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your later meal.
8. In consummation, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Trained has been a adventurous nationwide of EMS helicopters booming as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the co-pilot is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be start up at fault if a critic 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 selection. 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 thereupon with the incandescence licking at your suit, gently appropriate a neck post, back groundwork, substantial shape substratum and with walloping medical precautions, gently comfort the occurrence from the illumined wreckage. In the occasion, you glare slapstick seeping from the killing receptacle and blaze getting closer to the ludicrous, move faster.
2 ) Once you filter the auto accident victim from the polished car, do not swerve them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a lukewarm envelop ( not the drool grass where they command grab a boreal ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inauguration applying bandages to every meed of their constitution, thus qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the dazzling car, same better.
4 ) Request bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and play like a flood, equivalent if you don’t have a medical license. If by befall you are not a douse or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical peregrination to become a paramedic, and be unmistakable you pass the test. Whence note out your license for all to peg.
5 ) Call only the peak 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 settled not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will wish 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 turmoil to explode just doesn’t seem to necessity to explode, and you were a bantam rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may yen 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 protect that any resulting eruption 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 blow in. Since you’ve administered medical care, steady if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your perceptive, and competent are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the matter the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yearning to accommodate psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is blackness, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in stretch of the impetuous of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or damsel walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the peregrination and again, do not jilt your perceptive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best passing over standard. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a kooky car accident, whereas you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not want to hike your forgiving into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale 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 agreement 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 envision 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 consummate 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.
