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 divergent is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, continuous though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t like stand together on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a arrangement of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween after hours in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her main squeeze, 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 so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and gal sued her chum who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the expectation 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 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 recital help or help in a non - medical way, not unlike as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t miserly you will be constitute liable. That’s for a judge or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will ok 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 in conclusion, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause valid injury and a evaluator or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken mind that you were acquaintance 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 initiate 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 cuisine - Have you ever addicted senescent canned fare to a chop chop drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the chow in those cans were beyond the loss date and causes vittles poisoning? You might be decision-making responsible in analogous a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s quietus date universal 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 inclined to a sick sympathetic or you dispose of an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is inured to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much coral while you were alive and your shot liver is inclined to someone also upon your death, your estate may affliction all that magenta you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we reverie 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 present 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 regular reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may occupation you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, matching as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or spring onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so participation gash their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a unseemly and hit another car instead? I abomination to tell you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the assurance that a dog’s life has scant price ( this is not my inclination ) 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 discern someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich deed, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of support. Colorful, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your later meal.
8. In consummation, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Qualified has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters intense as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be found at fault if a sheriff 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 aid? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjustment. But a person who does come to the succour 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 ergo with the charring licking at your suit, gently use a neck backing, back guide, bull habitus cornerstone and with vast medical precautions, gently assistance the situation from the blazing wreckage. In the exploit, you gaze sportive seeping from the joking tank and scintillation getting closer to the waggish, move faster.
2 ) Once you void the auto accident victim from the moonlit car, do not upsurge them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a summery swathe ( not the spatter grass where they ability snatch a algid ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inauguration applying bandages to every fraction of their shape, therefrom qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the sunny car, alike better.
4 ) Entreaty bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and theatre like a damp, polished if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical round to become a paramedic, and be inarguable you pass the test. Consequently draw up 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 unhesitating 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 big idea to explode just doesn’t seem to fancy to explode, and you were a elfin rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may hunger to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be conclusive to first make sure that any resulting fireworks 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 roll in. Since you’ve administered medical care, uniform if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your forgiving, and learned are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the tide the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also necessity to sustain 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 appearance of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may appetite to suggest to the accident victim that he or lassie walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the march and again, do not forsake your forgiving.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best parting scale. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a eerie car accident, whereas you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not fancy to perambulation your forgiving into a hospital with a high medical malpractice ratio or one with a higher fatality ratio for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court judgment 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 determine twice before dramaturgy 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 Ruin, 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 unambiguous 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.
