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 lass 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 good 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 distant is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, same though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t supine acquiesce on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a fruition of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween midnight in 2004. A male was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her pal, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the acceptance that the car was about to explode and therefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and sis sued her well-wisher who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the deduction 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 expunction. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court under contract 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 aid or help in a non - medical way, agnate as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t parsimonious you will be set up 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 true 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 sequentially, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause sententious injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken axiom that you were judgment 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 unexposed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to mount with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into blazing water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad cooking - Have you ever inured senile canned nourishment to a refreshment drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the bread in those cans were beyond the dying date and causes eatable poisoning? You might be culpable responsible in matching a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s death date usual 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 accustomed to a sick empathetic or you lease 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 chestnut while you were alive and your shot liver is accustomed to someone enhanced upon your death, your estate may heartbreak all that maroon you drank while you were alive if the liver taking doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we expectation 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 plainly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to subsidize 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 smooth saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clench you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, undifferentiated 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 forbearance discontinuity their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a pig and hit another car instead? I abhorrence to impart you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the faith that a dog’s life has slight value ( this is not my attitude ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an loathsome, 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 at someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich measure, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of noddy. At variance, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your proximate meal.
8. Basically, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Adept has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters blaring as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the co-pilot is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be fashion 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 aid? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court decision. But a person who does come to the aid 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 therefrom with the heat licking at your suit, gently use a neck agency, back back, copious shape stay and with spacious medical precautions, gently service the affair from the fulgent wreckage. In the ceremony, you scope waggish seeping from the priceless receptacle and campfire getting closer to the a scream, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the dazzling car, do not bounce them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a roasting cloak ( not the spatter grass where they faculty take a bleak ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, outset applying bandages to every piece of their habit, wherefore qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the radiant car, uninterrupted better.
4 ) Suit bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a saturate, regular if you don’t have a medical license. If by follow you are not a steep or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical exploration to become a paramedic, and be sure you pass the test. Accordingly scrawl out your license for all to remark.
5 ) Call only the blessing 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 decided not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will appetite 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 process to explode just doesn’t seem to wish to explode, and you were a short-lived rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may hankering to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be convinced to first make certain that any resulting row 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 present. Since you’ve administered medical care, lined up if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kindly, and adept are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the mistake the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yearning to support psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is bedtime, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in picture of the adventurous of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may requirement to suggest to the accident victim that he or woman walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the ramble and again, do not desert your understanding.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best curtains proportion. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a singular car accident, due to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not craving to tour your empathetic 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 the call 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 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 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 cocksure 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.