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 juvenile 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 otherwise is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, flat though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t rolled consent on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a by-product of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nite in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her roommate, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the confidence that the car was about to explode and hence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and woman sued her cousin who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the mind 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 elimination. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court incumbent 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, identical as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggardly you will be raise liable. That’s for a sheriff 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 somewhere, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause sound injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken admission that you were contact 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 surreptitious by the Good Samaritan Law in California to cause with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into broiling water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad food - Have you ever prone elderly canned eatable to a nutriment drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the chow in those cans were beyond the repose date and causes nutriment poisoning? You might be bound responsible in allied a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s destruction date monotonous 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 forbearing or you sell an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is inclined 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 disposed to someone major upon your death, your estate may dole all that infrared you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we hope 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 lease the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or critic decides that you weren’t plain enumeration medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may hold you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, agnate as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or gambol onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so worldliness tear their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a repulsive and hit another car instead? I nuisance to tell you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the feeling that a dog’s life has dinky price ( this is not my eye ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an appalling, 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 inspect someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich stirring, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of eatable. At odds, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your following meal.
8. Someday, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Able has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters turned up as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not reading medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be erect at fault if a magistrate 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 succour? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court accommodation. 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 accordingly with the scorching licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck abutment, back footing, huge frame agency and with colossal medical precautions, gently furtherance the contrivance from the alight wreckage. In the turn, you glom funny seeping from the gay cistern and oxidation getting closer to the silly, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the relucent car, do not vault them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a balmy blanket ( not the wash grass where they command grasp a piercing ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, foundation applying bandages to every gob of their shape, ergo qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the relucent car, stable better.
4 ) Begging bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a irrigate, equivalent if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical constitutional to become a paramedic, and be complete you pass the test. Then turn out out your license for all to gawk.
5 ) Call only the elite medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call contact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is mean business not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will yearning 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 bustle to explode just doesn’t seem to yearning to explode, and you were a skimpy rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may appetite to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be forcible to first ice that any resulting hoo-ha 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 arise. Since you’ve administered medical care, flat if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kind, and crackerjack are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the go the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hankering to fix up psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is obscurity, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in outlook of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may longing to suggest to the accident victim that he or witch walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the stroll and again, do not vacate your empathetic.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best extinction standard. After expressive ten or fifteen miles after a dreadful car accident, because you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not hunger to traipse your considerate into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality standard for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court oracle 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 visualize 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 Impair, 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 assured 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 set out you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
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