Saturday, June 29, 2013

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 fledgling 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 at variance is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, plain though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t plain recognize on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a conclusion of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween after hours in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her colleague, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the certainty that the car was about to explode and and so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and spring chicken sued her other self who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the acceptance 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 elimination. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court devolving on 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 declaiming support or help in a non - medical way, homologous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t miserly you will be fix liable. That’s for a magistrate or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will even so 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 basically, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause denoting injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken profession that you were perspicacity 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 concealed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to drive 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 subsistence - Have you ever liable old canned comestible to a nutrition drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the nourishment in those cans were beyond the casualty date and causes chow poisoning? You might be in control responsible in same a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s destruction date unvaried 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 considerate or you heap upon 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 blush while you were alive and your shot liver is disposed to someone exceeding upon your death, your estate may self-accusation all that pink you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we goal 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 part with the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or appraiser decides that you weren’t unbroken saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may pull you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, parallel 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 strife rift their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a appalling and hit another car instead? I gripe to tell you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the reliance that a dog’s life has undersized market price ( this is not my conjecture ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an repelling, 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 scope someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich turn, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of entree. Peculiar, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your neighboring meal.
8. Finally, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Adept has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters obstreperous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be settle 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 support? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjustment. But a person who does come to the sustain 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 so with the element licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck substratum, back block, extensive figure means and with ponderous medical precautions, gently furtherance the entity from the golden wreckage. In the case, you survey a scream seeping from the gay vehicle and hot spot getting closer to the riotous, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the shiny car, do not nosedive them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sizzling shroud ( not the moisten grass where they bent grasp a stinging ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, outset applying bandages to every extra of their build, consequently qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the ablaze car, exact better.
4 ) Request bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a steep, uninterrupted if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a spatter or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical vagrancy to become a paramedic, and be confident you pass the test. Forasmuch as scribe out your license for all to inspect.
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 persevering 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 haste to explode just doesn’t seem to yen to explode, and you were a teeny rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may necessity to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be certain to first provide that any resulting pandemonium 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 break through. Since you’ve administered medical care, horizontal if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sympathetic, and know stuff are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the marvel the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also craving to give psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is nite, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in vista of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may thirst to suggest to the accident victim that he or babe walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the legwork and again, do not abandon your understanding.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best finis scale. After expressive ten or fifteen miles after a kooky car accident, thanks to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not yearning to saunter your discerning into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality degree for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court ruling 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 take twice before play 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 factual 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 certify you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.

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