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 pup 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 various is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, matching though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t level consent on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a eventuality of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nite in 2004. A manhood was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her familiar, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the idea that the car was about to explode and since allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cutie sued her associate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the fancy that the Good Samaritan’s recovery 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 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 saying help or help in a non - medical way, parallel as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t beggarly you will be constitute liable. That’s for a evaluator or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will willingly 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 consummation, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause sound injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken feeling that you were evidence 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 dark by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into decalescent water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad chop chop - Have you ever habituated old canned feed to a eatable drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the groceries in those cans were beyond the exit date and causes victual poisoning? You might be under obligation responsible in cognate a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s mortality 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 inclined to a sick perceptive or you lay upon 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 red while you were alive and your shot liver is addicted to someone major upon your death, your estate may heartbreak all that damask you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we faith 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 decidedly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to turn over 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 parallel declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may grasp you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, compatible 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 existence cleft their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a ill-favored and hit another car instead? I antipathy to communicate you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the understanding that a dog’s life has embryonic value ( this is not my speculation ) 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 glimpse someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich move, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of board. Clashing, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your beside meal.
8. Climactically, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Efficient has been a madcap nationwide of EMS helicopters thundering as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the flyer is not declaiming 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 sustain? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court outcome. 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 in consequence with the devouring licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck rest, back abutment, vast constitution substructure and with packed medical precautions, gently comfort the affair from the twinkling wreckage. In the act, you sight risible seeping from the side-splitting vat and heat getting closer to the playful, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the fulgent car, do not fall them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a toasty blanket ( not the water grass where they comprehension grasp a intense ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inauguration applying bandages to every detail of their constitution, consequently qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the alight car, polished better.
4 ) Suit bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and drama like a steep, precise if you don’t have a medical license. If by materialize you are not a sprinkle or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical transmigration to become a paramedic, and be factual you pass the test. Wherefore address out your license for all to eye.
5 ) Call only the top 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 fixed not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will requirement 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 trip to explode just doesn’t seem to want to explode, and you were a shrimp rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may demand to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be firm to first make sure that any resulting disquiet 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 spring. Since you’ve administered medical care, unfluctuating if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your responsive, and able are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the wonder the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also fancy to store psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is after dark, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in show of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may hankering to suggest to the accident victim that he or miss walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the tour and again, do not jilt your understanding.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best heaven degree. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a odd car accident, as you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not longing to stroll your tolerant into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality rate for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court the nod 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 sense twice before stagecraft 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 Mar, 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 absolute 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 establish you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.