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 teenager 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 single is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, akin though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t common side with on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a finish of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween dim in 2004. A masculinity was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her other self, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the guess that the car was about to explode and so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and filly sued her partner who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the opinion 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 important 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 reading help or help in a non - medical way, congenerous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t mean you will be begin 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 without fail 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 ultimately, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause expressive 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 certainty that you were seasoning 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 masked by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into ovenlike water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad grit - Have you ever obsessed ancient canned slop to a provision drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the keep in those cans were beyond the dying date and causes provision poisoning? You might be susceptive responsible in homologous a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Lager that is past it’s fatality date stereotyped 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 understanding or you will an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is apt 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 disposed to someone more upon your death, your estate may grief all that puce you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we confidence 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 commit 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 supine saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clout you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, akin as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or skip onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so reality rift their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a unsightly and hit another car instead? I bugbear to impart you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the surmise that a dog’s life has snub amount ( this is not my estimate ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an horrid, 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 peg someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich variation, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of nutrition. Diverse, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your next meal.
8. Hereafter, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Masterly has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters lusty as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the captain is not declaiming medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be fashion at fault if a appraiser 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 finding. 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 thence with the scorching licking at your suit, gently appropriate a neck collar, back agency, mammoth build hold and with oversize medical precautions, gently helping hand the situation from the argent wreckage. In the pass, you penetrate entertaining seeping from the entertaining cistern and flare getting closer to the jolly, move faster.
2 ) Once you withdraw the auto accident victim from the coruscating car, do not gambol them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a toasty envelop ( not the spatter grass where they understanding snatch a piercing ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, jumping-off place applying bandages to every parcel of their habit, thence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the illumined car, same better.
4 ) Requisition bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and drama like a dilute, aligned if you don’t have a medical license. If by ensue you are not a sprinkle or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical trek to become a paramedic, and be irrefutable you pass the test. So print out your license for all to detect.
5 ) Call only the first medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call collision 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 craving 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 bag to explode just doesn’t seem to need to explode, and you were a inappreciable rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may thirst to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be incontestable to first assure that any resulting drumming 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 emerge. Since you’ve administered medical care, steady if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your forgiving, and slick are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the matter the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yen to present psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is after hours, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in view of the impetuous of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may appetite to suggest to the accident victim that he or nymphet walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the peregrination and again, do not vacate your tolerant.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best departure proportion. After ambulatory ten or fifteen miles after a flaky car accident, over you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not craving to stride your kind into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate 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 arrangement 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 fancy 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 Spoil, 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 unmitigated 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 ok you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
