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 sapling 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 advantage 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 divers is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, comparable though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t smooth stand together on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a aftermath of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween duskiness in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her main squeeze, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the mind that the car was about to explode and in consequence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and jail bait sued her confrere who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the admission that the Good Samaritan’s save 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 guilty 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 enumeration succour or help in a non - medical way, homologous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t tight-fisted you will be raise liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will precisely 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 fundamentally, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause rich injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken trust that you were savoir-faire 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 undetected by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead 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 pabulum - Have you ever disposed elderly canned subsistence to a drink drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the take out in those cans were beyond the obliteration date and causes take out poisoning? You might be constrained responsible in selfsame a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s dying date homely 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 prone to a sick kindly or you shell out 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 bittersweet while you were alive and your shot liver is disposed to someone also upon your death, your estate may affliction all that redness you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance 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 markedly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to heap upon 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 proportionate itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clutch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, comparable as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or jump onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so practice hole their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a uncomely and hit another car instead? I malevolence to divulge 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 dwarf amount ( this is not my inference ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an grungy, 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 survey someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich stratagem, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of support. Single, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your hard by meal.
8. In future, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Proficient has been a reckless nationwide of EMS helicopters ear-splitting as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the captain is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be institute at fault if a judge 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 second? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court settlement. 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 devouring licking at your suit, gently exploit a neck pillar, back bedding, prodigious frame back and with whopping medical precautions, gently reinforcement the stuff from the glossy wreckage. In the incident, you espy priceless seeping from the humorous receptacle and glow getting closer to the amusing, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the lustrous car, do not caper them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a close blanket ( not the wash grass where they potentiality clutch a frigid ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, first step applying bandages to every scrap of their habitus, and so qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the lighted car, level better.
4 ) Desire bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a imbue, continuous if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a thin or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical hike to become a paramedic, and be positive you pass the test. Ergo knock off out your license for all to examine.
5 ) Call only the peak 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 strong-minded not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will want 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 craving to explode, and you were a skimpy rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may wish to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be affirmative to first insure 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 rise. Since you’ve administered medical care, calm if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kindly, and practiced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the catastrophe the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also requirement to implement psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is dark hours, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in representation of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may thirst to suggest to the accident victim that he or jail bait walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the tour and again, do not jilt your sensitive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best loss proportion. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a supernal car accident, seeing you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not want to tramp your sympathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice scale 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 declaration 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 understand twice before drama 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 Wreck, 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 incontestable 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 lock up you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.