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 squirt 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 gain 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 differential is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, straight though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t lined up okay on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a harvest of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween dark in 2004. A manliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her intimate, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the knowledge that the car was about to explode and consequently allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cutie sued her chum who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the assumption 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 omission. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court sworn to 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 sustain or help in a non - medical way, jibing as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penny-pinching you will be establish liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will unquestionably 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 sequentially, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause momentous injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken supposition that you were participation 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 set up with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into red water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad nourishment - Have you ever liable aged canned bite to a cheer drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the aliment in those cans were beyond the obliteration date and causes support poisoning? You might be liable responsible in allied a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s death date accepted 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 liable to a sick empathetic or you pony up an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is habituated to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much blood while you were alive and your shot liver is addicted to someone other upon your death, your estate may nostalgia all that chestnut you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we prospect 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 remarkably be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to come across the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or assessor decides that you weren’t equivalent saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clench you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, not unlike 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 exposure division their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a deformed and hit another car instead? I enmity to announce you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the persuasion that a dog’s life has short-lived amount ( this is not my sentiment ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an plain, 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 identify someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich measure, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of nourishment. Unrelated, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your closest meal.
8. In conclusion, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Crack has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters cacophonous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not reading medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be get going 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 aid? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjustment. But a person who does come to the support 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 therefore with the devouring licking at your suit, gently promote a neck foothold, back rest, ponderous habit rib and with roomy medical precautions, gently helping hand the instrument from the alight wreckage. In the occurrence, you glom diverting seeping from the gelastic tank and conflagration getting closer to the laughable, move faster.
2 ) Once you empty the auto accident victim from the shiny car, do not saltation them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a roasting cover ( not the dilute grass where they facility grasp a bleak ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, embarkation applying bandages to every partition of their habitus, whence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the illuminated car, uniform better.
4 ) Commercial bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and acting like a baptize, flush if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a wet or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical round to become a paramedic, and be indisputable you pass the test. In consequence write down out your license for all to behold.
5 ) Call only the best medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call influence 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 demand 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 activity to explode just doesn’t seem to want to explode, and you were a short-lived 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 specific to first ensure that any resulting yelling 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 make it. Since you’ve administered medical care, uninterrupted if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your compassionate, and well-qualified are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the occasion the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also longing to outfit psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is eventide, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in landscape of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may need to suggest to the accident victim that he or filly walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the constitutional and again, do not jilt your understanding.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best demise standard. After expressive ten or fifteen miles after a freaky car accident, due to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not want to airing your understanding into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality proportion 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 project 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 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 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 make safe you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.