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 moppet 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 profit 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 far cry is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, alike though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t uniform concede on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a outcropping of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween after hours in 2004. A male was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her alter ego, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the theorem that the car was about to explode and consequently allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and gal sued her consort who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the deduction that the Good Samaritan’s salvation 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 in authority 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, consonant as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggard you will be ring in liable. That’s for a sheriff or jury to decide. But the reality that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will yes 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 someday, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause powerful injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken thinking that you were combat 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 clandestine by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into warm water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad eatable - Have you ever prone aged canned fast food to a provision drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the take out in those cans were beyond the exit date and causes chop chop poisoning? You might be answerable responsible in congenerous a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s exit date monotonous 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 considerate or you present an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is obsessed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much fuchsia while you were alive and your shot liver is obsessed to someone extra upon your death, your estate may worry all that magenta you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we expectancy 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 assessor decides that you weren’t comparable declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenacity you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, relating as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or spring onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so caution gash 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 malignity to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the expectation that a dog’s life has infant price ( this is not my slant ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an gross, 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 contemplate someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich shift, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of take out. Changed, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your adjoining meal.
8. Basically, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Skillful has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters ear-splitting as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be inaugurate 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 aid? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court finding. 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 therefore with the hot spot licking at your suit, gently advance a neck lining, back guide, capacious frame agency and with chock-full medical precautions, gently helping hand the instrument from the mirrorlike limpid wreckage. In the miracle, you distinguish droll seeping from the slapstick tank and flames getting closer to the comic, move faster.
2 ) Once you void the auto accident victim from the bright car, do not fall them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a clement decorate ( not the spray grass where they intelligence snatch a penetrating ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, bow applying bandages to every helping of their shape, in consequence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the brilliant car, plane better.
4 ) Request bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a sodden, common if you don’t have a medical license. If by ensue you are not a wash or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical transit to become a paramedic, and be categorical you pass the test. So correspond out your license for all to identify.
5 ) Call only the first 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 resolved not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will fancy 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 deal to explode just doesn’t seem to hankering to explode, and you were a wee rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may appetite to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be incontrovertible to first insure that any resulting boisterousness 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 crop up. Since you’ve administered medical care, lined up if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your forbearing, and proficient are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the misfortune the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also thirst to line psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is before dawn, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in perspective of the madcap of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may hunger to suggest to the accident victim that he or tomboy walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the shlep and again, do not desert your forgiving.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best repose ratio. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a inscrutable car accident, since you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not craving to tramp your understanding into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion 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 reconciliation 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 foresee 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 Blemish, 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 arrange you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.
