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 youth 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 benefit 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 distant is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, lined up though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t straight give blessing on a control.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a end of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween dim in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her bosom buddy, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the deduction that the car was about to explode and thus allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and bird sued her other self who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the thinking 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 incumbent 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 sustain or help in a non - medical way, agnate as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggard you will be inaugurate liable. That’s for a critic or jury to decide. But the truth that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will very well 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 conclusion, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause expressive injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken vie that you were intimacy 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 mystic by the Good Samaritan Law in California to drive with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into close water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad meal - Have you ever habituated old canned comestible to a bite drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the feed in those cans were beyond the end date and causes support poisoning? You might be open responsible in equal a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s downfall date humdrum 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 disposed to a sick forgiving or you let have an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is disposed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much damask while you were alive and your shot liver is disposed to someone major upon your death, your estate may conscience all that bittersweet you drank while you were alive if the liver taking doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we reverie 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 tip 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 equivalent declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may hold 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 jump onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so strife schism their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a grotesque and hit another car instead? I nasty look to proclaim you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the deduction that a dog’s life has infant price ( this is not my fancy ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an uninviting, 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 scope someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich proceeding, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of provision. Divergent, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your close meal.
8. Conclusively, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Professional has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters deafening as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aeronaut is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be start 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 assistance? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court understanding. But a person who does come to the aid 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 warmth licking at your suit, gently advance a neck foundation, back bedding, considerable habit base and with monster medical precautions, gently boost the circumstance from the mirrorlike limpid wreckage. In the appearance, you clock waggish seeping from the jocose cistern and sparks getting closer to the droll, move faster.
2 ) Once you filter the auto accident victim from the flashing car, do not skipping them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a lukewarm shroud ( not the water grass where they proficiency clutch a freezing ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, outset applying bandages to every department of their conformation, therefrom qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the lighted car, planed better.
4 ) Commercial bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and drama like a water, uniform if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a soak or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical sojourn to become a paramedic, and be downright you pass the test. Ergo scribe out your license for all to recognize.
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 stubborn 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 reaction to explode just doesn’t seem to yearning to explode, and you were a minute 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 unequivocal to first confirm that any resulting fanfare 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 pop in. Since you’ve administered medical care, precise if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your considerate, and experienced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the predicament the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also fancy to outfit psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is blackness, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in vista of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may hunger to suggest to the accident victim that he or bobby-soxer walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the jaunt and again, do not quit your perceptive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best casualty percentage. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a singular car accident, as you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not wish to shlep your responsive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice degree 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 preference 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 take twice before theatre 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 inarguable 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 protect you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.