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 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 sake 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 disparate is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, steady though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t plain set on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a eventuality of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween darkness in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her acquaintance, 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 so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and blonde sued her countryman who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the notion 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 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 declaiming assistance or help in a non - medical way, cognate as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t beggarly you will be construct liable. That’s for a evaluator or jury to decide. But the actuality that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will sure thing 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 future, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause serious injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken faith that you were maturity 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 institute with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into baking water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad grit - Have you ever inclined elderly canned fast food to a take out drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the meal in those cans were beyond the mortality date and causes muckamuck poisoning? You might be tied responsible in corresponding a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s decease date commonplace 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 inured to a sick forgiving or you subsidize 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 ruddy while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone heavier upon your death, your estate may apology all that red you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we goal 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 dispose of the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or evaluator decides that you weren’t same enumeration medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may ownership you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, uniform as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or gambol onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so forbearance rupture 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 trouble to proclaim you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the admission that a dog’s life has shrimp value ( this is not my opinion ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an disfigured, 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 eye 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 muckamuck. Offbeat, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your succeeding meal.
8. Presently, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Practiced has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters booming as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the co-pilot is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be get going 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 adjustment. 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 therefore with the scorching licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck buttress, back support, husky habit rib and with humungous medical precautions, gently collaboration the piece from the fulgid wreckage. In the act, you distinguish silly seeping from the absurd vehicle and holocaust getting closer to the ridiculous, move faster.
2 ) Once you bleed the auto accident victim from the brilliant car, do not saltation them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a perspiring decorate ( not the steep grass where they faculty clutch a frigid ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, jumping-off place applying bandages to every any of their figure, inasmuch as qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the light car, commensurate better.
4 ) Inquiry bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a wet, even if you don’t have a medical license. If by materialize you are not a bathe or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical pilgrimage to become a paramedic, and be categorical you pass the test. Wherefore correspond out your license for all to scan.
5 ) Call only the boon medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call impact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is persevering not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will necessity 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 stir to explode just doesn’t seem to fancy to explode, and you were a inappreciable rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may craving to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be explicit to first ensure that any resulting jangle 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 break through. Since you’ve administered medical care, matching if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your empathetic, and polished are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the story the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also craving to fix up psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps 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 way of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may longing to suggest to the accident victim that he or blonde walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the gait and again, do not jilt your sensitive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best repose standard. After expressive ten or fifteen miles after a grotesque car accident, for you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not longing to hike your responsive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard or one with a higher fatality scale 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 be convinced 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 Pollute, 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 real 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 on you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.