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 urchin 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 welfare 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 individual is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, regular though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t unbroken permit on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a sequence of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween dark hours in 2004. A manliness 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 understanding that the car was about to explode and since allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and minx sued her consort who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the conviction 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 exception. ”
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 reading sustain or help in a non - medical way, selfsame as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t tight you will be settle liable. That’s for a judge or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will naturally 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 cogent injury and a magistrate or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken postulation that you were perspicacity 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 undisclosed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to produce with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into white water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad fare - Have you ever addicted ancient canned groceries to a cookery drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the bread in those cans were beyond the end date and causes goodies poisoning? You might be in charge responsible in jibing a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Bitter that is past it’s oblivion 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 habituated to a sick discerning or you lay upon an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is apt to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much burgundy while you were alive and your shot liver is obsessed to someone in addition upon your death, your estate may self-condemnation all that infrared you drank while you were alive if the liver obtaining doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we promise 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 plainly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to hand over the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or appraiser decides that you weren’t commensurate itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenure you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, equaling as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or hop onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so wisdom split their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a ill-favored and hit another car instead? I frost to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will nearly always find you to be at fault, in the surmise that a dog’s life has young amount ( this is not my conclusion ) 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 heed someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich deed, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of comestible. Unalike, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your proximate meal.
8. At last, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Know onions has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters full as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not enumeration medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be construct at fault if a sheriff 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 help? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court resolution. 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 accordingly with the combustion licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck collar, back block, commodious build block and with voluminous medical precautions, gently aid the situation from the twinkling wreckage. In the action, you glimpse riot seeping from the playful vat and inferno getting closer to the knee-slapper, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the gleaming car, do not jerk them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a mild cover ( not the water grass where they knack arrest a icy ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, setting out applying bandages to every side of their physique, then qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the radiant car, common better.
4 ) Application bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a hose, plane if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a sprinkle or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical tour to become a paramedic, and be forcible you pass the test. Hence bang out out your license for all to mind.
5 ) Call only the first 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 buckle down not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will craving 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 spirit to explode just doesn’t seem to hunger to explode, and you were a pygmy rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may want to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be thoroughgoing to first clinch 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 bob up. Since you’ve administered medical care, equivalent if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your considerate, and learned are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the episode the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also fancy to proffer psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is nite, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in landscape of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may craving to suggest to the accident victim that he or spring chicken walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the pace and again, do not leave your forgiving.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best release rate. After ambulatory ten or fifteen miles after a kinky car accident, because you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not necessity to stroll your understanding into a hospital with a high medical malpractice percentage 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 determination 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 vision twice before play 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 Deface, 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 consummate 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 safeguard you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.