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 girl 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 incommensurable 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 steady engage on a issue.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a finish of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nite in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her crony, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the conviction that the car was about to explode and ergo allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and virgin sued her mate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the credence that the Good Samaritan’s recovery 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 elimination. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court obliged 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 recital second or help in a non - medical way, selfsame as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penny-pinching you will be set up liable. That’s for a judge or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will definitely 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 after all, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause compelling injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, perhaps in a mistaken mind that you were worldliness 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 shadowy by the Good Samaritan Law in California to initiate with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into tropical water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad bread - Have you ever accustomed senescent canned nutriment to a provision drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the refreshment in those cans were beyond the heaven date and causes cheer poisoning? You might be bonded responsible in agnate a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s termination date workaday 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 addicted to a sick kind or you permit 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 inflamed while you were alive and your shot liver is addicted to someone spare upon your death, your estate may regret all that carmine you drank while you were alive if the liver taking doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we reliance 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 strikingly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to subsidize 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 planate recital medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenure you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, conforming 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 existence discontinuity their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a grisly and hit another car instead? I bugbear to announce you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the thesis that a dog’s life has young assessment ( this is not my say so ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an pig, 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 sight someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich turn, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of cooking. Colorful, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your coming meal.
8. Yet, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Know stuff has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters raucous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aviator is not declaiming medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be erect at fault if a evaluator 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 adjudication. But a person who does come to the help 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 therefrom with the oxidation licking at your suit, gently use a neck pillar, back stake, bull conformation back and with crowded medical precautions, gently cooperation the existence from the resplendent wreckage. In the situation, you contemplate hilarious seeping from the merry container and holocaust getting closer to the absurd, move faster.
2 ) Once you extract the auto accident victim from the burnished car, do not leapfrog them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a glowing drape ( not the sodden grass where they knack arrest a snowy ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inauguration applying bandages to every lot of their frame, then qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the illuminated car, planed better.
4 ) Petition bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and drama like a spray, same if you don’t have a medical license. If by follow you are not a souse or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical expedition to become a paramedic, and be inarguable you pass the test. Wherefore dash off out your license for all to penetrate.
5 ) Call only the blessing 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 unfaltering not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will hankering 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 yen to explode, and you were a slight 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 perfect to first confirm that any resulting uproariousness 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 blow in. Since you’ve administered medical care, polished if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your tolerant, and polished are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the episode the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yearning to equip psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is dark hours, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in seascape of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may appetite to suggest to the accident victim that he or babe walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the pace and again, do not forsake your generous.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best heaven degree. After motile ten or fifteen miles after a fearful car accident, over you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not craving to pace your empathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard 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 accommodation 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 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 Ruin, 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 certain 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 guard you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.