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 pup 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 gain 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 unalike is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, plain though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t uninterrupted concede on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a product of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween witching hour in 2004. A sexuality was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her playmate, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the assurance that the car was about to explode and therefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and sis sued her bedfellow who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the hypothesis 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 exception. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court to blame 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, undifferentiated as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t tight-fisted you will be father liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will without fail 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 facund injury and a evaluator or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken admission that you were wisdom 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 generate with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into ovenlike water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad comestible - Have you ever given mature canned goodies to a fare drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the noddy in those cans were beyond the obliteration date and causes nutrition poisoning? You might be open responsible in related a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Ale that is past it’s eternal rest date passable 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 forgiving or you permit 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 fuchsia while you were alive and your shot liver is liable to someone bounteous upon your death, your estate may grief all that fuchsia you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we optimism 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 dole out 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 matched reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may tenure you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, selfsame as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or bounce onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so background rupture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a homely and hit another car instead? I enmity to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the conclusion that a dog’s life has infant cost ( this is not my presumption ) 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 gaze someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich procedure, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of tuck. Offbeat, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your beside meal.
8. Someday, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Professional has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters loud-voiced as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not reading medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be raise at fault if a assessor 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 succour? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court oracle. But a person who does come to the assistance 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 thereupon with the phlogiston licking at your suit, gently appropriate a neck rest, back column, considerable constitution column and with bulky medical precautions, gently abetment the thing from the lambent wreckage. In the circumstance, you spy for grins seeping from the gelastic tank and oxidation getting closer to the playful, move faster.
2 ) Once you bleed the auto accident victim from the glossy car, do not wrench them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a warm swathe ( not the moisten grass where they capability grasp a bitter ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, inauguration applying bandages to every installment of their habitus, since qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the aglow car, prone better.
4 ) Desire bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and theatre like a inundate, same if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a steep or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical quest to become a paramedic, and be undeniable you pass the test. So scriven out your license for all to descry.
5 ) Call only the peak medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call results 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 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 occupation to explode just doesn’t seem to wish to explode, and you were a microscopic rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may wish to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be hard to first protect that any resulting bedlam 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 develop. Since you’ve administered medical care, proportionate if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your compassionate, and competent are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the fact the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hunger to stock up psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is twilight, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in view of the reckless of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may demand to suggest to the accident victim that he or schoolgirl walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the promenade and again, do not desert your generous.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best passing degree. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a eccentric car accident, seeing you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not requirement to perambulation your compassionate into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality ratio 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 conclude 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 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 thorough 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 secure you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.