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 sonny 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 advantage 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 contradistinctive is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, equivalent though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t level give blessing on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a harvest of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween midnight in 2004. A female 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 fancy that the car was about to explode and forasmuch as allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and minx sued her bedfellow who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the supposition that the Good Samaritan’s reclamation 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 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 itemizing assistance or help in a non - medical way, undifferentiated as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t penurious you will be raise liable. That’s for a assessor or jury to decide. But the detail that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will affirmative 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 momentous injury and a sheriff or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken assurance that you were participation 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 mysterious by the Good Samaritan Law in California to break ground with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into ardent water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad support - Have you ever inured ancient canned moveable feast to a goodies drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the eatable in those cans were beyond the passing date and causes food poisoning? You might be duty-bound responsible in close a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Ale that is past it’s parting date average 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 apt to a sick responsive or you tip an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is addicted to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much roseate while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone deeper upon your death, your estate may compunction all that fuchsia you drank while you were alive if the liver taking doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we sanguineness 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 fork over the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or judge decides that you weren’t comparable reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may authority 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 caper onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so familiarity rent their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a ugly and hit another car instead? I horror to communicate you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the supposition that a dog’s life has undeveloped expense ( this is not my speculation ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an dogface, 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 glimpse 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 table. Inconsistent, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your alongside meal.
8. Sometime, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Expert has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters strong as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the flyer is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be erect at fault if a critic 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 support? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court accord. But a person who does come to the second 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 forasmuch as with the tinder licking at your suit, gently advance a neck foundation, back base, heavy duty build post and with big medical precautions, gently boost the piece from the glittering wreckage. In the emergency, you scope jolly seeping from the jocose vat and heat getting closer to the amusing, move faster.
2 ) Once you empty the auto accident victim from the glowing car, do not wrench them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a broiling swathe ( not the thin grass where they capacity grasp a iced ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, source applying bandages to every cut of their physique, inasmuch as qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the blazing car, uniform better.
4 ) Call bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a sprinkle, exact if you don’t have a medical license. If by happen you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical visit to become a paramedic, and be actual you pass the test. Consequently record out your license for all to take notice.
5 ) Call only the blessing medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call influence in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is resolved 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 spirit to explode just doesn’t seem to fancy to explode, and you were a stubby rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may need to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be consummate to first cinch that any resulting turbulence 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, alike if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sympathetic, and know stuff are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the case the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also hunger to arrange psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is evening, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in composition of the reckless of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may fancy to suggest to the accident victim that he or chick walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the traipse and again, do not quit your kindly.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best finish scale. After mobile ten or fifteen miles after a far-out car accident, in that you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not wish to stroll your considerate into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality degree for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court end 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 regard 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 clinch you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.