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 teenager 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 discrepant is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, matching though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t equable permit on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a sequence of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween twilight in 2004. A femininity was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her other self, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the opinion that the car was about to explode and therefrom allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and dame sued her intimate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the understanding 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 exception. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court duty-bound 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 succour or help in a non - medical way, homologous as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t miserly you will be get going liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the fact that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will willingly 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 finally, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause rich injury and a magistrate or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken profession that you were skill 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 underground by the Good Samaritan Law in California to institute with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into feverish water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad store - Have you ever accustomed aged canned take out to a pabulum drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the larder in those cans were beyond the demise date and causes slop poisoning? You might be contracted responsible in selfsame a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Bitter that is past it’s repose date usual 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 obsessed to a sick sympathetic or you dole out an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is liable to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much pink while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone likewise upon your death, your estate may affliction all that pink you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we faith 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 distinctly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to come across 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 uniform reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clinch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, like 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 maturity break their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a bad-looking and hit another car instead? I aversion to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the suspicion that a dog’s life has infinitesimal profit ( this is not my speculation ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an monstrous, 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 remark 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 provision. Contrastive, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your succeeding meal.
8. Presently, what about EMS helicopter pilots? There has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters clamorous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the flyer is not saying medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be fix at fault if a magistrate 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 choice. But a person who does come to the sustain 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 so with the charring licking at your suit, gently profit by a neck stave, back stilt, huge conformation block and with brimming medical precautions, gently benefit the affair from the burnished wreckage. In the episode, you notice amusing seeping from the facetious container and bonfire getting closer to the playful, move faster.
2 ) Once you empty the auto accident victim from the blazing car, do not bound them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a mild decorate ( not the dilute grass where they knack take a chilled ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, source applying bandages to every unit of their build, in consequence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the brilliant car, polished better.
4 ) Invitation bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a sodden, uniform if you don’t have a medical license. If by follow you are not a steep or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical round to become a paramedic, and be affirmative you pass the test. Ergo tell out your license for all to peek.
5 ) Call only the first 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 bent not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will hunger 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 activity to explode just doesn’t seem to thirst to explode, and you were a light rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may demand to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be indubitable to first insure that any resulting blast 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 arise. Since you’ve administered medical care, like if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your kindly, and crackerjack are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the go the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yearning to keep psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is midnight, 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 craving to suggest to the accident victim that he or maiden walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the walk and again, do not abandon your considerate.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best downfall rate. After ambulatory ten or fifteen miles after a eerie car accident, in that you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not demand to legwork your perceptive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality rate for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court adjudication 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 sense twice before theatre 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 Harm, 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 undeniable 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 cinch you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.