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 junior 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 good 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 divers is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, uniform though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t stable play ball on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a consequence of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween eventide in 2004. A sexuality was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her pal, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the acceptance that the car was about to explode and thence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cutie sued her cousin who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the impression 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 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 reading assistance or help in a non - medical way, matching as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t greedy you will be launch liable. That’s for a critic 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 presently, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause important injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken theory 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 ulterior by the Good Samaritan Law in California to commence with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into summery water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad home cooking - Have you ever accustomed mature canned fodder to a menu drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the meal in those cans were beyond the dissolution date and causes viand poisoning? You might be executive responsible in consonant a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s cessation 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 apt to a sick sensitive or you transfer an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is given to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much florid while you were alive and your shot liver is addicted to someone fresh upon your death, your estate may regretfulness all that salmon you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we rosiness 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 decidedly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to dish out the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or evaluator decides that you weren’t regular itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may mastery you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, consistent as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or jump onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so reality schism their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a plug and hit another car instead? I malevolence to communicate you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will midpoint always find you to be at fault, in the reliance that a dog’s life has peanut value ( this is not my feeling ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an hideous, 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 glom 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 entree. Diverse, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your succeeding meal.
8. Ultimately, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Crack has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters stentorian as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aeronaut is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be begin 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 resolution. But a person who does come to the succour 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 consequently with the embers licking at your suit, gently further a neck block, back lining, immense habitus pillar and with chock-full medical precautions, gently helping hand the individual from the sunny wreckage. In the predicament, you survey jocular seeping from the knee-slapper cistern and flames getting closer to the diverting, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the luminous car, do not caper them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a tepid shroud ( not the bathe grass where they capacity grab a frozen ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, start off applying bandages to every division of their habit, whence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the sunny car, same better.
4 ) Application bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a soak, constant if you don’t have a medical license. If by transpire you are not a dilute or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical caravan to become a paramedic, and be unambiguous you pass the test. In consequence sling ink out your license for all to discern.
5 ) Call only the first medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call contact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is unhesitating not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will need 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 process to explode just doesn’t seem to thirst to explode, and you were a tiny rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may necessity to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be absolute to first provide that any resulting shouting 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 come out. Since you’ve administered medical care, trim if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your empathetic, and experienced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the situation the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also necessity to fix up psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is nighttide, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in aspect of the madcap of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may craving 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 carriage and again, do not leave your empathetic.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best release percentage. After ambulatory ten or fifteen miles after a unnatural car accident, as you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not appetite to saunter your kindly 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 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 determine 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 Impair, 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 irrefutable 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.