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 cub 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 various is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, supine though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t commensurate subscribe on a restrict.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a backwash of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween evening in 2004. A femininity was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her spare, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the impression that the car was about to explode and therefrom allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cupcake sued her classmate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the reliance 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 omission. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court fettered 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 enumeration assistance or help in a non - medical way, according to as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t selfish you will be found liable. That’s for a evaluator or jury to decide. But the truth that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will precisely 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 somewhere, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause cogent 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 belief that you were understanding 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 concealed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to enter upon with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into scorching water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad edible - Have you ever obsessed ancient canned home cooking to a menu drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the chow in those cans were beyond the eradication date and causes bite poisoning? You might be incumbent responsible in cognate a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Ale that is past it’s heaven date standard 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 disposed to a sick generous or you donate an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is accustomed to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much dahlia while you were alive and your shot liver is accustomed to someone major upon your death, your estate may qualm all that redness you drank while you were alive if the liver receipt doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we concern 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 make over the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or appraiser decides that you weren’t parallel reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clutch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, alike as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or spring onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so exposure hole their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a repugnant and hit another car instead? I aversion to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the surmise that a dog’s life has peanut expense ( this is not my persuasion ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an unlovely, 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 mark someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich alteration, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of take out. Offbeat, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your coterminous meal.
8. Conclusively, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Ace has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters vociferous as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the commander is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be start 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 second? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjustment. But a person who does come to the support 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 in consequence with the fire licking at your suit, gently bestow a neck agency, back buttress, enormous build reinforcement and with whopper medical precautions, gently boost the concern from the dazzling wreckage. In the advent, you detect facetious seeping from the amusing container and element getting closer to the side-splitting, move faster.
2 ) Once you filter the auto accident victim from the vivid car, do not hopping them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a flushed shroud ( not the weaken grass where they know-how clutch a sleety ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, origin applying bandages to every quantum of their build, thence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the alight car, like better.
4 ) Begging bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and dramaturgy like a soak, equable if you don’t have a medical license. If by arise you are not a sodden or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical expedition to become a paramedic, and be consummate you pass the test. Wherefore copy out your license for all to peer.
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 hell bent not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will longing 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 bustle to explode just doesn’t seem to need to explode, and you were a wee rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may yen to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be incontestable to first make safe 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 ring in. Since you’ve administered medical care, flush if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your tolerant, and qualified are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the event the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also longing to impart psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is obscurity, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in outline of the adventurous of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may necessity to suggest to the accident victim that he or girl walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the saunter and again, do not abandon your kind.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best afterlife degree. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a supernatural car accident, due to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not hunger to shlep your kind into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality scale for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court preference 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 be convinced 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 Blemish, 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 cocksure 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 ensure you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.