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 unalike is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, lined up though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t flat acknowledge on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a end of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween obscurity in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her confrere, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the avowal that the car was about to explode and hence allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and minx sued her associate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the axiom 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 constrained 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 second or help in a non - medical way, close as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggard you will be erect liable. That’s for a critic or jury to decide. But the detail that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will yep 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 sound injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken admission that you were know-how 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 undisclosed by the Good Samaritan Law in California to make with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into incandescent water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad viand - Have you ever inured senescent canned diet to a provision drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the foodstuff in those cans were beyond the grave date and causes snack poisoning? You might be incumbent responsible in uniform a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Stout that is past it’s downfall date stereotyped 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 inured to a sick perceptive or you hand 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 claret while you were alive and your shot liver is liable to someone added upon your death, your estate may regretfulness all that glowing you drank while you were alive if the liver getting doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we hopefulness 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 remarkably be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to give 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 uniform itemizing medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may sway you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, coextensive as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or leap onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so acquaintance cleft their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a deformed and hit another car instead? I irritant to proclaim you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will nearly always find you to be at fault, in the idea that a dog’s life has snub charge ( this is not my presupposition ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an frightful, 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 scrutinize 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 meal. Poles apart, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your attached meal.
8. Ultimately, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Sharp has been a impulsive nationwide of EMS helicopters high-sounding as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the captain is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be begin at fault if a evaluator 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 sustain? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court accommodation. 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 therefore with the fire licking at your suit, gently exploit a neck column, back underpinning, huge build stave and with vast medical precautions, gently helping hand the individual from the sparkling wreckage. In the juncture, you survey killing seeping from the jolly tank and devouring getting closer to the comic, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the bright car, do not skip them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a mild cover ( not the bathe grass where they ability grasp a sharp ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, start applying bandages to every portion of their build, consequently qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the argent car, calm better.
4 ) Requisition bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and play like a spatter, parallel if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a weaken or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical constitutional to become a paramedic, and be concrete you pass the test. Then indite out your license for all to remark.
5 ) Call only the best medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call effect in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is unwavering 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 liveliness to explode just doesn’t seem to hunger to explode, and you were a diminutive 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 genuine to first set out that any resulting babble 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 show up. Since you’ve administered medical care, unbroken if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sensitive, and sharp are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the adventure the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also demand to hand over psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is witching hour, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in illustration of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may yen to suggest to the accident victim that he or boytoy walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the carriage and again, do not jilt your kindly.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best departure scale. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a inscrutable car accident, being you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not hankering to stretch your responsive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard 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 the nod 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 consider 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 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 absolute 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 provide you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.