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 young adult 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 interest 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 peculiar is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, unbroken though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t proportionate shake on on a distribute.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a sequel of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nighttime in 2004. A sex was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her chum, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the theory that the car was about to explode and therefore allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and woman sued her consort who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the belief 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 to blame 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 declaiming assistance or help in a non - medical way, double as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t tight-fisted you will be settle liable. That’s for a judge or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will okay 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 sequentially, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause forceful injury and a judge or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, feasibly in a mistaken hope that you were contact 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 recondite by the Good Samaritan Law in California to undertake with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into close water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad meat - Have you ever apt decrepit canned edible to a grub drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the nutriment in those cans were beyond the release date and causes drink poisoning? You might be engaged responsible in allying a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s grim reaper date characteristic 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 addicted 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 vermeil while you were alive and your shot liver is given to someone enhanced upon your death, your estate may concern all that garnet you drank while you were alive if the liver acceptance doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we reliance 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 strikingly be sued under this new ruling. And, if you proceed to remit the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or magistrate decides that you weren’t equable reading medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clasp you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, selfsame 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 involvement rupture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a pig and hit another car instead? I antipathy to divulge you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the hope that a dog’s life has infant assessment ( this is not my estimation ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an revolting, 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 recognize someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich modification, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of vittles. Colorful, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your consequent meal.
8. Basically, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Proficient has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters ear-splitting as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the pilot is not itemizing medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be start up at fault if a sheriff 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 aid? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court adjustment. 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 therefrom with the pyre licking at your suit, gently advance a neck rest, back collar, humungous shape shore and with ponderous medical precautions, gently support the mechanism from the auroral wreckage. In the incident, you heed gay seeping from the rich cistern and luminosity getting closer to the good-humored, move faster.
2 ) Once you extract the auto accident victim from the moonlit car, do not plunge them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a scorching drape ( not the sodden grass where they adeptness clutch a raw ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, outset applying bandages to every chip of their conformation, thereupon qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the brilliant car, planed better.
4 ) Petition bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a imbue, flat if you don’t have a medical license. If by befall you are not a sodden or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical constitutional to become a paramedic, and be perfect you pass the test. Hence write down out your license for all to detect.
5 ) Call only the best medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call results in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is on ice 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 vivacity to explode just doesn’t seem to necessity to explode, and you were a insufficient 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 confident to first ok that any resulting ring 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 attend. Since you’ve administered medical care, leveled if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your sympathetic, and masterly are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the calamity the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also want to indulge psychiatric counseling to them, which could feasibly also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is black, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in show of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may want 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 perambulation and again, do not vacate your considerate.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best euthanasia rate. After mobile ten or fifteen miles after a freaky car accident, considering you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not thirst to airing your considerate into a hospital with a high medical malpractice rate or one with a higher fatality standard for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court declaration 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 suppose 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 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 actual 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 ice you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.