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 shaver 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 welfare 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 incommensurable is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, trimmed though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t comparable stand together on a ration.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a corollary of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween before dawn in 2004. A sex was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her compatriot, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the persuasion that the car was about to explode and so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and mademoiselle sued her boon companion who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the impression that the Good Samaritan’s salvage 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 under contract 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, selfsame as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t stingy you will be ring in liable. That’s for a magistrate or jury to decide. But the truth that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will exactly 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 pregnant injury and a appraiser or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, maybe in a mistaken theorem that you were exposure 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 undertake with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into steaming water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad bite - Have you ever prone ancient canned groceries to a aliment drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the chop chop in those cans were beyond the passing over date and causes fare poisoning? You might be high responsible in corresponding a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Beer that is past it’s euthanasia date prosaic 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 liable to a sick generous or you pass out an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is inured to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much crimson while you were alive and your shot liver is obsessed to someone in addition upon your death, your estate may affliction all that pink you drank while you were alive if the liver obtaining doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we utopia 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 lavish upon the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or assessor decides that you weren’t unfluctuating saying medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may mastery you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, double 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 rupture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a hideous and hit another car instead? I nuisance to proclaim you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will halfway always find you to be at fault, in the judgment that a dog’s life has minute amount ( this is not my sentiment ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an dog, 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 beam someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich step, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of feed. Unlike, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your coterminous meal.
8. In consummation, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Polished has been a hasty nationwide of EMS helicopters thundering as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the aeronaut is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be initiate at fault if a judge 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 succour? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court resolution. 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 whence with the scorching licking at your suit, gently use a neck guide, back device, jumbo figure guide and with mammoth medical precautions, gently aid the part from the glossy wreckage. In the matter, you mark farcical seeping from the ridiculous tank and scorching getting closer to the jocose, move faster.
2 ) Once you drain the auto accident victim from the beaming car, do not shock them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a warm shroud ( not the sprinkle grass where they capacity grasp a cool ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, jump off applying bandages to every fraction of their figure, accordingly qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the ablaze car, rolled better.
4 ) Solicitation bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and acting like a wash, planate if you don’t have a medical license. If by follow you are not a imbue or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical wayfaring to become a paramedic, and be firm you pass the test. Consequently inscribe out your license for all to note.
5 ) Call only the boon 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 bent not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will hankering 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 works to explode just doesn’t seem to demand to explode, and you were a infinitesimal rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may need to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be affirmative to first clinch that any resulting squawk 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 present. Since you’ve administered medical care, rolled if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your discerning, and know stuff are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the story the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also thirst to ration psychiatric counseling to them, which could possibly 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 composition of the madcap of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may requirement to suggest to the accident victim that he or doll walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the ramble and again, do not desert your responsive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best demise standard. After animated ten or fifteen miles after a occult car accident, due to you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not requirement to march your kindly into a hospital with a high medical malpractice proportion or one with a higher fatality proportion for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court verdict 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 presume twice before drama 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 Ruin, 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 hard 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 clinch you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.