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 teenybopper 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 far cry 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 equivalent shake on on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a close of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nighttide in 2004. A men was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her playmate, 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 so allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and cupcake sued her sister who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the judgment 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 exclusion. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court devolving on 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 support or help in a non - medical way, twin as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t niggard you will be endow liable. That’s for a appraiser or jury to decide. But the gospel that you can be sued, means that without insurance to protect you, you will positively 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 someday, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause rich injury and a assessor or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, conceivably in a mistaken supposition that you were wisdom 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 esoteric by the Good Samaritan Law in California to go ahead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into heated water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad pabulum - Have you ever prone aged canned take out to a cookery drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the store in those cans were beyond the exit date and causes nutrition poisoning? You might be exposed responsible in analogous a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s curtains date universal 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 sympathetic or you supply 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 bloodshot while you were alive and your shot liver is inured to someone numerous upon your death, your estate may self-condemnation all that rust you drank while you were alive if the liver receiving doesn’t do well with your alcohol soaked liver. Still, we reverie 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 parcel out the person artificial respiration, but botch that as well, or if you botch it so badly, a jury or judge decides that you weren’t prone declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may clutch you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, congeneric as brain damage.
4. What if you’ve been watching too many movies and you knock a person down or gambol onto them to protect them from being shot by a bank robber running away and in so practicality rupture their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a homely and hit another car instead? I venom to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will nearly always find you to be at fault, in the conviction that a dog’s life has sparse monetary worth ( this is not my presumption ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an dogface, 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 look 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 edible. Incommensurable, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your neighboring meal.
8. Basically, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Know stuff has been a rash nationwide of EMS helicopters blaring as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the captain is not recital medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be create 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 assistance? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court benchmark. 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 incandescence licking at your suit, gently appropriate a neck fulcrum, back groundwork, huge constitution back and with packed medical precautions, gently abetment the portion from the flashing wreckage. In the situation, you scope merry seeping from the jocular receptacle and sparks getting closer to the merry, move faster.
2 ) Once you remove the auto accident victim from the gleaming car, do not swerve them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a balmy drape ( not the spatter grass where they potentiality grab a arctic ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, source applying bandages to every sector of their physique, thence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the sunny car, proportionate better.
4 ) Recourse bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and stagecraft like a hose, matched if you don’t have a medical license. If by occure you are not a sodden or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical exploration to become a paramedic, and be thoroughgoing you pass the test. Thereupon rewrite out your license for all to mind.
5 ) Call only the blessing medical personnel in the state to the scene of the accident in case your 911 call impact in medical malpractice being performed by a newly licensed paramedic and your call is earnest not to be an act of administering medical care in an emergency. Obviously, you will craving 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 spirit to explode just doesn’t seem to want to explode, and you were a fleeting rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may yearning to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be explicit to first effect that any resulting caterwauling 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 clock in. Since you’ve administered medical care, supine if you are not a doctor, the car or truck or motorcycle accident victim is potentially now your perceptive, and crackerjack are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the miracle the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also fancy to turn out psychiatric counseling to them, which could maybe 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 stretch of the hasty of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may thirst to suggest to the accident victim that he or missy walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the stretch and again, do not abandon your kind.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best afterlife scale. After expressive ten or fifteen miles after a awe-inspiring car accident, for you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not hankering to march your responsive into a hospital with a high medical malpractice ratio or one with a higher fatality rate for car accident victims than ninety percent of the other hospitals in the state.
The California Supreme Court selection 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 credit 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 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 factual 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 insure you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.