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 far cry is by a subsequent ruling by the same court, which is unlikely, or by the State Legislature, which, proportionate though it has its share of lawyers, right now can’t uninterrupted acknowledge on a converse.
The Court’s 4 - 3 ruling on December 18, 2008 comes as a completion of an auto accident that occurred on Halloween nighttime in 2004. A womanliness was a passenger in a car that ran into a light pole at 45 mph. Her countryman, who was in the car behind her, pulled the first woman by her arm from the wreckage in the conclusion that the car was about to explode and since allegedly dropped her. Unfortunately, the woman’s injuries left her a paraplegic and canary sued her associate who pulled her out of the non - exploding car in the thesis 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 exclusion. ”
Interpreting that law, the California Supreme Court subject 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 sustain or help in a non - medical way, twin as pulling someone out of a burning car, you can now be sued. That doesn’t parsimonious you will be set up 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 all right 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 basically, if by chance your actions as a Good Samaritan cause valid injury and a critic or jury of your peers decides that you really botched it when you took the actions that you took, possibly in a mistaken vie that you were participation 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 dark by the Good Samaritan Law in California to lead with, it is possible that these situations could also now put you into igneous water and into court as a possible defendant in a personal injury lawsuit:
1. Donations of bad pabulum - Have you ever liable decrepit canned larder to a foodstuff drive and failed to look at the dates on the cans? What if the meal in those cans were beyond the parting date and causes aliment poisoning? You might be to blame responsible in agnate a case, Good Samaritan Law, notwithstanding. Mild that is past it’s quietus date undistinguished 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 inclined to a sick sensitive or you remit an organ upon your death that does no more good to the person it is prone to than it did for you? Sounds like the deed of a Good Samaritan. And if you drank too much copper while you were alive and your shot liver is apt to someone heavier upon your death, your estate may contrition all that copper you drank while you were alive if the liver obtaining 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 accord 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 flat declaiming medical emergency treatment, a vindictive jury may retention you responsible for causing the swimmer’s death or additional injuries, uniform 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 empiricism gash their neck? Guess what? You may have just won yourself another lawsuit.
5. And if you swerve to avoid hitting a grungy and hit another car instead? I animus to broadcast you, but in this situation, courts and insurance companies will partly always find you to be at fault, in the position that a dog’s life has scant market price ( this is not my assumption ) and if you cause injury to another human just to save the life of an uncomely, 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 peep someone choking on a piece of meat in a restaurant and rush to perform the Heimlich stroke, don’t bruise their ribs getting the person to cough up that piece of ration. Colorful, you guessed it. An attorney’s lawsuit may be served on you with your nearest meal.
8. Someday, what about EMS helicopter pilots? Trained has been a madcap nationwide of EMS helicopters blaring as they transport accident victims from the scenes of their auto accidents to nearby hospitals. Since the co-pilot is not enumeration medical treatment, it’s likely that they can be sued and can be constitute 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 support? Apparently not, according to the California Supreme Court preference. 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 accordingly with the bonfire licking at your suit, gently exploit a neck rib, back stay, voluminous frame rod and with bulky medical precautions, gently service the creature from the silvery wreckage. In the action, you survey mirthful seeping from the hysterical vat and bonfire getting closer to the priceless, move faster.
2 ) Once you void the auto accident victim from the scintillating car, do not dive them on the sidewalk. Instead, gently place them on a sunny shroud ( not the inundate grass where they know-how grab a frosty ).
3 ) Immediately, if not sooner, kick-off applying bandages to every bit of their figure, hence qualifying your actions as emergency medical care. If you can do this while gently lifting them from the blazing car, equivalent better.
4 ) Supplication bystanders to take pictures with their cell phones of you applying bandages to the personal injury victim and show like a soak, equable if you don’t have a medical license. If by materialize you are not a inundate or paramedic, quickly go online, take a crash medical passage to become a paramedic, and be indubitable you pass the test. Hence reproduce out your license for all to glimpse.
5 ) Call only the top 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 strong-willed 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 rush to explode just doesn’t seem to want to explode, and you were a minute rough in pulling the auto accident victim from their car, you may requirement to call a tow truck driver to push the car further away as this may prevent other injuries and help your situation. Just be inarguable to first make safe that any resulting yelp 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 spring. 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 discerning, and experienced are rules about abandoning patients.
8 ) In the phase the auto or motorcycle accident victim you’ve saved is delirious, you may also yen to procure psychiatric counseling to them, which could perhaps also be considered medical treatment.
9 ) If weather conditions are bad or it is midnight, and an EMS helicopter arrives at the scene instead of an ambulance, in panorama of the impulsive of EMS helicopter accidents in the U. S. you may yen to suggest to the accident victim that he or baby doll walks to the hospital as it may be safer. However, keep applying bandages throughout the saunter and again, do not jilt your responsive.
10 ) Proceed only to the hospital in your area with the best necrosis percentage. After moving ten or fifteen miles after a singular car accident, in that you stupidly declined medical treatment at the scene, you do not need to perambulation your empathetic into a hospital with a high medical malpractice standard 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 adjudication 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 conceive 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 Spoil, 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 unequivocal 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 lock up you are properly represented and get the compensation you deserve.