A lawsuit in the making
Great! If this suit is successful and you’re in California, in a wreck and the car’s starting to burn, nobody’s going to try to pull you out. I guess it’s roasted marshmallow time for you!
Law Might Not Protect Good Samaritan
A woman accused of rendering a friend a paraplegic by pulling her out of a wrecked car “like a rag doll” may not be protected by California’s good Samaritan law, an appellate court ruled.
The 2nd District Court of Appeal wrote in a decision Wednesday that the Good Samaritan law only protects people from liability if they are administering emergency medical care. The perceived danger of remaining in the wrecked car was not “medical,” the court ruled.
Attorney Robert Hutchinson who represents plaintiff Alexandra Van Horn, said the state’s Samaritan law doesn’t require people to render aid. But if they do, he said, they must act reasonably.
Well, there you go. Next time you’re in a car / airplane crash, I guess I’ll just dial 911 while I watch you bleed or burn to death. Good going, CA.
Looks like Van Horn got up on the wrong side of the rock yesterday.
Gives credulity to the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ theory, doesn’t it?
In the words of Bruce Willis in Die Hard “fucking California”
Gezzz, here we go again. đ
I want out of this nutty state so bad…
Hurry up retirement.
#3
How about retirement in Florida? đ
God bless the lawyers. No Tort reform needed here.
If the car was not on fire and there was no immediate danger to the lady in the car, then it was incredibly stupid to try to pull her from the car. Of course she might have thought it was a Hollywood car and that it was about to explode at any second.
My wife was injured in a car accident that was fault of her best friend. and, if I remember correctly, she had to sue her friend to get a claim from the insurance company. None of it came out of her friends pocket.
It wasn’t personal and my wife even gave some of the settlement back to her friend to get a new car.
I wonder if this lawsuit isn’t something like that.
So I guess if you come across someone involved in a car accident, and they want help, the best thing to do is make them sign a legal document so they can’t sue you under any conditions? No that would not work as some lawyer could argue that they were signing under duress. You are best off standing there and making a video of their death for later uploading to youtube.
I can’t tell you how much better this country would be if they just cut away California, Texas and Florida like the cancerous growths they are.
So I guess if you come across someone involved in a car accident, and they want help, the best thing to do is make them sign a legal document so they can’t sue you under any conditions? No that would probably not work as some lawyer could argue that they were signing under duress. I guess the lesson here is that unless you are a trained emergency rescue professional, you are not qualified to evaluate the situation and should not do anything. No then you could probably be sued by their relatives for not doing something to save their lives.
Best advise? If you see an accident, DON’T STOP! Its not worth the risk. Thank you again legal system.
Wow.. talk about scare tactics. The issue here is that the woman removed someone who wasn’t at risk, and then paralyzed them by that action.
That sucks, sad for the suit, but understandable.
A car on fire example would have âmedicalâ dangers… so where is the story? This is like tabloid reporting – a non story.
I helped out a motorist a few months back on a busy avenue in Manhattan where his car had stalled during the afternoon rush hour. The man had gotten out of his car and raised the car hood in an attempt to show other merciless drivers that he could not move. But nobody helped. I went over to him and told him to put the car in neutral and I would push the car to a side street where he could calm his nerves and call a tow truck. I closed the hood but I did not know that this model used a rod to hold it up. With the force I used I bent the hood almost in half! The guy looked with shock. (yipes!) Lifting the hood again, I moved the rod to its resting location and bent the hood back in shape (for the most part) and closed the hood. “No problem, see.” I pushed his car off to the side where I then asked him if I could be of any more assistance. He replied that his mechanic was right down the street and thanked me.
Mistakes happen.
Unless the other person is at risk of loosing their life because of burning then you shouldn’t pull them out. The best thing to do is get professional help, fire, ambulance etc. Never move anyone unless they are going to die before help gets to them. If they have any kind of spinal injury your asking for this kind of lawsuit.
If my thinking process were as limited as some of the above commenters in this thread, I would have some harsh words to say about people that slander my state without reason.
But, I have tools at hand that those posters apparently do not.
So, I Googled the names of the plaintiff and defendant and found the appeals court judgement, http://tinyurl.com/32x7xo.
Reading this, I have come to several conclusions.
1. There was no evidence at trial, that the Van Horn woman was in any danger and could not have waited for emergency personnel to arrive.
2. The California “Good Samaritan” law is in NO danger and still applies.
3. All the judgement says is that the trial judge errored in finding summarily for the defendent that the Good Samaritan law applied. Reasons, 1) there was no emminent danger to the Van Horn woman. 2) the Torti woman was not rendering medical aid.
4. This judgement does NOT cause any monetary rewards to occur. NOR does it cause any monetary rewards NOT to occur.
5. This judgement simply sends the matter back to the original court to go to trial.
All that this appeal judgement does, is say to the trial judge, error in summarily ending the case in favor of the defendent based on the Good Samaritan law. It says there are still disputed facts. And that the truth about some of those fact must be ascertained before a decision on the Good Samaritan law can be made.
I am not certain about the other 49 states. But, in my state of California, the mechanism we have for determining the facts of a legal case is the trial. Not newspaper articles. Not the opinions of uninformed persons on internet web logs, not even the usual set of uninformed persons on Dvorak Uncensored. The trial.
All the judgement says, is GO TO TRIAL. Period.
The article (linked to) says nothing about the victim being in imminent danger, from fire or anything else. If there was no such danger, it was dumb to pull the victim out of the car.
I seem to remember learning at a young age that moving an injured person was risky and that one should wait for trained personnel, especially if spinal injury is possible.
#13.
My apologies to the community for not being able to use tinyurl efficiently.
I do not know what I did wrong but somehow I managed to get the wrong tinyurl. Here is the correct one, http://tinyurl.com/2leobs
I was walking around in downtown Dallas some time back with a friend who is a MD. A Van had pulled over with this lady laying on the sidewalk, and people looking on helplessly. I wanted to help but my friend cautioned me, and was very reluctant to get involved. He sternly told me not to say he was a doctor. My friend did examine the lady, opening her breath way. She apparently had an acute asthma attack, and didn’t have her breather with her. She wasn’t breathing, her eyes where dilated.
Once the Ambulance came we went our merry way. I never knew what the outcome was, but it didn’t look good.
My friend was reluctant to give mouth to mouth. So for both legal reasons and heath risk reasons, my friend hesitated. I can’t blame him.
It strikes me very odd that Doctors are routinely sued for malpractice. Lawyers who are much less altruistic, who will more often intentionally exercise malpractice, rarely if ever get sued.
I guess that the problem with Science, you can be shown to be objectively wrong. The law is more about peoples feelings towards that person and the lack of scientific evidence.
If we held everyone to the same legal standards as medicine, just think how better things would be
1.) Car companies would have put Airbags into cars in the 60s.
2.) Lawyers would be sued more often; they couldn’t afford to be crooked.
3.) Bush would be impeached.
4.) The evidence for going to war would have been seen as flawed.
6.) More corporate executives would be in jail.
…..
And you wander why doctors are cynical about people and make so much.
My friend with a Jeep and a winch just loved going out during snow storms and helping people out of ditches in the semi-rural county I grew up in.
Then he got a ticket from a cop for operating a un-licensed town truck service!
Outraged and PO’d at the cop, he was driving home and just down the road found that very cop in the ditch!
I would have driven by and maybe mooned him but my friend was a gem of a guy and he stopped and offered to pull the cop out. The cop took him up on the offer and ripped-up the ticket.
#7. I bet that is exactly what it was. Kudos to you for being one of the few reacting in an intelligent fashion to this article.
It is probably a “friendly” lawsuit. She probably can only get so much from the driver’s insurance company, so she is trying to supplement that with money from the good samaritan’s company. the “helpful” bystander may suffer higher homeowner’s premiums (thats where this $$ tends to come from), but no other loss. tough to blame the plaintiff – no doubt her expenses were greater than anything the driver’s company would cover.
plus, there is no evidence that the injured woman was in danger sitting in the car. the good samaritan should have left it to the professionals.
#18 – hmmm, a “friendly” suit you say.
So “plaintiff A” sues “defendant B” knowing that “defendant B” won’t have to pay because the money will come from “insurance company C”.
Do you think that “insurance company C” prints that money? The award may be spread over millions of rate payers but every one of these suits adds up on my insurance bill.
This is exactly the same as finding a finger in a bowl of chili or spilling a cup of hot coffee on your own lap. Lets sue whoever might be in the radar, never mind who is actually responsible.
If I happened by such a scene and knew that I was required by law to make a medical decision or I could be in trouble, then that injured person is SOL, regardless of whether or not that person needed the help.
The woman is now a paraplegic. I doubt she’s friendly about the lawsuit at all. The good samaritan should have just left her there without consideration to the possibility of imminent danger and if the car would have caught fire, oh well, one less piece of garbage in the world.
The thing about fast action is NOT to think twice. They say there was no imminent danger, AFTER the fact. Nice to have the time to investigate when all is said and done.
This just tells future generations to not bother with anyone and turn a blind eye to someone’s pleas for help.