Good Samaritan faces lawsuit
Mon Dec 22 02:12PM
A court in the United States has ruled that a would-be Good Samaritan accused of rendering her friend paraplegic by pulling her from a wrecked car can be sued.
The Supreme Court of California has declared that the state's Good Samaritan law only protects people from liability if they are administering emergency medical care.

Justice Carlos Moreno ruled that a person is not obligated to come to someone's aid. "If, however, a person elects to come to someone's aid, he or she has a duty to exercise due care," he wrote.

According to the lawsuit, on 1 November 2004 Alexandra Van Horn was in the front passenger seat of a car that crashed into a lamp post at 45 mph. Lisa Torti was a passenger in a car that was following Van Horn and stopped after the crash.

According to Torti she feared the wreckage was going to explode and she therefore pulled her friend out. Van Horn has testified that Torti pulled her out of the wreckage ‘like a rag doll' and blamed her for her paralysis.

Torti argues that she should be protected from a lawsuit because she was giving ‘medical care' when she pulled Van Horn from the car.

Complete BS. This story pisses me off. Some people are so greedy.

She freaked out and yanked the girl out of the car and then left her laying beside the car on the ground if the car had caught fire or exploded the girl on the ground would still have been in danger. The moral to this story is if you are half drunk and don't know what you're doing it might be a good idea to wait until somebody comes along that does.

all I can say is, wow.

Jes.. is that ShamWOW?

And if she had been left in the car, then what?
Either way, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't.
I'm always guilty of second-guessing myself. I'm sure,
I'm not the only one who does that.
~Stella

There is obviously, more to the story,, that the judges who heard the cases,,, there had to be a few appeals to get to the state supreme court,,,,, based their decisions on.

Were all the lower court decisions the same,, or was there an "over turning" involved???

As is usual in most news reports,,, only the parts of the story are revealed that will catch the eye or ear of the public.
ed