The New Samaritan: Good or Hesitant?
On Halloween night four years ago in Los Angeles, a car slammed into a light pole at 45 mph, critically injuring a young woman named Alexandra Van Horn, who is now a paraplegic.
Also shattered in the accident was the very definition of what it means to be a Good Samaritan, undermined by a troubling new legal question: Can you be sued for trying to save someone’s life?
Van Horn and several friends had just left a bar at 1:30AM when the driver of the car she was in lost control and crashed. Following behind in a second car was Van Horn’s friend Lisa Torti, who stopped and rushed to help. Torti said she saw smoke and feared that the wrecked car would catch fire or explode, so she pulled the incapacitated Van Horn from the passenger’s seat.
Van Horn later sued Torti, saying that her spinal injuries from the accident were made worse by Torti dragging her from the car “like a rag doll.” Torti argued that she was covered by California’s Good Samaritan law, which provides legal protection to people helping in an emergency. The case was dismissed.
But in a controversial new ruling, the California Supreme Court said the state’s Good Samaritan law applies only to emergency medical care. Rescuing someone from a car crash doesn’t qualify. Hence, the court said, Van Horn has the right to sue her Good Samaritan. And so she did.
“Careless rescuers are not good Samaritans, really,” said a law professor after the court’s ruling. “We don’t want people interfering with other people and hurting them a lot worse, right?”
California legislators immediately proposed three separate bills to amend the law, but many future Samaritans had already downgraded themselves from Good to Hesitant to Never. “The next time I see someone in need of help I will look the other way and mind my own business” was typical of the many postings on internet message boards.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” wrote another. “I’m sure that if she hadn’t pulled the woman from the wreckage and the car had exploded, she’d be charged with letting the woman die.”
From parable to terrible, the Good Samaritan’s drop in stock may have been summed up best by a newspaper columnist who wrote, “As for that New Testament passage, in which the Samaritan comes across a man who had been robbed, beaten and left for dead, ‘and bound up his wounds…and took care of him’—it’d be a shame to have to put an asterisk there, with the notation, ‘Not applicable in California.’”
Tell us what you think: Would you still help someone in an emergency, knowing you could be sued? Where would you draw the line between helping and turning away?
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Scary thought...
So if you are in need of help, those who could help won’t because you might sue them.
If the friend acted in her best interest where is the negligence?
Can you be sued if you are not negligent?
What about the rest of the people; why not sue them for not helping?
Vix | 10 months ago
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Danger Will Robinson!
Once you go down the path of suing for money, forever will it dominate your destiny.
This kind of law worries me in so many ways. Such a suit is worse than frivolous, it is malignant – especially when made against a former friend. What I find especially concerning is that the lady who is suing had just left a bar. She put herself with that driver who lost control and crashed – she made that decision. How can she then be anything but grateful to her FRIEND who helped her? Next she’ll be suing the bartender for giving them too many drinks…or not taking their keys and calling a cab!
Anonymous | 10 months ago
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My brother was in a freak motorcycle accident which left him paralyzed. There was a car which saw him go over a cliff and they stopped and ran down to assist. They carried him up to the road and called for help. Would he have been paralyzed if they would have left him there and gone for help – who is to know. They acted with good intentions and to this day I am grateful they stopped and helped.
Debbie | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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Responsibility
When drinking, the designated driver is supposed to be sober. One wonders was the driver sober? If not, what was the accident victim doing in the car? Again, onus belongs to the free choice to climb into a car with a potentially impaired driver.
J | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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Be involved
As a grocery store manager, I was on my daily department walk through when I came upon a bakery employee who was choking. All the other employees on the scene were frozen and panicking themselves. I quickly assessed the situation and performed the Heimlich maneuver which on the second upward thrust she spit up a piece of danish that was lodged in her throat.
Even though all the employees present had just under gone a first aid training course one week before, they were like deer caught in head lights. This past summer, my wife and I were at Glacier National Park relaxing on Lake McDonald when we saw a young girl out in deep water obviously having a hard time swimming.
I made a decision to take the kayak out and see if she was OK. It is a good thing I did because as soon as I got near her she grabbed on to my kayak and held on. She kept saying that she was a good swimmer but she was exhausted. Her two cousins were in a small boat nearby but were playing with her and kept paddling away as she got closer. When I got the ten year old girl to shore everyone was very appreciative.
The very next day we were on a hiking trail that had a long section that was a narrow ledge. An older man lost his hat from a gust of wind and proceeded to chase it over the ledge. His grand daughter and myself were nearest to him and helped him from going over and pulled him back up on the trail.
Not once did I think about being sued from these three individuals or their families if the outcome had been different. While none of these stories involve a burning car, I probably would react and get involved as best I could.
Sadly, we live in an extremely litigious society, and laws need to be written to stop frivolous law suits, but even if that does not happen, we still need to be involved and help when we see someone in distress. I am sure all three of the above mentioned individuals and families are just happy that someone was there to give aid.
David Hood | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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If you go to source documents you find out (and this should have been in the story here) that both women were high and drunk. Ms. Torti’s judgment was probably impaired. She may have misread the situation regarding whether the car was going to explode and ignored the prudent act of leaving her friend there. She may in fact be guilty of negligence, carelessness and stupidity causing great bodily harm. I don’t like the upshot but I also don’t want people of impaired judgment like Ms Torti trying to save me. OTOH, for all the good that others like Mr. Hood (above) do, they should not be punished. I myself was saved by a friend while we were swimming in the ocean as teens. I was fatigued, he was a trained lifeguard and he just brought me in.
We need to amend the law to allow for prudent rescues by those of unimpaired judgment. Maybe some good can come out of Torti’s bad judgment after all.
Ann | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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I'd like to think I'd help
I’d like to think I’d help and, if I made the decision not to, it would be because I either didn’t know enough to be confident, or I thought the situation was a trap. (We had a situation in New Jersey in which a young woman, not dressed for the elements, was shivering on the side of a highway and trying to flag down help. The first woman who stopped let her use a cell phone, but she called the three friends who had supposedly abused her. The driver left, prudently in my estimation, though I think the driver should have called 911 for the girl, though she didn’t herself. A male driver stopped and picked up the young woman, dropped her at a hospital and left, coming back to talk to the authorities only on his sister’s advice. I don’t know any more details, so can’t really comment.)
I do agree with the earlier comments that if I were the one in danger, I would accept any rescue attempt, even if the upshot was to leave me worse off. Suing for financial damages, especially among friends, can’t lead to any good outcome. There was obviously a lot of contributing factors in the California car accident, and sometimes things are just tragic accidents, and there’s no one person to blame. This seems to me to be one of those situations.
Sally G | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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I think this story may be a situation wherein we don’t know the entire situation. I generally agree that I would stop, (and in fact have done so — such as when I saw a woman run off the road and into a ditch off the expressway), but I also think that it is possible to act negligently when trying to assist — especially if the rescuer is intoxicated as is likely in this story.
So, suing “good Samaritans” is generally a bad idea, but that doesn’t mean that you can do any damned thing to a person and then say “I was just trying to help”.
Stephen R | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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...cont responsibility
Ms. Torti’s judgment may have in fact been impaired…but the victim made herself a victim by the act of getting in the car with an impaired driver. In fact there would have been no need for rescue had the accident not happened.
J | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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Insurance Makes for Strange Suits
Is the injured woman suing to obtain financial resources, perhaps, instead of punishing an ex-friend? Did we jump to conclusions? Some people who are injured need large cash settlements to finance treatment and equipment. I have heard of people actually suing themselves in order to get sums of needed cash from insurance policies. Is that the situation here, or is the injured woman really lashing out at her friend? Not all law suits are from bad faith.
Mark Powers | 9 months, 3 weeks ago
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