One of the most difficult things that a person of any age can be forced to go through is the death of a member of their own family due to an accident. Grieving family members have the ability to seek justice, accountability, and financial support through the filing of a wrongful death claim. Unfortunately, the procedure of claiming compensation for wrongful death can be tough to manoeuvre. It’s possible that the defendant will try to pin the cause of the accident on your slain loved one.
The attorneys at Redkey Gordon Law Corp. care about equipping you with the information, resources, and skills you need to handle a case of this nature. In this post, wrongful death attorneys present an in-depth guide to comparative negligence, culpability, and wrongful death cases that can be found on their site.
Fault-Based Liability For Wrongful Death
To get things started, it is essential that you have a solid understanding of how the responsibility system works in a wrongful death claim in the state of California. These are legal cases that centre on assigning blame.
If you want to hold a driver, a truck company, a business, a property owner, or any other party legally accountable for a fatal accident, you must first demonstrate that the driver, truck company, business, or property owner was negligent, and that negligence was “a cause” of the tragedy. To put it another way, negligence is defined as the failure to act with reasonable care.
The manner in which negligence is defined in actual practice is contingent on the particular conditions that are at play. Texting while behind the wheel can put another driver at risk of being found negligent in the event of a deadly vehicle accident. In the event of a tragic accident involving a tractor-trailer, the trucking business may be held liable for negligence if they did not conduct a thorough inspection of the vehicle. When a party fails to take the usual level of care, that party is negligent.
Comparative Negligence: What You Need To Know
The fact that a single party may not necessarily be responsible for an entire tragic event is one of the many factors that contribute to the complexity of wrongful death cases. When determining who is at fault in a situation like this, the state of California applies a standard known as comparative negligence. In practice, what this rule means is that each party will be held responsible for the “blame” that corresponds to the proportionate share of responsibility that they have in a fatal accident.
Take, as an illustration, the scenario in which a person loses their life in a catastrophic truck accident in Stockton. Following a thorough investigation, it was determined that the trucking firm was guilty for 75 percent of the accident, while another driver was accountable for the remaining 25 percent of the collision. These two parties—along with their respective insurance carriers—would each bear a percentage of the responsibility for the damages.
Comparative Negligence And Wrongful Death
The comparative negligence standard that is used in wrongful death lawsuits in the state of California allows for the decedent, or the person who was killed in the accident, to be deemed partially responsible for their own tragic accident.
When a defendant or insurance company is deliberately seeking to shift blame onto a person who is no longer alive to defend themselves, these situations can be very challenging for the bereaved family to manage. In situations of this nature, the state of California is equipped with a procedure that can assign liability. In accordance with the explanation provided in the Judicial Council.
