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Failure To Wear A Seatbelt Could Bar Or Limit Your Recovery In A Personal Injury Action
In the State of California, all occupants in a motor vehicle are required to wear a seatbelt anytime the vehicle is in motion. Billboards up and down our freeways proclaim "Click It Or Ticket". The fact is, seatbelts save lives! This is no joke and California legislators in the last few years have passed legislation allowing peace officers not only to cite drivers who fail to wear their seatbelts, but to use one's failure to wear a seat belt as a basis for a traffic stop in the absence of your committing any other offense.
Notwithstanding the provisions of the Vehicle Code that require use of a seatbelt when operating or riding in a vehicle, your failure to buckle-up could seriously impact, if not limit your right to recovery in a personal injury action if involved in an accident. As a matter of law, one who is negligent in the operation of their vehicle is liable for all damage caused thereby. It is well known that everyone operating a vehicle on our roadways has an obligation to exercise due care so as to avoid causing an unreasonable risk of harm to others. The breach of this duty constitutes negligence. Little known is the fact that everyone operating a vehicle on our roadways or traveling as a passenger in a vehicle on our roadways has a duty to avoid creating an unreasonable risk of harm to themselves. The breach of this duty constitutes comparative fault and could serve as a bar to recovery in a personal injury action.
If you are involved in an accident through no fault of your own and injured, at some point, the question of whether you were belted will undoubtedly come up. This is especially so if the injuries you suffered are ones that could arguably have been prevented had you been wearing your seatbelt. Defense attorneys are sufficiently savvy to know that while their client may have been the legal cause of the accident complained of, they may not have been the legal cause of the injuries claimed by the plaintiff. If the injured party would not have been injured had he or she been wearing a seatbelt, the fact that the accident was the fault of the defendant is of little to no consequence. The injuries suffered were a direct result of the injured party's failure to wear his or her seatbelt. That being the case, the injured party is precluded from recovering anything for these injuries. This concept is not new however, with a new set of jury instructions recently adopted which more clearly spell out the law in this regard, jurors now have little difficulty grasping this concept and have, of late, been more apt to deny recovery to a plaintiff where it is shown that their injuries resulted from their own negligence in failing to buckle-up.
At EISENBERG LAW FIRM, we encourage everyone to buckle up and drive safely.
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