Hi, my name is Matt Eason. I’m a personal injury and workers’ compensation attorney who has been practicing in those areas of law for over 25 years here in Sacramento. In this video, we’ll answer a question we received: “What are the different types of wrongful death in California?”
Please click here to view the video.
The question is slightly ambiguous so that we will focus on the types of wrongful keyword wrongful death in California. Wrongful death is when someone passes away or dies, and they should not have. What facts or circumstances give rise to the wrongful death could vary from case to case.
From one extreme, wrongful death can be caused by intentional misconduct or the intentional act of another. Murder is a simple example of that. A step below intentionally causing someone’s death is often referred to as recklessly causing someone’s death. Someone acts recklessly when they know precisely how likely severe harm or death would occur, and they precede in the face of it anyway. An excellent example of reckless conduct is often drunk driving. You know that when you drink excessive amounts of alcohol and then get behind the wheel of a vehicle, you know there’s a genuine risk that someone will be seriously injured or pass away. That is reckless conduct.
Negligence is synonymous with accidental, but different. Negligence is when someone fails to act as a reasonable person would in similar circumstances. A sensible person would stop at a stop sign. A reasonable person would drive at a city speed. Those are situations in which if you fail to act as a reasonable person but do not intend to cause harm, it just so happens that it will typically give rise to a negligence claim.
Some of the biggest questions and most considerable confusion over negligence and breach of the standard of care or breach of duty to act reasonably have to do with medical malpractice. Suppose someone were to pass away in a hospital under the care of a doctor. Just because they passed away does not mean that the doctor or the health care practitioner committed malpractice. Did that doctor fail to act as a reasonable doctor under the same or similar circumstances? If a reasonable doctor had worked the same way, 3there would probably have been no negligence. Unfortunately or fortunately, there is no wrongful death action, depending on how you view it. The flip side is that if the doctor fails to act reasonably, then that might support negligence and thus might support a wrongful death action.
So, to oversimplify it, there are three basic types of wrongful death actions. There is what’s known as ordinary negligence when it’s failed to act reasonably. There is recklessness when you proceed in the face of danger and knowing significant harm might occur, or there is when you intentionally intend to harm or kill somebody, such as murder.
If you have questions about a wrongful death here in California, I hope you consider reaching out to me or a wrongful death attorney in Sacramento in my firm.
