Hi, my name is Matt Eason. I’m a personal injury and workers’ compensation attorney and have been practicing in those areas of law for over 25 years here in Sacramento. In this video, we’re going to answer a question we received which is, “what are the different types of wrongful death in California?”
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The question is a little bit ambiguous, so we’re going to focus on the types of wrongful keyword wrongful death in California. Wrongful death is when someone passed away or died, 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 the 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 specifically of a likely serious harm or death would occur, and they preceded in the face of it anyway. A good 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 very real risk that someone will be seriously injured or pass away. That is reckless conduct.
Negligence is somewhat synonymous with accidental, but a little bit different. Negligence is when someone fails to act as a reasonable person would in the same or similar circumstances. A reasonable 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 not intending to cause harm, and it just so happened that is typically going to give rise to a negligence claim.
Some of the biggest questions and biggest confusion over negligence and breach of the standard of care or breach of duty to act reasonably has to do with medical malpractice. If 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. The question is did that doctor fail to act as a reasonable doctor under the same or similar circumstances. If a reasonable doctor would have acted the same way, then there’s probably not negligence. Unfortunately or fortunately depends on how you look at it, there is no wrongful death action. 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 common 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’ve got questions about a wrongful death here in California, I hope you consider reaching out to myself or one of the wrongful death attorneys in Sacramento in my firm.
