Frequently, when someone has been injured as the result of an accident, it seems easy to place the blame on one of more of the individuals that were present at the site of that particular incident. Still, someone that has chosen to take legal action might find that the task of assigning fault is not so cut and dried.

Can the victim of an accident get compensated if he or she was partly to blame for that same accident?

If the state where the accident took place follows the comparative negligence principle, then that particular victim can expect to receive at least some compensation. If the case were to go to court, then the judge and jury would check to see what percent of the blame for the accident could be placed on the defendant.

The Personal Injury Lawyer in St John’s knows that a portion of the blame that could not be placed on the defendant would get assigned to the plaintiff. Suppose that the jury decided that the defendant was 75% responsible for the accident, and the plaintiff was 25% responsible. Based on that assumption, the judge and jury could decide on the plaintiff’s compensation.

The jury would need to consider the compensation, if the defendant were 100% to blame. Then the jury would need to deduct from that figure an amount equal to 25%. That would be the size of the plaintiff’s compensation.

Understand that the above approach would not work, if the accident had taken place in a state that followed the contributory negligence principle.

Can an accident victim get compensated if his or her physical limitations had made the accident-caused injuries worse?

Yes, every person, even someone with a physical disability has the right to make his or her way through the world. In other words, someone with a physical limitation should not be placed in harm’s way, following completion of some other person’s actions.

Usually, the sort of action that might place a person with physical limitations in harm’s way is an act of negligence. In other words, the responsible party would have failed to use a proper level of care, with respect to the endangered victim. Alternately, it could be that the responsible party had chosen to make life hard for the individual with the physical limitations. That would be an example of intentional carelessness, as opposed to accident behavior.

One doctor admitted to having carried out such behavior, when he wrote a book on his internship. He admitted to having paid insufficient attention to the amount of oxygen that the anesthetist gave to one particular patient. That was a patient that had been born with Down’s syndrome. His heart was highly susceptible to any deviations from the acceptable level of oxygen.