The duty to rescue
Generally speaking, there is legally no duty to rescue another person.
The courts have gone into very gory details in order to explain this. In
Buch v. Amory Manufacturing Co., the defendant had no obligation to save a child from crushing his hand in a manufacturing machine. The court suggested an analogy in which a baby was on the train tracks – did a person standing idly by have the obligation to save him? Legally, no. He was a
“ruthless savage and a moral monster,” but legally he did not have to save that baby.
An interesting and solid case to the contrary is
Soldano v. O’Daniels, where the Court of Appeals of California bucked convention and stated that an employee did have a duty to help.
In that case, a Good Samaritan requested that a store
employee use the phone to call the police, as a person was being threatened in a bar across the street. The employee denied the use of the phone to the Good Samaritan and refused to place the call himself. The person ended up dying, and the Court said, enough is enough. This person would not have died if that call had been placed, and someone has to take responsibility. They felt it was time to reexamine the traditional relationship of responsibility.
Normally, however, there is no duty to rescue.
Soldano is a unique quirk in the legal system that has not overcome the four categories of duties, which we shall now discuss.
Legal categories of duty
When someone is in peril, injured or somehow incapacitated, there are certain situations in which a duty to rescue is pre-established. In these cases, reasonable assistance would need to be provided, and failing to come to the rescue of these parties would be grounds for liability.
- The defendant created the peril: If it was the person’s own negligence that created this situation, then he’d better figure a way out of it – and get the plaintiff out of it, too.
- There is a special relationship: This is a parent-child relationship, student-teacher relationship, inmate-correctional officer, or the like. If one has a special relationship with the other, then they are responsible for the other as well.
- They undertook an action: As we said in the beginning of this article, let’s say someone was drowning way out at sea. You decide to run out and be a hero, desperately swimming to meet your flailing friend. The other people on shore look at your churning limbs and think, “Wow, okay, he’s got this.” They decide not to intervene because of your actions. Halfway to your friend, your side cramps up and you realize, with a sinking feeling, that you can’t make it. You can’t do it. Your friend drowns, and nobody else helped because they thought you had control of the situation. Once a person begins a rescue, they have an obligation to finish it. If you fail to render aid, well... you blew it.