Re: [Paddlewise] Trips - hosts and leaders

 "Shawn Baker" <shawnkayak_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> It is sad that Americans as a whole do not accept personal
> responsibility as a lifestyle.  "It's someone else's fault"....and it's
> a sad plague spreading to other countries.

We don't have to change their attitudes;  all we have to change is the legal 
rules which allow searching for the deepest pocket associated with one of 
these tragedies and encumbering it with a frivolous suit based on a claim of 
gross negligence.

I'll repeat what I asked before:

___how do we go about changing the aspects of the legal system which allow 
this?___

  To wit, how can we provide the same sort of "Good Samaritan" protection to 
kayaking trip leaders (and similar) which we have already provided to holders 
of Red Cross CPR certification?  If we can get that to happen, these suits 
will disappear (he said hopefully).

(Background:  many years ago, holding a CPR card meant that if you attempted 
CPR on a person who showed the symptoms of a heart attack (or who was 
unconscious, had no pulse, and was not breathing), and failed to perform CPR 
flawlessly, you were exposed to serious liability.  Subsequently, laws were 
passed which allowed CPR providers protection from malicious suits.  Forget 
the exact language, but I believe a litigant now has to establish egregious 
negligence or somesuch for the suit to proceed, and if the CPR-doer has shown 
good faith efforts, the suit will be thrown out.)

--
Dave Kruger
Astoria, OR
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