Can a Sudden Medical Condition Be a Defense for a Car Accident?
I saw an article today about a car accident involving the mother of the girl missing near Palatka, Florida. It was a rear-end car accident, but the other driver claimed that she had a seizure before the accident and was not in control of her vehicle.
Normally, when one car (the "back car") crashes into the back of another car (the "front car"), fault for the accident can be attributed to the back car. It may not be as clear if the front car stops suddenly for no apparent reason, but generally, drivers on the roads are supposed to maintain enough distance between their vehicles and the ones in front of them so they can safely stop if the car in front stops.
However, we have handled personal injury cases resulting from serious rear-end accidents in Jacksonville, Florida where the driver of the back car provided a different excuse, as the driver in the accident involving the mother from Putnam County, Florida did. Occasionally, the driver who causes the accident will allege that a sudden medical condition caused him/her to crash into the other vehicle. For instance, that driver may claim that he/she suffered an epileptic episode, blacked out or experienced a reaction to medication. These defense in personal injury and wrongful death cases rarely work. First, these claims can often be disproven by medical records and testimony of witnesses as to the driver's condition at the scene of the accident immediately after the accident. Additionally, even if someone does experience a sudden medical episode that causes a crash, that does not necessarily excuse negligent driving that causes an accident. The sudden medical condition that causes the accident must be reasonably unexpected. If that driver had reason to believe that he/she was not medically competent to drive or may experience such an episode, he/she was negligent and at fault the moment he/she started driving. This kind of knowledge or expectation on the part of a driver that some dangerous medical episode may occur while driving can be discovered by looking into the driver's medical records and history as well as the warnings on the prescription drugs that driver had taken. What we normally find is that the driver was warned and knew he/she should not have been driving and could have anticipated the medical episode that caused the crash. In such a case, the defense of a sudden medical condition is baseless.
