In metropolitan Atlanta, our lawyers are seeing more and more pedestrian personal injury cases. Due to congested conditions caused by increasing population and more motorists on the road, as might be expected, there are more incidents involving pedestrians. Many cases involve situations where pedestrians are not in walking in crosswalks and are struck while crossing a road, sometimes in broad daylight. Other cases involve pedestrians crossing the road at night when they are difficult to see. Other cases involve joggers and people on sidewalks who are injured due to third party negligence. As might be imagined, these cases are typically very serious because when a pedestrian who has no protection is struck by a car, the injury is likely to be a very bad one.
In Georgia, every driver of a vehicle has duty to exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian upon a roadway and shall exercise proper precautions upon observing any child or obviously confused, incapacitated or intoxicated person. This law is found at O.C.G.A. ยง 40-6-93. The courts have held that this statute establishes that motorists on the highways must exercise ordinary care to both discover and avoid persons in the roadway.
Georgia is a comparative negligence jurisdiction which means that if the pedestrian fails to exercise proper care for their own safety then the jury can consider that in apportioning damages between the pedestrian and the at fault motorist. If a pedestrian is more negligent than the at fault motorist, the claim will be barred by the doctrine of contributory negligence. If the pedestrian is negligent but not as negligent as the motorist who causes the injury, then the negligent motorist can still be held liable but their liability is reduced by the percentage of the negligent pedestrian.
As these cases are always factually specific, it is imperative when serious injuries are involved that family members look after their loved ones by associating counsel at the earliest opportunity so that there can be an adequate investigation of the facts and so that witnesses with knowledge of the facts can be located and interviewed. These cases always turn on the facts so the more facts that are gathered, the better the analysis of the facts and the more likely it is that justice can be done either for the motorist who may or may not have been negligent and/or for the injured pedestrian.
Updated: