Just about everyone feels distressed, after becoming involved in a car accident. Some accident victims experience an especially strong emotional reaction to that decidedly jarring and unanticipated incident.
How does the legal system deal with harm to an accident victim’s emotions?
Personal Injury Lawyer in Fort Erie knows that emotional harm falls under the category of pain and suffering. Sleeplessness, depression, anxiety, fear and humiliation, all belong on a listing of possible emotional problems, which could arise as the result of a victim’s involvement in an accidental incident.
The development of such problems indicates the intense impact of an accident-related injury. The evidence of the accident’s impact serves as a basis for seeking compensation. That is why victims’ emotions push lawyers to work hard, in order to get their clients compensated.
How can a personal injury attorney produce evidence of problems with a client’s emotions?
The attorney should urge the client to speak with doctors about the feelings that he or she has experienced, while recovering from an accident. In that way, the patient’s/client’s medical record could become a source of valuable evidence. Lawyers should also encourage their clients to keep a journal. In that journal, a client’s recall of pain or suffering could include comments on the intensity of length of the experience.
It is the lawyer’s job to show that a reported emotion developed after the accident, and was not a part of the client’s demeanor before that jarring incident. In order to carry out that task, lawyers often seek testimony from friends and neighbors of an emotionally disturbed client. That testimony can support a claim that a given accident’s impact caused such disturbances.
Legal issues that relate to the emotions
Sometimes the evidence in a personal injury case indicates that the defendant had made a point of trying to create a stressful situation. For instance, a defendant that had tried to deceive a certain victim might also have strived to stir-up the same victim’s emotions.
That would be an example of a time when the defendant’s intentions could allow the legal system to punish the deceitful person that had harmed a given plaintiff. That punishment could come in the form of punitive damages.
Still, a lawyer’s effort to suggest the existence of those sorts of intentions must proceed with caution. A member of the legal profession could get in trouble for attempting to expose intentions that did not exist. If made aware of such an attempt, a judge could hit the guilty attorney with a fine.
An attorney’s tactics should not strive to stir up a judge’s emotional response. A judge would react forcefully to the emergence of evidence of an attorney’s utilization of such tactics. That reaction would take the form of a fine.