Seatbelts save lives and reduce the number and severity of injuries. This should be sufficient motivation for everyone to buckle up.
However, if you need additional incentives, consider these legal penalties for failure to use your seatbelts.
- Law-enforcement penalty: Arizona has a mandatory seatbelt law. Police officers may cite front-seat occupants of most motor vehicles who do not wear their lap and shoulder seatbelts. In addition, drivers may be cited if passengers younger than age 16 do not buckle up. There is an exception for some middle seats, in which there may not be a shoulder belt. In this case, the lap belt must still be fastened. Children younger than age five must be secured in an appropriate child safety seat. Fines may be imposed on violators.
- Financial penalty: The Arizona Supreme Court has established a civil penalty that can be applied to injured accident victims who were not wearing a seatbelt when they were injured.
The penalty works like this. If you are injured in an automobile or truck accident and your injuries are more severe because you did not wear your seatbelt, your damage claim may be reduced accordingly, even if you were entirely blameless in the accident.
For example, assume you are in a car stopped for a red traffic light. You are rear-ended by another fast-moving car. As a result of your failure to wear your seatbelt, you are thrown into the windshield and suffer a serious head injury.
Your injuries include facial scars that doctors say you will have to live with the rest of your life. These injuries are attributable to your impact with the windshield, an impact that could have been avoided by wearing a seatbelt.
Through the judicial process, it is established later that the full value of your personal injury claim is $150,000. However, because contact with the windshield was avoidable, a determination is made that 50 percent of your injuries were caused by your failure to buckle up. (The careless driver is charged with the other 50 percent.)
In this example, the other driver, or his insurance company, may avoid paying you as much as 50 percent of your claim. You may receive no more than $75,000, even though the other driver was entirely responsible for the motor vehicle accident.
Though unlikely, it is nevertheless possible for a seriously injured blameless auto or truck accident victim to collect nothing for injuries because of the failure to wear a seatbelt.
If personal safety considerations are insufficient to motivate you to use your seatbelt, consider the effect our judicial process may have on your pocketbook.