Personal Injuries and DWIs in North Carolina
If you’re injured by a drunk driver in North Carolina, your claim should be taken VERY seriously by everyone involved.
Obviously, drinking and driving is bad. But there’s more to it than that. From an injury claim perspective, the value of the claim is significantly enhanced. Here’s the scoop: In a negligence claim you can seek to recover from the tortfeasor what are called “compensatory” damages. That essentially means reimbursement for what you lost: medical treatment costs, lost wages, and something for pain and suffering are the traditional big three items we are looking for (what I call the Holy Trinity of personal injury law).
Every state is different, but n North Carolina you can, under very limited circumstances, ask a court to award you not simply the compensatory damages (paying you back for what you lost) but you can also ask the court for punitive damages. Those are damages that have NOTHING to do with your losses; they are simply there as a possibility to deter that sort of behavior.
What’s more, in the VERY limited circumstances that you can request punitive damages, the amount you can request is limited in North Carolina to the greater of three times compensatory damages or $250,000. However, there is ONE exception: In DWI injury claims, there is NO LIMIT TO PUNITIVE DAMAGES.
This is an IMMENSELY important fact. In NO OTHER instance in NC can you ask a jury to just make up a punitive number that they think is warranted under the circumstances. It’s bananas.
But there’s always a catch, right? Where does that money come from? Granted, some of the people driving drunk and smashing into folks have deep pockets, but certainly that’s not the majority of them. How are you going to actually GET the money from a punitive damages award?
The good news is that automobile liability policies are responsible for punitive damages in NC (this is not the case in some states, I’m told). So that means that if you get a punitive damages award, the at-fault carrier is on the hook! This is good, but the fact is that most people in NC have a minimum limits policy which at the time of this writing is $30,000 per person. That means that the total amount that any one plaintiff could recover from that kind of policy, whether it’s just compensatory or compensatory AND punitive damages, would be $30,000.
So what do you do then?
If you have Underinsured (UIM) motorist coverage AND your recovery exceeds the limits of the at fault party, you might be able to recover against your own policy. Don’t hesitate to do this by the way, regardless of it being your own policy. This is PRECISELY what you’ve been paying for all these years so it would be the height of foolishness not to use it. While UIM policies are there to help fill in the blanks left by lower limits policies, they are not on the hook for punitive damage verdicts, so you shouldn’t be willing to try your case on the hopes that you’ll get punitives covered by your own carrier.
This is weird and complicated stuff. All the more reason to talk to an attorney. Talk to me! 919-929-2992
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