Everyone drinks, and for most of us, the result isn’t much worse than a severe hangover. But for a few, drinking complicates an already catastrophic personal injury by inviting a few judgmental people to "blame the victim." If you were injured in an accident caused by someone else’s carelessness, your injuries are not your fault. The mere fact that you were drinking doesn’t release the person who injured you from responsibility for his or her own actions. Nor will it unfairly keep you from having your day in court.

Evidence that you were drinking may not even be allowed in the courtroom. Just as having had some alcohol doesn’t mean you’re drunk, Pennsylvania courts have held that a jury shouldn’t assume you were impaired just because you drank alcohol. Time also matters—if it’s been a few hours since you had a drink, you may not be intoxicated anymore. Even a low BAC reading showing you drank alcohol—but not enough to put you over the legal limit of 0.08%—is insufficient evidence of intoxication in our courts. The other side must still show that you were intoxicated with more concrete evidence, like a high BAC reading or witness reports of visible signs of intoxication. Without that proof, evidence that you were drinking cannot be used in court, because it might unfairly prejudice the jury against you.

But even if you were clearly intoxicated, that doesn’t automatically release others from their responsibility for causing your injuries. You may still sue a person who injured you, such as the driver of a car that hit you while you were walking home from a bar. If your own intoxication is admitted as evidence, however, it may cause you to recover less money in court than you might have otherwise. That’s because in Pennsylvania, we have a comparative negligence law -- a law that assigns damages to a plaintiff based on how much fault he or she bears for the injury. In the pedestrian accident example, a jury might find that you were 5% at fault and the driver was 95% at fault for the accident. In that situation, you would collect 95% of the damages you won.

And in Pennsylvania, we also have a "dram shop" law -- a law that holds alcohol-serving establishments liable for the actions of customers who were "visibly intoxicated" and should not have been served. (The law also holds hosts of private parties responsible for allowing minors to become intoxicated and cause accidents.) Importantly, the dram shop law allows the drinkers themselves to sue over their own injuries -- if the defendant gave them alcohol when they were visibly intoxicated. In fact, Anapol Schwartz has won major settlements for clients in similar situations, who were injured in one-car accidents caused in part by a business’s negligence in serving them when they were already clearly impaired.