In New Mexico, you will need to establish the following elements by a preponderance of the evidence in order to recover damages for negligence: the other driver's duty towards you, a breach of duty, causation, and damages. All drivers in New Mexico owe a duty to use reasonable care based on weather conditions and traffic rules. Many different actions or omissions may be considered a breach of duty, such as texting, talking on the phone, running a stop sign, failing to yield at an intersection, or applying make-up.
If the breach of care is the legal cause of an accident in which you suffer broken bones, you may be able to recover compensatory damages. The causation element typically consists of proving that the accident was a reasonably foreseeable result of the defendant’s carelessness and that you would not have been hurt if the defendant had met the appropriate standard of care.
A wide range of damages may be available to car crash victims, depending on their circumstances. Both economic and non-economic forms of harm typically can be compensated. Examples of economic, or relatively objective, damages include hospital bills and the costs of future treatment as well as lost wages caused by missed time at work or repairs to a vehicle. Non-economic damages tend to be more subjective. They may include the pain and suffering that you experienced during and after the accident, as well as any scarring or disfigurement that resulted.
New Mexico follows the rule of comparative negligence. This means that if a plaintiff is partly responsible for the accident, his or her award of damages will be reduced by the amount of his or her comparative fault. Some states require that the plaintiff must be less responsible, or no more responsible, for the accident than the defendant in order to recover any damages. However, New Mexico does not follow this modified comparative negligence rule. It uses a system of pure comparative negligence, under which an accident victim can potentially receive compensation as long as he or she was not completely responsible for the crash.