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Leaving the Scene of an Accident (Hit and Run)

The legal duties every state imposes on a driver involved in a crash - to stop, to exchange information and to help anyone hurt - and the separate criminal offence of driving away instead.

Informational only - this is not legal advice. These definitions explain general legal vocabulary in plain English. They are not advice about your situation, reading them creates no attorney-client relationship, and the law differs from state to state and changes over time. For advice you can rely on, speak to a lawyer licensed in your state.

What it means

A driver involved in a collision - with another vehicle, a pedestrian, a cyclist, or unattended property - is required by every state to stop at or near the scene, to give their name, address, vehicle registration and (on request) licence and insurance details to the other party or the police, and to render reasonable assistance to anyone injured, which at minimum means summoning help. Where the other party is not present, as with a parked car, the duty is typically to leave a note and report the collision. Fault is irrelevant to these duties: a driver who did nothing wrong in the collision commits the offence by leaving.

Leaving the scene is a criminal offence in its own right, separate from any charge arising from the crash itself. Its grade depends on the harm: leaving after property damage is generally a lesser offence, while leaving after an injury or death is a serious crime in every state, often a felony, and frequently punished more heavily than the underlying crash would have been. A conviction also brings licence consequences and, for insurance purposes, may allow an insurer to deny coverage.

The offence requires knowledge - that a collision occurred, or that it was reasonably apparent. A driver who genuinely did not know they had struck something is not guilty of leaving, though what a driver "should have known" is often the contested question, and returning to the scene or reporting promptly matters both to the charge and to how it is treated.

Where this comes from

The duties to stop, exchange information and render aid, and the offence of failing to do so, are created by each state's motor-vehicle code, and the grading of the offence by the harm involved is state law. There is no general federal hit-and-run statute; the federal government's role is limited to reporting standards and highway-safety funding.

When people hire a lawyer for this

If you have left a scene, even a minor one, the sequence in which you report, speak to police and speak to your insurer matters, and it is one of the situations in which talking to a lawyer first is the practical course rather than the evasive one. If you were the person hit, an uninsured-motorist claim on your own policy is often the route to compensation when the other driver is never found.

Find a lawyer for this in your state

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Part of the LawyerLand plain-English legal glossary. Definitions are written from primary sources - statutes and court rules - and each entry states the authority it rests on, or says plainly when the doctrine is state law with no national rule.

If you cannot afford a lawyer, civil legal aid programmes provide free help with many of these problems: civil legal aid programmes by state.

Related free reference tools: statute of limitations for a personal-injury claim, by state, quoted from each state's official text - part of LawyerLand's legal reference tools.