And don’t forget the City’s Code of Silence trial begins today.  I hope that Jerome Larkin can make a cameo appearance and explain the ARDC role in all of this.

http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/code-of-silence-trial-could-put-mayor-emanuel-on-the-stand/

Lawyers have taken an oath to uphold the constitutions of the US and their own state.  We don’t “take up arms” because we know that the only time there is a win for a democracy it is done in a legislature or in a courtroom, generally a Federal District Courtroom, and yet the small person has been banned for most suits in Federal District Court.

Something has to change. We spend $2 billion per day on the Pentagon, while our rights are being slowly eroded away in the US and State courtrooms.  I recall when the judges were very interested in justice and would brag about how they helped the common guy.  Now the judges to your face brag about how they next have a $50 million case up next before them and your damages are pennies, so please get out of the way.

What happened?  Well I think I can tell you what happened.  It has now been one year since I have been suspended and 2 years since Ken has been suspended trying to protect YOUR first amendment rights.  There is no public outcry, there is no stream of letters to anyone who care about 2 attorneys who served the public and the little guy without hope.

This tells me a lot about what is need in the practice of law and for the people, and that is pretty much nothing.

Most of you know that I am in need of money for rent ($18,000), now money for my office phones ($500), they are shut off.  Now all I do is blog about cases and write books, but it seems like that isn’t important work.  I do understand that other lawyers took your money, not me.  I understand that the probate court seized assets of the innocent trying to protect the innocent, but there is no public outcry for you or for me or the elderly and disabled.  Ken and I and Mr. Amu are pretty much it.  Bev and Ken Cooper do some great work too.

I understand the Jesus healed 10 people, only one went back to pay him and there was no mention of payment out of gratitude. People have a long way to go, and I appreciate it.  I really do.

So, those of you that care, keep on praying.  But for now, everything waits until I get in my motion for Sanctions.

And then I promise that you, the little guy, will be at the top of my list.  Not some mega corp always trying to screw us all over to make a few bucks and then have the courts rubber stamp their string of thefts from our bank accounts.

I want to protect the elderly and disabled and blog about it and perhaps represent some really, really bad cases and I want to do discovery and send out pleadings so people can represent themselves the world.

Please continue to send me you guardianship and custody horror stories. I do want to take these to the Senate and House and demand they both do something about the lack of accountability in our court systems and lack of justice.

JoAnne

start at 8 minutes into this show.

Horrifying. The ARDC, the states attorneys (Madigan, Alvarez and Saltoun) were alerted and no one did anything about this. The FBI was alerted and did nothing.

Join in a public outcry for abuses done to the elderly and disabled.

okay, I voted her that, but I know she helps other women who have been through the worst–and that is prostitution.  A crime that no one does anything about where in the US we have the most trafficked women, girls and boys.

I have had contact with trafficked women in Chicago, and believe me, no one helps. I faxed the FBI, the states attorneys (Madigan, Alvarez, etc.), the Chicago police department and no one responded.

For that, I am giving Brenda Powell my vote and this blog’s vote for Woman of the Year.

Keep on going, Brenda!

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33113238?SThisFB

My 25 years as a prostitute

Brenda Myers-Powell was just a child when she became a prostitute in the early 1970s. Here she describes how she was pulled into working on the streets and why, three decades later, she devoted her life to making sure other girls don’t fall into the same trap. Some people will find Brenda’s account upsetting.

Right from the start life was handing me lemons, but I’ve always tried to make the best lemonade I can.

I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from – my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on. The official explanation is that it was “natural causes”.

I don’t believe that. Who dies at 16 from natural causes? I like to think that God was just ready for her. I heard stories that she was beautiful and had a great sense of humour. I know that’s true because I have one also.

It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person – in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it.

She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid – I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.

I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny.

One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off.

To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with – an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things. I was a really outgoing girl – I used to laugh a lot.

At the same time, I was afraid, always afraid. I didn’t know if what was happening was my fault or not. I thought perhaps something was wrong with me. Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” – if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me.

By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing.

So, one evening – it was actually Good Friday – I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older.

I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it.

I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from.

The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home.

But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet.

That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.

They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse – the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under.

Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part.

When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no-one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet.

And the johns – the clients – are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or mental illness or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously.

I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.

I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system.

I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body.

I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.

And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas. I remember looking up and saying to God, “These people don’t care about me. Could you please help me?”

---

Find out more

• Brenda Myers-Powell spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service
• Listen to the interview on iPlayer
• Dreamcatcher, a film about Brenda directed by Kim Longinotto, will be shown in the BBC’s Storyville strand in the UK later this year

---

God worked real fast. A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around.

It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed – and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back.

Through Edwina Gateley, I learned the value of that deep connection that can occur between women, the circle of trust and love and support that a group of women can give one another.

Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else.

But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.”

So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded theDreamcatcher Foundation. A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do – we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women.

The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.”

I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways – the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.

So far, we have 13 girls who have graduated from high school and are now in city colleges or have gotten full scholarships to go to other colleges. They came to us 11, 12, 13 years old, totally damaged. And now they’re reaching for the stars.

Besides my outreach work, I attend conferences and contribute to academic work on prostitution. I’ve had people say to me, “Brenda, come and meet Professor so-and-so from such-and-such university. He’s an expert on prostitution.” And I look at him and I want to say: “Really? Where did you get your credentials? What do you really know about prostitution? The expert is standing in front of you.”

I know I belong in that room but sometimes I have to let them know I belong there. And I think it’s ridiculous that there are organisations that campaign against human trafficking, that do not employ a single person who has been trafficked.

People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalised. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat.

But let me ask you a question. How many people would you encourage to quit their jobs to become prostitutes? Would you say to any of your close friends or female relatives, “Hey, have you thought of this? I think this would be a really great move for you!”

And let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.

Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.

There are good women in this world and also bad women. There are bad men and also good men.

Following my time as a prostitute, I simply wasn’t ready for another relationship. But after three years of healing and abstinence, I met an extraordinary man. I was very picky – he likes to joke that I asked him more questions than the parole board. He didn’t judge me for any of the things that had happened before we met. When he looked at me he didn’t even see those things – he says all he saw was a girl with a pretty smile that he wanted to be a part of his life. I sure wanted to be a part of his too. He supports me in everything I do, and we celebrated 10 years of marriage last year.

My daughters, who were raised by my aunt in the suburbs, grew up to be awesome young ladies. One is a doctor and one works in criminal justice. Now my husband and I have adopted my little nephew – and here I am, 58 years old, a football mum.

So I am here to tell you – there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life – and I’m not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.

Brenda Myers-Powell appeared on Outlook on the BBC World Service. Listen again to the interview on iPlayer or get the Outlook podcast. The documentary Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, will be broadcast in the UK as part of the BBC’s Storyville strand in October. Production by William Kremer.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-edward-snowden-is-a-hero

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to be hiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”

Before accepting such claims at face value, let’s remind ourselves of what the leaks so far have not contained. They didn’t reveal anything about the algorithms that the N.S.A. uses, the groups or individuals that the agency targets, or the identities of U.S. agents. They didn’t contain the contents of any U.S. military plans, or of any conversations between U.S. or foreign officials. As Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who broke the story, pointed out on “Morning Joe” today, this wasn’t a WikiLeaks-style data dump. “[Snowden] spent months meticulously studying every document,” Greenwald said. “He didn’t just upload them to the Internet.”

So, what did the leaks tell us? First, they confirmed that the U.S. government, without obtaining any court warrants, routinely collects the phone logs of tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Americans, who have no links to terrorism whatsoever. If the publicity prompts Congress to prevent phone companies such as Verizon and A.T. & T. from acting as information-gathering subsidiaries of the spying agencies, it won’t hamper legitimate domestic-surveillance operations—the N.S.A. can always go to court to obtain a wiretap or search warrant—and it will be a very good thing for the country.

The second revelation in the leaks was that the N.S.A., in targeting foreign suspects, has the capacity to access vast amounts of user data from U.S.-based Internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Skype. Exactly how this is done remains a bit murky. But it’s clear that, in the process of monitoring the communications of overseas militants and officials and the people who communicate with them, the N.S.A. sweeps up a great deal of online data about Americans, and keeps it locked away—seemingly forever.

Conceivably, the fact that Uncle Sam is watching their Facebook and Google accounts could come as news to some dimwit would-be jihadis in foreign locales, prompting them to communicate in ways that are harder for the N.S.A. to track. But it will hardly surprise the organized terrorist groups, which already go to great lengths to avoid being monitored. Not for nothing did Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad go without a phone or Internet connection.

Another Snowden leak, which Greenwald and the Guardian published over the weekend, was a set of documents concerning another secret N.S.A. tracking program with an Orwellian name: “Boundless Informant.” Apparently designed to keep Snowden’s former bosses abreast of what sorts of data it was collecting around the world, the program unveiled the vast reach of the N.S.A.’s activities. In March, 2013, alone, the Guardian reported, the N.S.A. collected ninety-seven billion pieces of information from computer networks worldwide, and three billion of those pieces came from U.S.-based networks.

It’s hardly surprising that the main targets for the N.S.A.’s data collection were Iran (fourteen billion pieces in that period) and Pakistan (more than thirteen billion), but countries such as Jordan, India, and Egypt, American allies all, may be a bit surprised to find themselves so high on the list. “We hack everyone everywhere,” Snowden told the Guardian. “We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

For most Americans, the main concern will be domestic spying, and the chronic lack of oversight that Snowden’s leaks have highlighted. In the years since 9/11, the spying agencies have been given great leeway to expand their activities, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which deals with legal requests from the agencies, and the congressional intelligence committees, which nominally oversees all of their activities, all too often acting as rubber stamps rather than proper watchdogs.

Partly, that was due to lack of gumption and an eagerness to look tough on issues of counterterrorism. But it also reflected a lack of information. Just a couple of months ago, at a Senate hearing, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, one of the few legislators to sound any misgivings over the activities of the intelligence agencies, asked Clapper, “Does the N.S.A. collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” To which Clapper replied: “No, sir.” (He added, “Not wittingly.”) At another hearing, General Keith Alexander, the director of the N.S.A., denied fourteen times that the agency had the technical capability to intercept e-mails and other online communications in the United States.

Thanks to Snowden, and what he told the Guardian and the Washington Post, we now have cause to doubt the truth of this testimony. In Snowden’s words: “The N.S.A. has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

Were Clapper and Alexander deliberately lying? If so, perhaps Snowden should be extradited to the United States and dragged into court—but only as part of a proceeding in which the two spymasters face charges of misleading Congress. I suppose you could make the argument that he is a naïve young man who didn’t fully understand the dangerous nature of the world in which we live. You could question his motives, and call him a publicity seeker, or an idiot. (Fleeing to Hong Kong wasn’t very smart.) But he doesn’t sound like an airhead; he sounds like that most awkward and infuriating of creatures—a man of conscience. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things,” he told Greenwald. “I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

So what is Snowden’s real crime? Like Ellsberg, Vanunu, and Bradley Manning before him, he uncovered questionable activities that those in power would rather have kept secret. That’s the valuable role that whistle-blowers play in a free society, and it’s one that, in each individual case, should be weighed against the breach of trust they commit, and the potential harm their revelations can cause. In some instances, conceivably, the interests of the state should prevail. Here, though, the scales are clearly tipped in Snowden’s favor.

I’ll leave the last word to Ellsberg, who, for revealing to the world that that Pentagon knew early on that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable, was described in some quarters as a communist and a traitor: “Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans’ and foreign citizens’ privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we’re trying to protect.”

Most people in the US do not know who Edward Snowden is or what he has accomplished.  Further, they think he is similar to Julian Assange which just dumped tons of data–mostly old information about how the Vietnam war was a farce and the US Govt knew it and wasted billions of dollars on it and killed tens of thousands of young US men.  It was murder without bounds.

So I hope this article clears up the confusion.  Snowden carefully leaked the unconstitutional aspects of the US Govt’s massive spying system, with out providing the underlying information of the secrets of US Citizens or the US government.  He just stated the extent of spying on US citizens and explained why it was unconsitutional.  He also revealed enough information on how the NSA works so that this information can show that NSA officials routinely went to Congressional hearings and just plain lied about what the NSA was doing.

Edward Snowden leaked the system and not the contents, for the most part.  His information was crucial for Congress to know it had been substantially lied to over the years.  He was a man of conscience.

Julian Assange does something similar but his activites appear to center on old data dumps and whisteblower type activites where he posts what other leak.

From Roseanne Miller

http://nypost.com/2016/05/22/justice-department-lawyers-got-a-slap-they-deserved/

In a stinging slap at the Justice Department, a federal judge last week ordered practically all the lawyers in its main DC office to take ethics training for five years.

At that, they got off lightly: Judge Andrew Hanen said he would have disbarred the lawyers, who had deceived him, if he had the power.

Hanen was the judge who heard the request by 26 states to toss out President Obama’s 2014 executive order granting temporarily legal status to millions of immigrants who aren’t actually legal.

The case is now before the Supreme Court — which is the only reason Hanen didn’t issue a summary judgment against Obama and the lawyers who lied.

Federal rules of civil procedure require attorneys to neither mislead the courts, nor allow the courts to be misled. Hanen found that the Justice lawyers had done just that — in his court.

How so? The states were considering filing for an immediate injunction to stop Justice from implementing the Obama order. The lawyers assured Hanen in court that nothing would go ahead before February 2015, so there was no need.

Then the department went ahead and “legalized” 100,000 illegals — without ever telling the judge.

Hence his fury once he learned the truth.

Hanen not only barred the offending attorneys from ever appearing in his court again, he ordered ethics training for all lawyers from “Main Justice,” the DC central office, who might appear in courts in any of the 26 states.

He has also ordered Attorney General Loretta Lynch to present within 60 days her plan for making sure Justice lawyers never play such games again.

We don’t blame Lynch: This all went on under her predecessor, Eric Holder. But we hope she embraces Hanen’s order rather than trying to appeal.

All lawyers have an obligation “to act honestly in all of their dealings with a court,” as Hanen put it. And attorneys at the Justice Department have a clear duty to be candid with the courts.

Lynch might want to see if she can get her guilty subordinates disbarred.

And from

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/05/19/judge-orders-ethics-training-doj-lawyers/84624098/

“Clearly, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about or adherence to the duties of professional responsibility in the halls of the Justice Department,” Hanen wrote in a 28-page order in which he sought to emphasize his demand for “honesty” by quoting dialogue from the movie “Miracle on 34th Street.”

“The need to tell the truth, especially in court, was obvious to a fictional young Tommy Mara Jr., in 1947, yet there are certain attorneys in the Justice Department who apparently have not received that message or more likely have just decided they are above such trivial concepts,” the judge stated.

http://www.nextavenue.org/guardianship-u-s-protection-exploitation/

NEXT AVENUE BLOGGER

• 
  By Emily GurnonHealth & Caregiving Editor

Ginger Franklin of Nashville speaks before the Tennessee Bar Association.

(Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series on guardianship abuses appearing this week on Next Avenue.)

Note:  JMD comments in blue

Ginger Franklin was just shy of her 50th birthday when she fell down the stairs of her Nashville-area townhouse in 2008. A marketing representative for Sam’s Club, she was taken to the hospital with a severe brain injury. Doctors weren’t sure if she would survive.

Since Franklin had not designated anyone to make decisions for her if she became incapacitated, and with no immediate family, her aunt was advised to petition the court for a guardian. The guardian, a lawyer appointed by the county, placed her in a group home for seriously mentally ill adults.

But Franklin was not mentally ill. And she did what no one expected her to do: she recovered.

When she returned home from a rehabilitation center seven weeks later, however, the guardian “told me that I didn’t have a home anymore and that my townhouse was empty,” Franklin said.

Some of these cases are the ugliest family cases you can imagine…. somebody who did not get access to Mom and Dad’s money [against] someone who did.

— Brenda Uekert, National Center for State Courts

(Note, in many other cases you can be targeted by the  OPG–Office of Public Guardian, the hospitals you stay in, financial planners–anyone that might sell your elderly loved one to a for-profit guardian, attorney, CPA, nursing home or other professional at hundreds of dollars per hour)

As is common in guardianship cases, the court granted permission for the guardian to sell Franklin’s home and its contents. The owners of the group home where she was placed then put Franklin to work: She was forced to do the grocery shopping, cook, dispense medication, watch over the other residents of the house and clean the owners’ personal home — for no pay, Franklin said. Meanwhile, she was paying $850 monthly rent to the owners, plus $200-per-hour attorney fees to the guardian for such tasks as writing checks for Franklin’s expenses and leaving phone messages, according to a court document.

With the help of an advocate, and media attention, Franklin fought the guardianship in court, winning her freedom in 2010 after two long years of having no legal rights. She now lives independently in the Nashville area and has sued the guardian.

“It’s quite an understatement to say I was devastated,” she told Next Avenue. “I don’t trust people anymore. I lost everything — because I fell down the stairs.”

Note: the mantra is “target, isolate, medicate, drain the estate, narcotize to death, quietly cremate.”

More Will Enter ‘The Danger Age’

 

The article then goes on to quote one of the four GAO reports from the Senate Subcommitte on Aging that are published elsewhere on this blog.

As the boomer population moves into old age, the numbers of people affected by guardianship and conservatorship will rise “tremendously,” said Jennifer Wright, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis who directs the school’s Elder Law Practice Group.

“There are more of us who are going to enter the danger age,” she said.

Primary, there  will be more entering the danger age AND being endangered because law enforcement currently will not touch any of these cases, nor will the bar association, so the strings of felonies committed against seniors under color of law, will sky rocket.

With as little as a single document — and in some cases, not even a court hearing — older adults can see their most basic rights stripped away. They cannot vote, get married or get divorced. A family member or a stranger appointed by the court will decide where they will live, how their money will be spent, what health care they will get or not get, when they will go out, when and where they may travel and whom they are allowed to see.

Guardianships: Difficult to Challenge

Rarely is an “incapacitated person” or ward able to get a guardianship or conservatorship terminated — until death, that is. Franklin was, in that sense, very lucky.

“Go ahead and see what you can do, because you have been deemed incapacitated, so everything you say or do is meaningless,” said Brenda Uekert, principal court research consultant with the National Center for State Courts. “You can’t even get an attorney, because a judge has already determined that you don’t have the ability to make decisions for yourself.”

You can note right here that any attorney that you get will come from a “secret list” the judge has and they will generally do nothing but drain your estate. They will not advocate with a flurry of motions, writs of habeus corpus, nada, nothing.  You will not get a budget, you will not get ratings of former “clients” that were served by the attorneys.  Check out Judge Gorcya’s testimony where she “appoints” three attorneys for the children that file nothing, no motions to vacate, no motions to reconsider, no appeals, no writ of habeus corpus.

Those who do try to fight often end up paying exorbitant amounts of money.

“Many families go bankrupt because they believe if they hang in there long enough the system will work for them, and it doesn’t,” said Elaine Renoire, a director of the National Association to Stop Guardian Abuse in Loocootee, Ind., a victims’ rights group. The No. 1 complaint she hears: guardians who try to isolate older adults from their loved ones.

In her 2014 book, The Con Game: A Failure of Trust, business professor T.S. Laham of Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area wrote that America’s guardianship system is “an open invitation to potential abuse.” (Next Avenue wrote about the book last year.)

Definitions Inconsistent, Numbers Elusive

What is meant by the terms “guardian” and “conservator” varies depending on the state. National groups working on reform efforts use “guardian” to refer to a person appointed by the court to make decisions over an individual and “conservator” to refer to a person appointed to handle the estate. Some use the terms interchangeably or use one to cover both situations.

Note:  In Illinois:  (755 ILCS 5/11a-3) (from Ch. 110 1/2, par. 11a-3)
Sec. 11a-3. Adjudication of disability; Power to appoint guardian.
(a) Upon the filing of a petition by a reputable person or by the alleged disabled person himself or on its own motion, the court may adjudge a person to be a disabled person, but only if it has been demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that the person is a disabled person as defined in Section 11a-2. If the court adjudges a person to be a disabled person, the court may appoint (1) a guardian of his person, if it has been demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that because of his disability he lacks sufficient understanding or capacity to make or communicate responsible decisions concerning the care of his person, or (2) a guardian of his estate, if it has been demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that because of his disability he is unable to manage his estate or financial affairs, or (3) a guardian of his person and of his estate.
(b) Guardianship shall be utilized only as is necessary to promote the well-being of the disabled person, to protect him from neglect, exploitation, or abuse, and to encourage development of his maximum self-reliance and independence. Guardianship shall be ordered only to the extent necessitated by the individual’s actual mental, physical and adaptive limitations.

But what happens in an Illinois courtroom, there is no trial, there is just an “agreement” between all the court appointed attorneys to guardianize and it’s nearly always a full guardianship, no matter what the more reputable MD says, they have courtroom troll docs who make sure it’s 100% incapacity of the elder and 24-7 care to drain the estate as fast and furious as possible.

It is difficult to impossible to know how many people are under guardianship or conservatorship in the United States, experts said. Many states do not do comprehensive record-keeping. A 2013 AARP report gave a “best guess” estimate of the number of adults under guardianship nationally at 1.5 million, but added the data “are scant and vary in quality.”

One has to wonder about this comment.  A guardian has a legal duty to report every year on the condition of the ward and spread on the record any death in a prompt manner. Someone could do the accounting, but apparently no one cares about grandma or grandpa  I suppose it is just as well, CPS or Child Protectioin or Family Protection Service loses tens of thousand of children every year in the system making one wonder if the system can just be dismantled and done on an ad hoc basis.

Despite the lack of statistics, those familiar with the system say the vast majority of guardians and conservators, perhaps 80 percent or more, are relatives of the incapacitated person.

Idaho and Minnesota are the only states that track the amount of money being controlled by guardians or conservators; the combined total for just those two states is over $1 billion, according to Uekert.

A Parade of Atrocities

Abuses that have been reported in recent years include the following:

• A Phoenix woman, Marie Long, had managed through careful saving and investing to amass $1.3 million by the time she had a stroke in 2005. Four years later, she was nearly broke, her estate having been bilked by an unscrupulous guardian agency that, among other things, charged $50 per hour for someone to open her mail, according to the Arizona Republic. The agency later closed shop; Long died in 2014.
• Daniel Gross of Long Island was hospitalized with cellulitis while visiting a daughter in Connecticut in 2005. When his children began arguing over his care and who should control his money, he was placed under conservatorship in that state without being told of a hearing; his court-appointed lawyer didn’t object. Gross then landed in a locked nursing home ward with a violent roommate, the Hartford Courant wrote. He was later freed by a judge who called what happened under a different jurist “a terrible miscarriage of justice.“
• Sixty-seven-year-old William Kehl suffered a major stroke that landed him in a Punta Gorda, Fla., hospital in 2008. When the facility wanted to discharge him to a distant rehab center, his ex-wife and medical power-of-attorney resisted. The hospital petitioned the court to appoint a guardian, who sold off Kehl’s assets and paid herself $1,827 a month until Kehl’s ex-wife managed to take over as guardian and bring him to her home, according to a 2014 article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
• Palm Beach County, Fla., Circuit Judge Martin Colin was transferred from the court’s guardianship division earlier this year after an investigation by the Palm Beach Post raised questions of a conflict of interest based on the fact that his wife was a paid professional guardian in the same court.
• A Las Vegas woman, Patience Bristol, is now in prison after pleading guilty in 2013 to exploitation of a vulnerable person. She “tapped the accounts of her [four] wards to cover her sizable gambling debts and personal expenses” totaling $495,000 in just one case, according to a lawsuit reported in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

For more cases, see my current list of 30 cases I intend to take to the Senate Committee on Aging and I ask that people email me for a survey form joanne@denisonlaw.com

Reasons for the Abuse

The principle behind guardianship and conservatorship is noble: Make sure that someone who cannot take care of himself or herself has another person or institution watching out for their interests.

And in most instances, it works the way it should, say professionals who have pursued reform efforts.

But dig into the details and a more complicated picture emerges.

“The system is underfunded. There’s not enough judges who understand what to do and how to do it. There’s not enough volunteers to do the work. And there’s not enough money to pay people to do it on a compensatory basis,” said Bernard A. Krooks, founding partner of the New York law firm Littman Krooks.

Courts need — but often lack — the money for staff to oversee guardians and conservators and to review the periodic reports they are required to submit. There may be a shortage of judges to handle cases of all kinds, including guardianships. Counties often lack the funds to appoint public or professional guardians when the ward is indigent.

“And you’re dealing with the most vulnerable segment of the population,” including the elderly and disabled who cannot stand up for themselves, Krooks said. “So you’ve just got a recipe for disaster, and that’s what’s happening in a lot of states.”

The main problem is that this has been a system of greed and corruption for decades.  There should be a FBI agent on every probate floor right outside the door everytime probate is in session. And if there is ONE complaint the dude is useless, he should be kicked to the curb.  Most corruption clients of mine file dozens of complaints with the authorities–all valid and reasonable and 99% are dismissed without any investigation being done.  Reports of abuse presented in court are frequently handed right back to the abusers–the court tied in troll doctors, lawyers and anti social workers.

Angling for the Money

But much of it starts, he said, with greed.

“We’re seeing [relatives] initiate ‘will contests’ while the person is still alive — I think that’s what a lot of these contested guardianships come down to,” Krooks said. In those cases, what may be argued is not whether there should be a guardian but who it should be.

Uekert agreed. “Some of these cases are the ugliest family cases you can imagine. Some of them make child custody cases seem like a cake walk… somebody who did not get access to Mom and Dad’s money (against) someone who did,” she said.

Note:  the real question here is, why are there no hearings on this, no due process, no petition, no briefing schedule, no hearing, no trial on the issue of visitation?  Better yet, the Elder Federal Protection Act of 2009 says if an elder or disabled wants to see a person, and that person wants to see the Elder, why isn’t that being done?

The petitioner — the person or institution asking a court for the guardianship — can be a relative or a nursing home or a hospital. The judge may appoint any of those — or name a professional guardian (if the ward has assets) or a public guardian (if a ward has no money).

Note, that while appointing a nursing home is an obvious conflict of interest, this happens all the time.  People file petitions who will benefit from it tremendously.  And if they don’t do it, they pass it along to someone who will act as a strawman in the case.  No one is tracking any of the money that flows all over the place–kickbacks and payoffs and finder’s fees are very common.  Elders for cash.

Catherine Seal, a Colorado attorney who has worked in elder law for 20 years and been involved in guardianship reform, said state laws on the issue vary greatly. However, Seal noted, “Even in the states with the most sophisticated statutes, you still have court hearings that happen ex parte, which means that nobody gets to be there other than the petitioner.” She said she had a recent case in which a judge signed an initial order appointing an emergency guardian without any hearing and without the required affidavits swearing to the allegations in the petition.

“I represented the respondent, and I went into court as soon as I could, and we got the thing dismissed — because the court didn’t have the necessary information,” Seal said. Her client had the means to pay for an attorney, she said. Most don’t.

In John Wyman’s mother’s case, the Order for Guardianship was “walked thru” days before the date set by statutory notice for hearing, leaving the case without jurisdiction.  When I came into the case to do a Motion to Dismiss based upon lack of jurisdiction, Judge Fabiano was furious, turned red, and repeated like a parrot,  I was being disrespectful to her.  I apologized, said I was not trying to be disrespectful, but had to state the facts and law for the record so we could all get out of there.  She calmed down after that.

Limited Background Checks of Non-Professional Guardians

In December 2014, a survey on state guardianship laws and court practices found that almost 40 percent of the 1,000 respondents said that criminal background checks were not required of non-professional guardians of an estate. Respondents to the survey, commissioned by the Administrative Conference of the United States, included judges, court staff and guardians from around the country.

Sixty percent of the court respondents said they did not require a credit or financial background check on a prospective guardian.

But a background check could alert a judge to the potential for abuse once the guardian or conservator has control of someone’s assets. Seal said judges should require guardians to get a bond so the protected person can be “made whole” in the event of misuse or fraud.

If a financial institution refuses to issue the bond, that’s a red flag. “If you’re not a good financial risk, you shouldn’t be in charge of the money,” she said.

What’s with the credit check obsession?  Why not just come out and make them file Ethics Reports detailing all the money they have received in the health care industry, if they get bribes or kickbacks and identify the source.  Also, let family members get their bank account records showing all deposits into any account they own, or their spouse.  Why be so shy?  And they should also be tested for psychopathy and the results published.  Turns out that psychopaths and narcissists are proud of the fact they feel no tender emotions such as love, kindness, caring, sympathy, empathy or remorse because it “helps them have superior thinking.”  Right.

Where the Courts Fall Short

Seal and other experts said that once guardianships or conservatorships are established, monitoring of those ongoing relationships often falls short.

“Courts are not set up well to monitor guardians,” but rather to initiate a process, get it finished and deliver a decision, Seal said.

Uekert agreed with others that an enormous part of the problem is funding.

The problem is not funding.  It’s stealing.

“Everything is contingent on the courts trying to do this out of budgets that the state legislatures don’t want to support,” she said. “If the court is responsible for monitoring and doesn’t have anybody who can effectively act as a court visitor, audit cases or review accounting, to what extent can a court monitor?”

Duh, require a guardian to do it themselves or be subject to a subpoena if someone suspects there is lying.   Also they should be required to be subject to 1) a budget for a case; 2) publish their criminal record or lack thereof; 3) publish an Ethics Report yearly detailing all their sources of income and amounts and their spouse’s too.

Judges and attorneys — especially those in rural counties who deal only rarely with guardianships — may be uninformed or impervious to changes in the law.

Not true, the blogs are out there and they are chock full of detailed stories such as this one. Anyone sitting as a probate judge should be required  to read the probate blogs–not the news, the probate blogs. Not the cases they are on, but other cases in other states.

Wright said that in her early years of practicing elder law in Oregon, when she was representing someone in a contested guardianship and objected to part of the proceeding, “The judge said on the record, ‘Well, I don’t pay much attention to the rules of evidence or civil procedure in cases like this.’ So the judge has just told me outright that he doesn’t obey the law — what am I going to do now?”

No, read between the lines.  What he told you is, the case is fixed, sweetie.  There is even a CLE video on this blog showing a judge AND an attorney informing the audience on how to fix a case. This is one way.  Kick procedure and the Bill of Rights to the curb.  This attorney should have reported the judge for case fixing and he should have been removed.

How The Situation Is Improving

Experts who have been involved in the guardianship arena for decades said that, even with all the problems, the situation has improved.

In those early days of her practice, Wright said it was a different world.

“There was almost no due process at all. And not only that, there was almost no perception that due process was important,” she said. A large proportion of guardianships were done by default — meaning that as long as the petitioner showed the proposed ward had been notified, that was all that needed to happen.

“No hearing, no inquiries as to why they didn’t respond or whether they were trying to figure out how to,” Wright said. “And that was considered perfectly fine.”

The attitude was, we’re doing something nice for these people, she said.

Everyone has good intentions. But even when they do, Wright said, the ward can be harmed.

That continues to happen far too often, said Alison Hirschel, director of the Michigan Elder Justice Initiative and the elder law specialist at the Michigan Poverty Law Program. Laws may be enacted and refined, but changes fail to materialize in the courtrooms where guardianships are decided.

In Michigan, Hirschel said, the law as written is very good. “The problem is what happens in probate law practice. If a petition is filed against someone, it’s extraordinarily likely that that petition will be granted. Individuals are very frequently not represented in these hearings — they’re very frequently not even present at these hearings, so the judge doesn’t even see them,” said Hirschel, who also teaches elder law at the University of Michigan Law School.

I agree, the basic law is good, but it could use tweaking.  See elsewhere on this blog, “wishlist for probate new laws”.

And even when there are caring relatives, or services in the community to help older adults remain in their homes, “guardianship is like a pipeline to the nursing home,” she said. “And they never get out.”

And NO ONE ever takes a survey to see how many residents want to go home, or whether in fact they still have assets to go home.  If the house was sold, but there are funds or if a relative wants to donate funds, why not a granny pod?

A Way Out?

For the vast majority (98%++) of probate corruption victims, the only way out is death.  Few escape.  One woman had $5 million and wanted to give each child $1 million while she was still alive to see them enjoy it.  But she knew right away they would guardianize her and they had be “watching her”.  So she sold her house to a friend. The friend received a generous payment every month as a “reverse mortgage” for her expenses so her money was protected.  The woman transferred all her money to offshore accounts not amenable to court order. She bought a $225,000 RV and got the heck out of California and traveled where she wanted, in every town, picking up a statement from a local M.D. that she was highly intelligent and competent.  After about  a year, the court dismissed the OPG Petition for Guardianship.  But she was left with a $40,000 judgment in legal fees, which she ignored.

One way you can protect yourself against becoming a victim of guardianship abuse: Get a durable power of attorney and a health care advance directive. These documents can help keep the determination of your future out of a courtroom.

Attorneys and advocates for older adults urge them to fill out such paperwork before they suddenly need it. Because after the fact, it’s probably too late.

Those documents don’t guarantee that you won’t be exploited; the key is to give the responsibility for your welfare to the right person. But if done wisely, a great deal of heartache and expense may be avoided.

Why don’t more people take proper steps to be prepared?

“Everybody is in complete denial,” said Seal. “Just like nobody’s going to go in a nursing home. We’re all going to live forever, very healthy — like on the commercials — or we’re going to die in our sleep after a game of tennis.

“If any one of us were to consider the fact that we might be the subject of a guardianship case, we would all be very unhappy with the system as it actually exists now,” Seal continued. “No one would want to be a party to this.”

This article was written with support from the Journalists in Aging Fellowships, a program of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America, sponsored by the Retirement Research Foundation.

http://www.ourmidland.com/news/wixson-advocates-for-residents-as-public-guardian/article_4a875747-fa66-539e-ae43-39f1e4e14686.html

For those of you out there that know probate, get ready, this article will make you want to vomit:

From Cynthia Stevens:

How many stories will it take before the authorities do anything.

He wants to see her, she wants to see him. She does not want to stay in a nursing home, but the nursing home has her under house arrest.  Doctors and nurses admit she is competent. Yet, she is imprisoned in a nursing home, the gulags, ghettos, and slums for the elderly from which death is the only escape.  Human and civil rights quickly disappear as attorneys and the nursing homes “take it all” and accuse family members and friends who would charge nothing to little to care for the elderly, as being the culprits, when they are nothing but criminals charging 10,000 to 15,000 per month or whatever they can get, while refusing to let the elder go home and stay with a relative.

http://www.wcvb.com/news/man-accused-of-taking-woman-from-nursing-home-heads-to-court/39656180

This man was finally released on his own recognicanze but probably faces serious charges.  He loves his friend. She loves him.  But their fate is sealed by a locked down nursing home where she cannot escape and will likely never see the light of day.

From: kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com>
To: illinoisgov <gov.goca@illinois.gov>, “ilhouse51@sbcglobal.net”Subject: Fw: ARDC v. JMD – Motion to vacate all orders as void abintio, Strike Trial Testimony and Reinstate License Instanter–court reporter NOT licensed
Date: May 21, 2016 9:07 AM
Attachments: ARDC v. JMD – 052116 -Motion2Vac.all.orders.exhs.pdf ARDC v JMD 051716- MTVacate.all.orders.doc
Pursuant to Rule 8.3 and 18 USCA 4 I am reporting once again the criminal activity in which Jerome Larkin has pursuant to his violation of 18 USCA 371 18 USCA 1341 18 USCA 241,242 actively promulgated a massive cover-up of corrupt judicial activity including but not limited to criminal activity by corrupt lawyers and judges against the elderly and the disabled.
Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 6:56 AM
Subject: Re: ARDC v. JMD – Motion to vacate all orders as void abintio, Strike Trial Testimony and Reinstate License Instanter–court reporter NOT licensed

The efforts of Jerome Larkin and his 18 USCA 371 have no bounds. It is absolutely amazing that the entire band of “Lawyers” operating out of the IARDC office in Chicago are not in jail.

I practiced law for over fifty years and during my career until I got involved with the two guardians ad litem, the IARDC and the attorney for the guardian in the Sykes case 09 P 4585 I could not even contemplate such perfidy, ignorance, intellectual dishonesty and outright dishonesty. Yes, I had run into my share of lawyers who were dishonest, but, the overwhelming majority of lawyers were not only honest, but very nice and decent people. I knew going in that Judge Connors was ‘wired’ as Rule 137 was clearly not applicable and she was trying to intimidate me rather that adjudicate. The Evidence confirmed it.

What you motion will address before the Supreme Court of Illinois is not you conduct, but whether or not the judges of the Illinois Supreme Court have integrity or whether they are political hacks. Larkin has violated his oath and his position of trust. He has more than gone the extra mile to protect the two guardian ad litem, corrupt judge, corrupt lawyers, climate of breach of fiduciary relationship and outright fraud and tax evasion.

Larkin’s duty was to protect the public from dishonest attorneys. In particular it was to protect senior citizens from lawyers who would facilitate their isolation, their exploitation, abuse, loss of rights and theft by fiduciaries. Why should Larkin, Farenga, Schmiedel, Stern, Connors, Black or any of the attorneys employed by either the State of Illinois object to an HONEST INVESTIGATION of any claim of abuse?

Indeed, it is very clear that after promulgating for you at your disciplinary hearing a kangaroo trial with a predetermined result (fix/wired) so you would be properly induced to ‘shut up!’ having cut off you source of income, Larkin promulgated over=charges on court reporter fees and fees from unlicensed individuals claiming to be court reporters as a vehicle of FRAUD on the Supreme Court of Illinois. The spoliation of evidence, perjury, subordination of perjury appears to be SOP at the agency. (IARDC). It is consistent with the racism. (Amu case, and the refusal to allow Diane Nash access to the hearing room when at the same time admitting Gloria Sykes – who happens to have a lighter skin color and not known as an Icon of the Civil Rights movement (Selma March).

A key point that should be in your filings is the fact that the BURDEN OF PROOF is on the IARDC to prove by CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE their allegations. The affidavits of Gloria Sykes and Scott Evans, as well as the Evidence Deposition of Judge Connors (page 91) all are clear and convincing evidence that Jerome Larkin and the IARDC attorneys covered up the horribly wrongful proceedings in the Sykes case and he and each attorney involved has had an overt role. The Court file which was excluded from the evidence clearly demonstrates the absolute perjury by Larkin.

Larkin cannot find in the file a summons that complies with 755 ILCS 5/11a -10.
Larkin cannot find a return of service in the file that specifically says that on such and such date that a particular sheriff’s Deputy served Mary Sykes. The Sheriff has written a letter pointing out that his office did not serve Mary Sykes. (However, Peter Schmiedel will claim that there was ‘bench’ service of something.)
Larkin cannot demonstrate that any NOTICE (oral or written) was given to the next of kin (near/close relatives) 14 days prior to a hearing to determine if a guardian should be appointed and the extent and nature of Mary’s alleged disability.
Larkin cannot find in the record any actual hearing to determine if Mary was disabled and the extent and nature of the hearing. ALL OF THE FOREGOING ARE JURISDICTIONAL

Try as he may, Larkin cannot undo the admission of Judge Connors on page 91 of her Evidence Deposition or the August transcripts of proceedings in her Courtroom.

All of the foregoing I said before, and everyone is aware of it; however, this is only the tip of the iceberg as there has developed a cottage industry targeting the elderly and the disabled and using the Courthouse to coverup the criminal activities.

The line in the sand has been crossed!

Either action occurs now, or Americans are no longer safe to grow old! A few gray hairs is a red flag and an opportunity for corrupt lawyers, public officials and health care professionals such as nursing home operators to exploit us old farts!
Ken Ditkowsky
http://www.ditkowskylawoffice.com

From: kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com>
To: Cynthia Stephens <cynthiastphns1@aol.com>; & 50 others
Sent: Fri, May 13, 2016 12:43 pm
Subject: Re: OTCwith Shu and Deborah Goonan – Saturday, May 14th, 2016 at 2:00pm, est., or anytime thereafter, on www.onthecommons.us, orwww.onthecommons.net!

You just couldn’t make this up.

And remember, all of these people are supposed to be adults and graduated high school.

Too sad:

My HOA has just passed new “Rules & Regulations” that prohibit: 1. Knocking on a neighbors door. 2. Swearing 3. Emails between neighbors 4. Any communications between neighbors deemed “not nice” by the board. 5. Being discourteous 6. Being disrespectful 7. Written communication among members that doesn’t involve association business 8. Discussing complaints about the board with anyone. 9. Complaining about the board outside of an official meeting. 10. Communicating with neighbors via email or US mail. 11. Communicating with the board via email or US Mail about anything other than association business. 12. Making more than one contact to the board about any complaint or issue. 13. Any behavior the board deems inappropriate. Anyone who violates any of the above policies will be fined, and have foreclosure action taken upon them if they don’t pay the fine. Also, other legal action may be taken against them at the violator’s expense. HELP!

Dear Rocky Champion;

You don’t need the help, it’s the Board that needs to grow up about 6 grade levels.

I don’t know what to do with HOA morons like that, but maybe my readers will have a few choice words.

JoAnne

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-mayor-rahm-emanuel-testimony-code-of-silence-met-20160520-story.html

In an unprecedented move, city attorneys on Friday offered to admit to a federal jury that a code of silence exists in the Chicago Police Department if it meant Mayor Rahm Emanuel would not have to testify about it at the upcoming trial involving two whistleblower cops.

But U.S. District Judge Gary Feinerman rebuffed the idea, saying he was standing by his ruling earlier this week that Emanuel must take the witness stand to answer questions about the code of silence.

Feinerman said that even though he was “reluctant” to take up the mayor’s valuable time and cause a media circus by having him testify, he believed Emanuel could offer “much more texture” to the existence of the code of silence if he testified about it rather than have the city’s lawyers offer a written stipulation.

Feinerman said he agreed with attorneys for the whistleblower cops that the mayor’s testimony “would provide further evidence of an unwritten policy and practice.” Emanuel could “speak to the pervasiveness of the problem,” the judge said.
The ruling was a blow to the city, which has fought tooth-and-nail to keep Emanuel from having to take the witness stand. In a speech to the City Council, the mayor acknowledged the police code of silence amid the deepening scandal over the fatal shooting of black teenager Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer.

A spokesman for the city’s Law Department had no immediate comment Friday.

The trial, set to begin May 30, involves a civil rights lawsuit brought by Chicago police Officers Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria over allegations they were blackballed by the department for cooperating with the FBI in an investigation into a corrupt tactical team led by Sgt. Ronald Watts.
The two alleged that when supervisors learned of their role in the undercover investigation, they called them “rats” and passed along that sensitive information to others in the Police Department. They were removed from their unit assignment and shuttled around the department to lesser jobs far from their homes and at bad hours, according to the lawsuit, which names the city and a dozen high-ranking officers as defendants.

When they complained to supervisors about the alleged retaliation, one told them, “Look, everyone is against you, so you don’t want to piss me off,” they alleged.

The trial will center on whether the department has a de facto policy that uses the code of silence to allow bad officers to act with impunity. During his December speech to the City Council, Emanuel condemned “the tendency to ignore, deny or in some cases cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.”

Referring to frequent police complaints that witnesses too often refuse to come forward, Emanuel said, “We cannot ask citizens in crime-ravaged neighborhoods to break the code of silence if we continue to allow a code of silence to exist within our own Police Department.”

jmeisner@tribpub.com

Lawyer seeks to question Emanuel on ‘code of silence’ for lawsuit
Distrust of Chicago cops helps drive Emanuel’s low approval on crime

Excellent story. But why isn’t the Trib asking about how Jerome Larkin of the ARDC covers up the code of silence for lawyers and how the City uses lawyers to get Plaintiff’s counsel to back off on lawsuits, delay the turn over of crucial information for trial and obstruct justice with impunity.

It is obviously the “code of silence for lawyers” that supports the “code of silence for city attorneys” that supports the “code of silence for chicago police”

Get a clue. The fish stinks from the head.

I can’t tell you how much I am disappointed by the investigation of the New York bar’s 13 attorneys where only one threw a corrupt foreign official out of his office on a 60 minutes report. Sixty minutes should be having a field day with corrupt lawyers and the bar associations and their programs. I am proposing herewith an entire series–“Law and Order– corruption in the courts”. Where is that series at?  Ken and I and others could write volumes of screen plays. Hollywood, please contact us.

In the meantime, we have 3 activist lawyers in Chicago who dared to make a difference, and who the ARDC suspended for 3 to 4 years–Ken Ditkowsky, myself and Lanre Amu only for whistleblowing and reporting on all the corruption.

Where is Hollywood?  You could not even make this highly dramatic and emotionally charged stories up.  Murder she Wrote and the Wurnos story has nothing on the day to day dealings of Probate Courts, especially in Cook County Illinois.  I mean, come on.  In Arsenic and Old Lace all the old ladies did was kill sickly old men.  In the Probate Courts, they fabricate evidence, kill them off with nursing home administrators and the crony RNs and doctors without narcotics licenses that still prescribe drugs to narcotize to death.

Link to most recent pleading to Illinois Supreme Court

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6FbJzwtHocwRVVMNkhfTDBwLXM

see below

Mary Bush has graciously consented to the publication of her horror story.

This is her corrected version

Case Summary for: (your name and address, email and phone)
Mary Bush
flyfreeandstrong@gmail.com

PLEASE SHOW YOUR ANSWERS IN BOLD
Case number:
1509-1720 Judge Platt; 50 A 2015 Judge Tunnell & Judge Hall
2115-cv-5008 Judge Legrome Davis, Habeas Corpus
Appeals: 2726 EDA 2011, 2746 EDA 2011, 5 E.D.M 2016, 1694 E.D.A 2013; 1861 E.D.A. 2013, 1863 E.D.A. 2013, 1779 EDA 2014
Case Name: Genevieve Bush
Case Jurisdiction: Orphans Court Chester County, PA
PA Superior Court of Pa Eastern District
U.S. Dist. Court No. 2:15-cv-05008 Writ of Habeas Corpus
Judge(s): Katherine B L Platt, Mark Tunnell, John Davis, LeGrome D. Davis
Relationship to you: Mother
Opposing counsel: Alexander J. Chotkowski, John Francis McKenna – sons of Genevieve’s attorneys entering appearances in 2007 long before suing for guardianship when they opposed Genevieve in court for return of her funds they never challenged her capacity at all then they sue her in October 2009 saying she cannot manage her finances after being out of her life since 2007 court hearing. The judge in the 2007 case was Robert Shenkin who was from the same law firm that Alexander Chotkowski and John McKenna worked. Prior to becoming a judge, he was in private practice for 20 years with the firm of MacElree, Harvey, Gallagher & Featherman, Ltd. where he engaged in the general practice of law.
1. Service: Was there proper service in the case? No
Was the disabled person served properly 14 days or more in advance of the hearing? NO
Was the disabled person given a copy of a Summons and Complaint and Notice of Hearing by the Sheriff or Process Server? Yes and his affidavit said she understood the process this was in November 2009 and the court later states she lacked capacity when she signed her own directives in 2006.
Was the disabled read her/his rights under the law? No, Constable George Morrissey called an attorney friend for mom right after he served her and she never being sued before hired them.
Were all next of kin notified of when the hearing for guardianship take place? Yes
– how were they notified (phone/email/mail/in person)? By Mail
If the disabled was not served, please print out the docket from when the case first began to the guardianship hearing appointing a guardian showing no service or “person not served”
2. Isolation
Isolation has been severe–Genevieve was socially active with her friends and family, church travel, women’s groups, then incarcerated into a county facility against her will on 5/18/2015 into a locked ward. She has lost complete contact with more than 50 people who were in her life
Is there an order limiting visits? (Please attach, if possible) (ask them for a copy of all orders limiting visitation, if they refuse, report this too)
No – guardian made up her own orders
How are the visits limited?
Guardian and nursing home conspired to say I was not a daughter, but now I am only a trespasser
Are there medical records indicating visitation limits? No
Is there a list of “permitted visitors”?
Yes
Who made up the list?
Guardian and nursing home
Who is your loved one not seeing right now (list name and relationship) where the visits are limited and how are they limited?
Mary, daughter, Leo, brother and her friends & family– cannot see her because travel to her facility is hard to get to. I am the only one guardian Carol J Hershey made mom pay to see and now has no visitation. When mom was home with me she had a very active social life.
3. Chemical Restraints
Is your loved one taking any forms of chemical restraints or psychotropic drugs?
Suspected, but not known, Moms behavior is so changed and she is knocked out a lot
Are you allowed to check to see if they are taking such medications?
No–not allowed to see any “medical” information
Do you have the disabled person’s medical records? Why or why not?
Only up until the period of my POA–after 2011 nothing
Is the person drooling or do they have slurred speech?
Yes-I have photos and video of mom’s altered state
Does the Guardian have a court order permitting the administration of psychotropic drugs?
No
Has the disabled person ever been held down and shot up with drugs against their will?I believe yes –Mom is not acting her normal self since being incarcerated
4. Abuse of Disabled
Since the guardianship proceeding, has your loved one been abused?
Yes–physically, mentally, sexually, emotionally and financially. The life she planned for herself has been obliterated.
Please state all ways in which they have been abused
injuries – skin tears, bruising, broken leg, injured foot, lack of exercise, restricted from moving her body, months in a reclined geri chair
Mentally – abusive aids/staff, loss of pets by a court order, loss of freedom, loss of her rights, loss of established relationships, loss of her husband in 2004 and no time to grieve, loss of her belongings, verbal abuse by staff, son as a guardian forced her to be diaper changed in bed and not allowed her to go to the bathroom, son would wear fathers hat, son put a drool bib on her when she was upset, son chained her possessions all around her home, she was not allowed to attend church, she suffered the loss of seeing and going out with friends and daughter, she was isolated, now more isolated in a nursing home all alone doing nothing for hours.
Sexually she was restrained by aids in her own home while son digitally penetrated after her bath saying she need medication up there, he put bandages on her areas for no reason
Emotionally- withdrawn from all the abuse
Financially – Trustees were not given due process, trust was handed to oldest son who mother had sued in 2006 and removed his POA in 2005. He is liquidating the trust by warring against it and paying out hundreds of thousands to people attached to this case by the court. The money has not gone for her true care. Genevieve is being liquidated with no say in anything.

List any hospitalizations and approx. dates where abuse was a problem.
1/20/2016 fractured leg and high blood pressure nursing home Park Lane at Bellingham lack of standard of care, cited by the Pa health department on 02/25/2016
Was the disabled returned to the same abusive situation?
Yes – Park Lane at Bellingham West Chester, PA 19380
Did the court direct that the abusers (attorneys, GAL’s, case managers) investigate allegations of abuse?
No–never
Abuse can consist of bruises, cuts, broken bones, broken skin, bed sores (very serious), aspiration of food into lungs (because patient was not sitting while eating, very serious), malnutrition, dehydration, etc.
Was a feeding tube inserted against the disabled’s will? No
What is the hygiene of each place the disabled has been placed into? Please list any incidents where the disabled was living in filthy conditions and the approx. dates.Pocopson Home was cited by the Pa Department of Health

Park Lane at Bellingham was cited

Have you made any complaints? If so list dates and brief summary of complaint and its outcome
Too many complaints to list from about 06.14.2015 to 01.27.2016 Park Lane stopped me from reporting by calling me a trespasser in retaliation for calling the health department
Park Lane Facility was cited numerous times. 02/25/16 Department of Health Determined Neglect
Were you told you could visit, but then you were blocked by the guardian?
Yes, Guardian Exlizabeth Srinivasan would threaten me she would cut my time back if I did not obey her, Carol J. Hershey started 08-07-15 and restricted my time from the start after having phone conversations with Judge Katherine Platt. All the guardians chose to use my mother as their weapon to stop me from advocating for moms rights.
Did the court issue orders you could visit, but then the visits never happened? yes during the time son sexually assaulted my mom, Then with Carol J Hershey saying she needed to “supervise” me I saw my mother less than an order that was in place. Now Park Lane called me a trespasser and I have not seen mom since 01/26/2016
Did the disabled want to live at home or with a relative but the court ordered them into a nursing home?
Yes, mom was happily living with me, Judge made us both leave our home. Mom titled the home to me with her attorney in 2008, and then the judge ordered it back so the sons could take over and I was evicted in 2013 without a hearing and mom was taken out in 2015 without a court hearing. Sons now stay and use our home for themselves. They throw away her mail.
Was your loved one placed in a nursing home, group home or institution without a court order naming the institution? NO Adult Protective Services forced my mom into a Chester County Nursing Home ‘Pocopson’ with a court order signed by moms former attorney now Judge Tunnell, to this day there has never been a hearing and mom has not been allowed to return home.
Did the court find it was all right to pay a nursing home for care but not pay a family member to care for the disabled at home or in the relative’s home?
Yes, Court even ordered Daughter to pay for Mom’s attorney George Zumbano when I hired him as moms legal guardian.
If there was isolation, how many times did you see your loved one per week, month or year?
At first, twice per month, now not at all.
5. Abuse of Family
Have you or any family members been falsely arrested because of the guardianship? Please provide details, if so. Please attach a copy of all court orders and warrants for your arrest. How many times were you arrested? Provide transcripts if possible.
Yes. On 1/27/16 Park Lane Nursing called me a trespasser and had me arrested. I promptly left even though there was no advanced notification
Have you been defamed, false lighted, slandered or libeled by the court or any attorneys? If so, please list approximate dates and what was falsely said about you.
Since Oct. 2009 to present guardians spreading false documents to health care people, police, hospitals, banks, grocery stores etc, Judge Platt writing biased meant to smear “opinion” that have created civil chaos in and around mom and my life. False staged contempt charges where guardians spread these documents around to our community.
Have false civil charges been brought against you or a family member? False accusations of theft, missing assets blamed on the wrong person, etc? Yes false accusations of theft when the son moved into our home he would take or hide things then call the police, I still have belongings never recovered from our home. Sons falsely claim with no documentation at all of thefts by me in the realm of two million dollars. They have only done this through their testimony when documents show all monies were in the trust by my mother.
Were you the subject of a gag order not to talk about or post information on social media, blogs and the internet (please attach order).no
Were you or your loved one threatened in any manner? yes for years now
Did they move your loved one far away from you? no
6. Constitutional Rights
Has the court issued any gag orders or “location” orders where the disabled person cannot travel as desired. Guardians stopped mom from visiting dads relatives that she would see regularly
Mom is not allowed to go anywhere, Since May 18,2015 all contact with the outside world has stopped, she has not been able to socialize to friends, family, pets, me, church, womens groups. In a year’s time she has only been allowed out doors for a total of maybe 5 hours . She is kept locked in the facility.List dates of all gag or location orders, a brief summary of the content.
Guardian Carol J Hershey is making up “orders” as she goes along
Did the disabled ask for an attorney and receive one prior to the hearing for guardianship?
Mom hired the attorney the constable called. Then in 2011 asked me to hire George Zumbano who I had to pay because the court would not allow for fees paid . Judge Platt then told Mr. Zumbano to withdraw his appearance on November 20, 2015 and now mom has no legal representation at all.
Was the attorney clearly independent, or did s/he not fight for the disabled’s rights?
No. Three attorneys billed Mom and ignored all her rights, In my opinion no attorney will go up against the judge they have other cases in front of. Mr Zumbano went against my mothers legally scribed wishes for me to be her guardian/POA towards the end of 2013
Were you told that the attorney must come from a secret list the court keeps? No
Was the disabled given a choice of attorneys? If the disabled could not choose, did the family choose freely?
Mom trusted the serving sheriff and hired the law firm he called for her. Mom did participate in hiring Mr. Zumbano
Did the disabled come to all court hearings?
No. Mom never had a single day in court ever over 8 years now. No ADA accommodations, and court appointed capacity Dr of psychology stated clearly in his report she would not be harmed by being in court, she was denied the right to due process.
Was anyone told not to talk about the case on social media or on the internet? Explain.
Not yet
Were they prevented from coming to any hearings? If not, why not? Was transportation provided for the disabled person?
Court said they would meet with mom in camera but they never did. Mom wrote her brother in 2010 “I will see you in court” this was entered in as an exhibit.
Was the disabled ever told not to speak in court when they wanted to make a point?
Mom never went to any of the court hearings her attorneys did not fight for this right Reger Rizzo and Darnell her attorney was Thomas Shindler.
Were any of the family members told not to speak in court when a family member wanted to make a point? YES multiple times I went Pro Se in June of 2015 attorneys were given time for a closing statement Judge Platt did not allow me to finish my case .I filed a motion to file a brief the next day and it was denied, the judge ruled without me closing my case.
Witnesses were also stopped from testifying and evidence was rejected. Judge claimed writings and work my mom did that I did it so she will not allow it.
Did the disabled person want to waive any rights (right to a hearing, right to an attorney, right to be present at their hearing, who would be the Guardian?) Was the waiver of rights recorded?
Mom wanted to go to court but couldn’t. She wrote a letter to the Brother saying “see you in court” but her attorney said do not come in.
Were you told you could not record proceedings?
Yes
Were you blocked or delayed in receiving transcripts?
Many times the transcripts cost too much. Some transcripts from 2015 took over a year to get.
Did anyone tell you if you fought for your rights, they would terminate visits or take other adverse actions? No the Court and opposing attorney just file and charge false contempt charges and fines.
Did they move your loved one far from you? No
Do you know if anyone got kickbacks for putting your loved one in an institution, group home or nursing home? Did you subpoena all the institutions, lawyers and court vendors for this information? In my opinion
I suspect Guardian Carol J Hershey does with Park Lane at Bellingham in West Chester PA
7. Mental Exam
Did the disabled get a full and fair mental exam by an independent doctor of the disabled’s choice?
No, she only got a court troll doctor of psychology
Why or why not?
Court always orders same doctor that trolls the courts for custody cases..
Did the court appoint any evaluators?
Dr. Bruce Mapes. Then Petitioners allegedly paid him for an ‘expert’ report
Did these evaluators come from a secret list the judge had? Yes or attorneys , seems so
Was a full physical exam conducted before the mental exam to determine if there were any treatable conditions?
No physical exam, 1 hour with court psychologist, court psychologist spent more time with Petitioner Brother/Son and opposing counsel than with Mother
Was the disabled informed in advance of the exam to prepare for the exam?
She was too scared to participate fully, friend reported doctor was “gruff”
Was the disabled told in advance the results would be used in court to guardianize him or her?
No.
Did the disabled sign a waiver they knew the results would be used in court against them to guardianize them? No During the exam did the disabled have their glasses and hearing aids and did they function properly?
No hearing aids and mother suffers from a rare disorder – Avoidant Personality Disorder, mother had her own MD in psychiatry who was banned from testifying in her behalf.
Was your loved one taken on a Pscyh Hold? Was it with a court order? Who signed the papers your loved one was a danger to themselves or others? How long were they held and were they forced to take psychotropic drugs against their will?
8. Final Days on earth
Did the disabled receive appropriate medical treatment and medicines at all times?
No. As a result she was hospitalized for 3 days, cellulites, fractured leg, high blood pressure.
Was the disabled put in hospice against his or her will or instructions? Don’t know.
Did the disabled leave a Medical Power of Attorney or living will that said “no hospice”?
No
Does the disabled’s religion prohibit hospice (Roman Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, etc.)
No, but mom is not allowed to practice her religion, the last time she was allowed to go to church was Palm Sunday in 2014 after major arguments with Guardian
Was the disabled narcotized to death with psychotropic drugs while food and water were withheld? No, but may be happening now
Was the disabled cremated to destroy evidence of the murder? N/A
9. Assets
Were any assets missing from the inventory or accounting that you were aware? Please list any valuable asset that was missing and if an insurance or Bonding claim was filed and the result of the claim.
Yes, assets are missing. $100k of tools, Platt just gave to one son, inventory was undervalued and not listed by son who was appointed guardian of the estate against the trust protective clauses.
Did a nursing home get paid any kickbacks for placing the disabled there? Were you allowed to serve discovery on this issue? I don’t know how to do this.
Did the disabled get the funeral and burial of his or her choice? NA
Did the court or estate take any funds or property into the estate which were held in joint tenancy with any other person without notice, hearing, discovery and jury trial?
Yes, court took house and 2 trucks (you need to report this theft to the FBI and to the police and file your objections in court and then file a civil suit against the judge and all the attorneys doing this or joining in on it 42 USC 371 conspiracy too.) Report the stolen vehicles to the car insurance carrier
Did the court evict anyone in the disabled’s home without eviction notice, hearing discovery and jury trial?
Yes, I was living with my mom in our house and had only 30 days to move out 4 pets and myself, ended up having to move out in only one rainy day in 2013.
Further Comments:
I was falsely accused of undue influence when mom worked with her attorney Jay Fischer for 4 years. The court allowed hearsay staged litigation and denied submittance of factual evidence. I was made to pay for mom’s attorney after adjudication of incompetency to about $47K and I have paid over $450k in legal fees and fines. There was no due process at just about every turn, 90% hearsay testimony that could not be backed up with documented evidence,
Please indicated if it is okay to publish information on this form (without any of your personal information), so that it may help others. Thank you. Yes–Okay to publish
Places to complain
1) Nursing home abuse may be reporter to the state agency licensing nursing homes
Done with PA Health Dept cited facilies
2) Complaints about attorneys may be made to the state disciplinary board for attorneys
Done–none were disciplined (I would be glad to publish your letters and the dismissal of valid complaints against the attorneys. Go file the IRS form on breach of fiduciary duty against them and demand their fees be returned because their work was fraudulent)
3) State, County and local Attorney General’s Offices and the Inspector General in the case of nursing home fraud (placement against will, drugging with psychotropic drugs, etc.) The Inspector General is supposed to prevent waste of state funds.
Done–nothing happened ever
4) State, County and local politicians
Done–nothing ever happened
5) FBI. The FBI is generally interested in cases where more than $500,000 was stolen or there were changed transcripts, ex parte conversations between opposing counsel or parties and the judges. But don’t let that stop you from complaining. Get several email addresses for the FBI and send your complaint to several. If your local FBI does not have an email, get their fax number and put it in writing and complain by fax. Try to get a complaint no., this gives you victim’s rights.
Complained to FBI, nothing happened.
Complain early and often until you get results.
Visit your local politicians and demand investigations of these corrupt cases.
Visit all the blogs, facebook pages and complain there.Everyday I am on the internet complaining. I get tons of sympathy because this unfortunately is not an isolated incident of corruption in Probate in the US
I also went to Chester County Commissioners and they also did nothing.

See below.

As Ken reminds all of  us, there is a special form for the IRS to collect a 50% tax rate on criminal gains.  We should all be filling out the IRS form for breach of fiduciary duty/criminal gains to put pressure on the miscreants such as Stern, Farenga, Schmeidel, Waller to pay the taxes due on the fact that Mary was never served, the Sykes case had no jurisdiction, they blocked discovery at every turn by telling the  court “they investigated” and searched for the valuable coin collection and found none when in fact they never did search for the coins at all.  In fact, they all knew or should have known Carol emptied the safe deposit box with the coins and they should have reported that to the court, but they did not.

Let’s make this IRS form 3949’s today very popular

Click to access f3949a.pdf

for more information go to:

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/how-do-you-report-suspected-tax-fraud-activity

From a NASGA email:

Glen Campbell’s Children Instigate Tennessee Law That Will Protect Elderly Posted: 18 May 2016 07:44 AM PDT This week marked a major victory for Glen Campbell’s oldest children in what they claim has been an ongoing battle with their stepmother over rights to visit their ailing father. On Monday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed the Campbell/Falk Act, which protects communication rights for people who’ve become wards of the state and those who have conservators over their financial and living situations. Named after the country music legend and Emmy-winning actor Peter Falk (Columbo, Murder, Inc.), the new law restricts conservators from blocking interaction with loved ones, whether it be in person or via phone, email or mail. And if the disabled person is unable to communicate — as is the case with Campbell, who is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s — his or her prior relationship with the visiting person presumes consent. Campbell’s eldest daughter, Debby, and son Travis teamed with Falk’s daughter, Catherine, in lobbying the government to get behind the cause. Catherine Falk claims her stepmother tried to prevent her from seeing her famous father, resulting in extensive (and expensive) legal action. Peter Falk suffered from dementia and passed away in 2011. Catherine claims her stepmother neither notified her of her father’s passing, nor of his funeral. Falk was at the Tennessee state capitol this past Monday, along with Debbie Campbell Cloyd, Travis Campbell and his wife Trudy, Marcia Southwick with Boomers Against Elder Abuse and Joseph Roubichek of the National Association to Stop Guardian Abuse. Country legend Tanya Tucker — who dated Glen Campbell in the early Eighties and has remained a close family friend — was also in attendance to lend her outspoken support. “If this can happen to Glen Campbell, it can happen to anyone,” Trudy Campbell said at the bill’s signing, as reported in a news release from Tennessee’s Senate Republican Caucus. “It is a civil right and certainly a God-given right to see your child and to receive mail from them. We know that thousands of others are suffering from restrictive action by a ward and are very pleased that Tennessee has passed this law to protect them.” Senator Rusty Crowe (R-Johnson City), who sponsored the bill with Representative Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) commented that it’s “heartbreaking to hear sons and daughters who cannot spend quality time with their parent after they are incapacitated and their health is in decline,” adding, “We believe this new law strikes the right balance so that it protects the rights of some of our most vulnerable citizens, while at the same time giving the conservator a fair process to follow in protecting the ward.”  (Continue Reading) Full Article & Source: Glen Campbell’s Children Instigate Tennessee Law That Will Protect Elderly

Elder abuse legislation signed into law by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam The only problem with the Falk bills is that they often require you to have a lawyer to protect your rights.  I see no reason why the courts have to get involved at thousands of dollars per hour in lawyers fees–a GAL, a lawyer for the Guardian and then yet another lawyer to ask for a phone call and visitation schedule?  That’s nuts.  A trained volunteer can assist the elder in making up a visitation schedule for just a few dollars to reimburse him or her for gas/travel.  I say, forget this nonsense. Get rid of guardianship.  Use trained volunteers who are just  reimbursed their expenses for meeting with a ward once per week for an hour.

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/11/14/california-state-bar-in-turmoil-after-shake-up-triggers-whistleblower-claim/

and see this

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6FbJzwtHocwdUw4a2gxellqSFU

The California State Bar was thrown into turmoil this week after its ousted executive director struck back with retaliation claims alleging that he was fired for complaining about ethical breaches inside the organization.

Joseph Dunn, a Democratic former California state senator, claims in a whistleblower lawsuit filed in California state court Thursday that the state bar fired him from his job last week after he accused the bar’s top disciplinary officer of lying about the organization’s handling of attorney misconduct complaints.

The bar, an arm of the California Supreme Court, is the state’s legal gatekeeper, overseeing bar admissions and managing the state’s attorney discipline system for its 181,000 active members.

Mr. Dunn alleges that the bar’s chief trial counsel, Jayne Kim, who oversees investigations into complaints about attorneys, “unlawfully removed” backlog cases from official reports. “This was done to benefit Ms. Kim in her upcoming evaluation and to fraudulently inflate the productivity of her office,” the complaint says.

Ms. Kim, the lawsuit says, retaliated by filing an internal complaint against Mr. Dunn. The bar then retained an outside firm that billed it $300,000 — at $800 an hour — to conduct an evaluation of Mr. Dunn, according to his complaint.

Ms. Kim couldn’t be reached for comment. As recently as last year, Mr. Dunn had publicly praised her effort in reducing backlog cases.

The complaint also accuses Ms. Kim of failing to enforce a new state law intended to crackdown on immigration consulting fraud.

It’s amazing the salaries that these attorney administrators get and still there is a huge public outcry the Cal. State Bar isn’t doing their job and now this whistleblower suit.

I’m fairly amazed that the ARDC and the JIB have not been sued yet for not doing their job either.

Jerome Larkin is on the war path against attorneys exposing coverups in the court, he has suspended myself, Ken Ditkowsky and Lanre Amu for only telling the truth but he drags his feet on prosecuting a known serious and dangerous felon, Seth Gillman who has committed over $100 million in medicare fraud against the government, and has stolen employee tax funds from their trust account.

It’s only a matter of time before the lid blows off that kettle of boiling fetid corruption stew.  And you know it’s going to happen.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/State-Audit-California-Bar-Failed-to-Protect-Public-From-Some-Bad-Lawyers-Put-Public-at-Significant-Risk-369877001.html

Warning:  this is sick stuff

https://illinoisfamilyaction.org/2015/07/in-cook-county-judge-making-is-like-sausage-making/

In Cook County, it’s judge-making time, and it ain’t pretty. On June 25 and 26, at the Democrats’ “pre-slating,” 41 lawyers who are appointed judges appeared and begged and groveled for party slating. There are two 1st District (Cook County) Appellate Court vacancies and 10 countywide Circuit Court vacancies (which may expand to 12 to 15 by the December filing deadline).

The slated candidates will be anointed in late August. That means that 31 lawyers’ egos will be sliced, diced and eviscerated, but who really cares about suffering attorneys? There is no American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Lawyers.

There are 387 jurists in Cook County, three on the Supreme Court, 24 on the Appellate Court and 360 on the Circuit Court, of whom 75 are elected countywide and 147 are elected from the county’s 15 subcircuits, while 138 are associate judges appointed by Circuit Court judges. The elected judges stand for retention every 6 years, and they never lose; the associates are subject to reappointment every 4 years. When vacancies occur in either the Appellate Court or the Circuit Court, they are filled by appointment by the three 1st District (Cook County) Supreme Court justices, Anne Burke (the wife of the alderman), Charles Freeman (a Circuit Court judge from 1976 to 1990) and Mary Jane Theis (a Circuit Court judge 1988 to 1993 and an Appellate Court justice from 1993 to 2010). All were slated. All are Democrats. They have a rotation system for appointments. Once a justice makes a pick for a vacancy, they “own” that spot and pick all subsequent vacancies. Freeman, who is black, has a lock on vacancies created by black judges.

Nobody gets named unless Ed Burke*, the chairman of the Democrats’ judicial slatemaking committee, approves. Those appointed to elected judgeships must run for election at the next election.

Then it gets dicey. Voters don’t know judicial candidates or their qualifications. Slating usually, but not automatically, guarantees nomination, and the Democratic nomination guarantees election, since the Republicans never field candidates. Since the early 1990s a continuous stream of unslated Irish-surnamed women have won countywide and subcircuit primaries. In contests throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when a lot of men ran, a single Irish-surnamed woman always won. Black voters, in particular, have an aversion to ethnic names; if it sounds Polish, Italian Hispanic, Greek or Asian, the candidate does not get their vote. Black voters tend to vote for candidates whom they know to be black or, in their absence, for Irish or neutral names.

However, the tables have turned. For decades, too many male candidates guaranteed the nomination of a woman, but now it has evolved to the point where too many Irish-surnamed women on the ballot may guarantee the nomination of a man.

Of course, the Democrats are the party of “diversity.” Race, gender, geography and, now, sexual orientation, are uppermost. The permutations are endless. In the Appellate Court race, with two spots, five candidates appeared for slating: appointed incumbent Bertina Lampkin, who is black, along with four Circuit Court judges, William Stewart Boyd and Leonard Murray, both of whom black, Raul Vega, a Hispanic from the North Side, and Eileen O’Neill Burke, of Maine Township in the Northwest Side 10th Subcircuit, who is backed by the suburban committeemen.

That presents slatemakers a problem of Einsteinian proportions. There can’t be two black candidates for two spots. Lampkin will be slated, even though Boyd, who sought slating in 2014, was promised 2016 slating when he didn’t run. There can’t be two men, but there can be two women. Expect Burke and Lampkin to be slated and win. Vega and Boyd will wait until 2018.

There are certain ironclad rules defining judicial slating, the violation of which consigns one to political purgatory.

First, no “hacks” need apply. Every supplicant must be rated meaning qualified or highly qualified by the bar associations, of which there are 13. A “not recommended rating is fatal.

Second, there is the “Step Aside Rule.” There are limited judicial openings. If a supplicant appears and impresses, has “juice” (meaning clout with some committeeman or special interest), and promises not to run if not slated, that begets an IOU. In other words, come back in 2018 or 2020. However, the aspirants who “stepped aside” in 2012 and 2014 are back with their IOUs, like Boyd. Now it’s his turn, but the quota-conscious Democrats aren’t going to slate two black candidates, so Boyd can sit in the Divorce Division for 2 more years.

Third, don’t run for judge unless you’ve got $100,000. The party’s “assessment” for each slated candidate is $35,000, which pays for two countywide mailings of the sample ballot, with bios and pictures, and the procurement of 10,000 signatures on nominating petitions. Every judicial aspirant must, from mid-2015 through March of 2016, attend Democratic ward and township cocktail parties or dinners and buy $250 to $500 worth of tickets per event. There are 50 ward organizations and 30 township organizations. That’s $50,000. Plus, there are “judge makers,” astute, well wired political operatives who tell the clueless lawyers where to go, what to do and how much to donate. A “judge maker” charges about $25,000 per client.

Fourth, quotas dictate. There needs to be a pre-ordained number of women, blacks, Hispanics and, now, gays. In 2016 there are 10 to 15 countywide judgeships, and at least half must be women and one-third must be black, with one Hispanic and one gay. There is overlap, such as with a black woman or a gay male minority, etc.

Fifth, there is leverage. Over a 2-year period, there are 10 to 20 Cook County Circuit appointments to be made, and usually two or three Circuit Court judges get elevated to the Appellate Court. The lawyers who appear before the slatemakers and “step aside” and not run in the primary, are on the short list for future slating or associate appointment. Those who buck the party and run are blacklisted.

Sixth, there is the exposure factor. Many lawyers appear to get themselves known by the committeemen, angling for a future judgeship, by appointment or slating.

Seventh, those appointed to a judgeship must run for that judgeship. If they lose, adios. There’s no second chance.

Eighth, there is practicality, reality and strategy. The slatemakers want winners. Candidates with Irish surnames win, especially women, so it’s risky for the party to slate somebody who is a guaranteed loser, such as somebody with an odd-sounding name. An example is Sean Chaudhuri, an Asian Indian who is seeking 2016 slating. Kiss him goodbye. Any opponent with a Mc or O’ surname, affixed to a Bridget, Maureen or Colleen, will clean his clock.

However, the Democrats have a well choreographed “Plan B,” which involves slating “alternates.” It takes only 2,200 signatures to get on the March 15 ballot, and Democratic committeemen can deliver 10,000 signatures to each slate candidate. There’s a 90-day petition-circulation period, commencing Sept. 15, with filing by Dec. 15. A serious wannabe (or unslated) judge can get 5,000 signatures, either by himself or by paying for it at $5 a signature. The insurgent candidates network, hold back their petitions to see who files, and then file in the most winnable race, such as those with too many men or with an unelectable slated candidate.

The party bosses also hold back. There are usually three to five judges who “coincidentally” decide to retire in December, days before filing. Lickety-split, the alternates’ petitions are on the street, and they file unopposed, as only committeemen can get 5,000 signatures in a few days. That’s how non-Irish-surnamed men get on the bench, and it’s the only way Chaudhuri can win.

According to insiders, the candidates likely to be slated for the Circuit Court are Aleks Gillespie, Maureen Hannon, Alison Conlon, Brendan O’Brien, Daniel Patrick Duffy, Carolyn Joan Gallagher and Rossana Fernandez, Travis Richardson and John Lyke (who are black), and Devlin Schoop, who is backed by the gay bar association but who is not gay.

Alternates are Chaudhuri, Pat Spratt, Pat Heneghan, Carolyn Joan Gallagher, Mary Melchor and Joe Cleary.

For lawyers with identifiably Polish, Italian, Greek, Jewish, Asian or Eastern European surnames, it’s appointment only.

Two subcircuit contests bear watching. In the 10th Subcircuit, stretching from Park Ridge to the Ravenswood 47th Ward, appointed incumbent Eve Marie Reilly faces at least two Irish-surnamed women, Katherine O’Dell, who lost in 2014, and Colleen Daley. James Crawley, who is gay and who is from the 47th Ward, will run, but the proverbial 800-pound gorilla is John Garrido, a Chicago police lieutenant who lost for 45th Ward alderman in 2011 and 2015, getting 6,053 and 7,263 votes, respectively. “I’m looking at it,” Garrido said. Of the 229 precincts in the subcircuit, 48 are in the 45th Ward. “Maybe John Arena will back me,” joked Garrido. “If I’m a judge, then I won’t run against him again.” Against a fragmented, Irish-surnamed field, with three women, Garrido could win.

In the Hispanic-majority 6th Subcircuit, which takes in the 1st, 26th, 30th, 31st, 32nd, 33rd and 35th wards, attorney Richard Cooke got everybody’s undivided attention when he loaned $500,000 to his campaign account. Cooke moved into the district from River Forest. The appointed incumbent is Anna Loftus. Expect several Hispanic candidates to file. Can Cooke’s money buy a judgeship?

By Russ Stewart.

thanks for writing this Russ

More information.  “Fast Eddie” is known as if not the center, but at the hub of all major corruption in Chicago.  From Wiki on him:

Edward M. “Ed” Burke (born December 29, 1943) is alderman of the 14th Ward of the City of Chicago. A member of the Democratic Party, he was first elected to the Chicago City Council in 1969, and represents part of the city’s Southwest Side. Chair of Council’s Committee on Finance, Burke has been called Chicago’s “most powerful alderman” by the Chicago Sun-Times.^[1] Burke was named one of the “100 Most Powerful Chicagoans” by Chicago Magazine, describing him as “[o]ne of the last of the old-school Chicago Machine pols.”^[2]

Burke is the longest-serving aldermen in Chicago history.^[3] He was a leader of the “Vrdolyak 29” during the first term of Mayor Harold Washington, the “Council Wars” era. Burke and his staff were the subjects of federal and local investigations, and members of his staff were the targets of indictments and convictions involving payroll and contracting irregularities.^[4]

Burke is the lead partner in a law firm that specializes in property tax appeals and which includes clients who do business with the city. Burke’s wife is Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke. He and his wife werefoster parents and were party to a protracted, highly publicized, racially charged child custody dispute.

It’s just so nice to know that Ald. Eddie Burke is in charge of channeling all the judges in “crook” County.  Of course, he got his wife onto the Supreme Court where she “handled” Ken Ditkowsky’s kangaroo ARDC trial and Lanre Amu’s too.  For that dirty job, Anne Loftus was suddenly granted a juicy appointment as a Circuit Court Judge.

Sure.  Really?

And from Illinois Issues Online, a report from NPR comes this interesting article and quote

http://illinoisissues.uis.edu/features/2008mar/judge.html

Ald. Edward Burke… lamented, “It was a hell of a lot easier in the old days when Mayor Richard J. Daley handed you a list.”

Ms. Joanne Denison, I thought I would write a short few paragraphs to try to capture words that describe the pain and suffering of a family destroyed.

I have always been the glue to hold our family together.  Each branch of personalities so vastly different from the next, so harshly entangled with thorns and thistles of racial oppression.  I am a graduate of Tuskegee University with a conferred Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering.  Through harsh brutal torturous racism, three different positions, two different States, and ten years (a decade), I went through a life similar to Carl Brashear as portrayed in the movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Men of Honor, in the nineties.  Is this the twilight zone?  Still in the nineties, this is happening!!!  White managers gather to watch me nearly lose my life in a work assignment just as they did in Carl’s divining assignment.  I was nearly dead (uncontrollable blood pressure and kidney failure at 34 years old) and full of anger for the harsh treatment.  I left out on disability solely for this issue.  I sacrificed what would be today an 80,000.00/year position for sanity and peace, no regrets.

Less than twenty years later, mother gets dementia and the thugs of our family are set over me and my mother due to our race, poverty, and my disability only.  No other fault so whatever than the power to discriminate.  Our family is caught in a living never ending nightmare of utter oppression due to a society with no respect of person or the elderly to remotely just LOOK AT THIS CONDITION and consider what happened to us.  No one of power to stop this inhumane conditions care.  I am forced daily to beat back a memory of ever having a loving and caring mother just to survive the reality.  Our family has set goals and are committed to getting the word out about racism and the systematic destruction of dark skinned people of America.  The original name of our Facebook group Global Citizens Unite to Fight Corruption in America proved to long, thus we later changed it to Global Citizens Unite with 8000 members in less than three months of existence.

Sandra A. Black

Case Summary for: Sandra A. Black, *************** Marion, Indiana,

Case number: 27D03-1008-GU-185

Case Name: Guardianship of : Mildred Barber, an Adult

Case Jurisdiction: Grant Superior Court 3

Judge(s): Dana Kenworthy (Recused) current Warren Haas

Relationship to you: Mother

Opposing counsel: no counsel

Service: Was not an issue because the protected had been overcome by her predator son. Thus yes she was always sent information that was inadvertently handled by her predator.

– how were they notified (phone/email/mail/in person)?

2. Isolation
The order removed my (Sandra Black) as the original petitioner and all rights of any interest so whatever in the guardianship of Mildred Barber

How are the visits limited? No visits so whatever. Mildred Barber is under strict isolation of her abusive son in which the family has had to surrender and succumb to the corruption of the judicial system, State Adult Protection Services that couldn’t admit fault in handing Mildred Barber over to her predator, which is undoubtedly now evident, but through concealing and cover-up by pure avoiding the abuse, destroyed property, stolen property, which is still in continuance due to the need to keep Mildred Barber enslaved to her high school drop out, seriously marijuana addicted, cruel and abusive son that is not wanted revealed how badly devastated her existence has been reduced due to corruption, incompetence, and purely lack of concern for the quality of life of Mildred Barber.

Are there medical records indicating visitation limits: None, no care as to her activities or visits. She is purely a slave for her income. No love

Is there a list of “permitted visitors”: No, what ever happens, they just allow to happen.

Who made up the list: No list, no visitors due to the horrid condition of abuse and bullying over the years family had to vacate interest due to the torture and agony forced to partake in by guardians and Judge Haas as a condition to visit.

Who is your loved one not seeing right now (list name and relationship) where the visits are limited and how are they limited: People who used to force a visit includes:

Myself 1. Sandra Black daughter 55 years old
2. Felicia Ogunbuyide granddaughter 29 years old
3. Kemuel Eliyahu Ben Shem grandson 19 years old severely scared
4. Chrisdeon Ogunbuyide great-grandson 10 years old
5. Victoria Goree great-granddaughter 4 years old
6. Isaiah Goree great-grandson 3 years old
7. Jewel Nadrowski Niece 49
8. Jessica Ganaway Niece 32
9. Jessie Gilmer Nephew 55
10. Yania Westbrook Niece 36
11. Lester Barber Nephew 57

Friends and other family that can not visit due to near physical violence and severe verbal abuse of fowl language

3. Chemical Restraints

Is your loved one taking any forms of chemical restraints or psychotropic drugs: Not known have not had contact since October 2015.

Are you allowed to check to see if they are taking such medications? No contact to avoid abuse

Do you have the disabled person’s medical records? No Why or why not: Not allowed involvement no one cares about the disabled’s health or wellbeing other than going through pretenses. She goes to doctors appt. and leave with no one to care about asking questions or suggestions for her health. All is pure protocol, no personal care of interest for Mildred Barber.

Is the person drooling or do they have slurred speech? Dramatic shut down of communication from onset of abuse and isolation. Mildred Barber lives with no one to set up entertainment or activities. She ends up psychotic arguing or playing with herself to survive the utter loneliness. This is all for a son who utterly has contempt for her, but neither the court nor Adult Protection Services would remotely try to ask people who KNEW, like mother’s home care providers to her home for her brother. In the end, as it was self evident they all chose to conceal and cover-up abuse and thefts by her son.

Does the Guardian have a court order permitting the administration of psychotropic drugs? Court and Guardian by law have final say, but son runs all day to day care.

Has the disabled person ever been held down and shot up with drugs against their will? No

4. Abuse of Disabled

Since the guardianship proceeding, has your loved one been abused? YES!!!

Please state all ways in which they have been abused.

Mother’s dogs, plants, and most all possessions either died, were sold off, or just disappeared. My brother took her home and made her the prisoner in her own home. One plant was from my grandmother’s grave who died in 1989, I was supposed to pass it on to my children, but he killed it. Her car was taken away prematurely because the doctor was told about mom’s visions (HALLUCINATIONS) that mom experienced every since a child in her awaking state. All my life I have heard of her visions and dreams some came true. Elijah did not know mom so he couldn’t tell the doctor that this was what occurred regularly in mom’s life. When asked to do so and explained that mom always saw things when waking up as she had reported to them of a man over her bed. I was told he would not deal with those white folks; I had no business going to court.

After mother was ordered finally stuck she, then realized that her son was not going to get her all the things he had promised her to go against me in court, in court mom would say that she only wanted me to visit not for guardianship and immediately protested the final decision in October, 2013. By November, 2013 Mildred and Elijah my brother were in an all out war, guardians ignored all complaints. Mildred was threatened bodily harm and to burn down her home cursed out, horrendous verbal abuse. Then when she wouldn’t succumb, he began isolation. Mom told me that she tried to kick him in his balls and my brother told her if you do that again motherfucker you’ll be a dead mother fucker. This is my brother, I know it was not dementia. It was told to guardians and ignored. He took her phone stating that she would try to call the police on him. Guardians stated that she couldn’t afford a phone. All her income had been badly mismanaged by the state by allowing Elijah to run the household.

Mom got so bad off from the abuse that we did not leave from our visit and the police were called by my brother. They said they wouldn’t order us to leave because there was no order. The guardian came out Jared Quarles and ran the ENTIRE FAMILY out and kept my brother in the home. Present were Sandra Black, Felicia Ogunbuyide, Kemuel Shem, Jessica Ganaway, Daniel Batchelor, Jewel Nadtowski. We were told that mom did not have 12.00 dollars to her name, that’s why she couldn’t afford a phone and we would all have to get out and stick to our hours of visitation. We all left and mother and he were in a fierce battle for him to get out.
Then he forced her out of her room off upstairs, with no phone, no TV, sealed bathrooms, into utter solitary confinement. All reports were in vain as the guardians didn’t care and it continued for months until Mildred had a complete psychotic break. In one week’s visit (At this time guardians set up that I could only visit 5 hrs once per week actually in order to get five hours I had to agree to bathe my mother or be restricted to only 2 hours, I took the 5 hours. And also one weekend visit once per month). Every week mother reported horror stories. I would find her forced to stay in her room also video documented. Thus all manner of lost privileges not due to illness, but inadequate persons to care. This extreme and very harsh abuse went on from the end of court in October till around April, 2014. When mom psychotic broke my brother got real scared contacted me and family member to help mom to stop talking to herself. He had began to hid all mom’s possessions like her TV, Dishes, glasses, cups, silverware, Towels, face cloths so that on our scheduled visits neither she nor we could have access to necessities. Again the guardians didn’t care. Visits were sometimey due to both the guardians and Elijah sabotage of the few hours that I did get.

I began a daily protest in July, 2014 through February, 2015. My city is racist and the local paper would not cover the story nor would anyone else. Buy August, 2014 Marion Police investigator for abuse Tammy Wolf, went out and found that she suspected bullying by my brother and called both the guardians and APS. By now all is hopeless due to corruption. They ignored her totally and the APS lied to her that they went out in 2012 and there were no more complaints. I told her, Tammy Wolf that was a blatant lie as not only had I been calling the APS, but also Mr. Joe Newman, retiree from the City of Chicago and friends to me and my mother called them too. He was told that any manner of abuse to my mother is of no concern to APS as it would have to be handled through the courts. When I called, my son, and daughter called APS would never pick up and we always left messages that went unreturned thus ignored.

Soon after Tammy Wolf’s investigation, mother started reporting how happy she was, then it turned into her being interested in my brother. Remember this would be told to me 5 hr visit one week and then 5 hr visit the next week where she told me that he was having sex with her. I thought that someone might care about the fact that unrelentlessly mom tried to get rid of my brother from Oct 2013 till this point and now after T. Wolfs investigation she’s all excitedly happy. Like what happened, in 2012 with the first order by Kenworthy, but the APS announces to my brother that they would come out so that he could have time to take her to dinner and whoo her over so by the time they come out mom is happy so no problem. This was now well documented with Marion Police involved that mom was not happy with my brother and now again T. Wolf comes out and mom’s life magically changes and she’s happy. I was sickenly supprised when mom told me that she was having sex with my brother. So confused as to what to do as mom no longer had any rights. She was ill so does her saying she is having sex with her son even matter to this system? I 100% didn’t know if my brother could do it to keep mom under wrap as he had been doing through out the entire case. It was so horrid of a possibility that I couldn’t go to the police that my mother was saying my brother was having sex. Then after talking much with family over the weekend, I decided to report what mom told me and give them the video recording of it. Just as I was horrified so was the police to request a rape kit. I attended the rape kit investigation which took in access of one hour because mother continuously said that she was married to my brother and that he told her not to tell because the police would get him. Mom repeated this story continuously and the guardians were told that they would prefer even though they couldn’t tell if a rape had occurred mom shouldn’t go back into the home. The guardians said there was no proof of a rape and therefore she is to go back. The next week visitation mom is very sad and depressed. I asked her why because she told me that GG (my brother) was so very good to her. She said, “HE GOT OUT OF THAT.” This was immediately sent to guardians all ignored. After this Elijah stepped up the abuse and refused to leave and allow visits. Tammy Wolf would help by calling the guardians who just began ignoring. From November, 2015 until March, 2016 no visits were allowed without abuse until the State Reps got involved to reestablish visitation, but NOT TO END ABUSE.
Mother was brought to my home from March thru October 2015, she would go straight to her bed as she was ordered at my brother’s I would work to get her out of that behavior have a couple of nice days, then mom would be forced where she didn’t want to go with a person didn’t want her, but did want her house and not to look like an evil person. I couldn’t get the guardians to work with me to free mom by just telling my brother that he would be needed to keep the house (of course give him mom’s house so that she could be free to be a person again). Always ignored, no answers to fix the abuse. We knew it would never end after a lawyer was finally hired by my daughter who came into money. That lawyer said that nothing could be done, no one in my family ever could have my mother because of the judge’s prejudice against me. He offered to take money to talk to the APS to change mom’s case because it was clear that they were not listening to me. I asked my lawyer, doesn’t it look bad if all the time I had told these people that mom was not liked that all the horrible things would happen and then if they hear you say it and it is already set that they do not want to look bad. What will happen? He said, you’re right. I couldn’t get the abuse to ever stop our family would live in hell forever with my mother. So after the lawyer, the entire family gave up and left mom to one son who despises her and no family.

List any hospitalizations and approx. dates where abuse was a problem. Unknown, uptil October 2015, my mother was a very healthy woman other than dementia. We went to parks, restaurants, walks, the fair, shopping, to my knowledge my mother is nor allowed anywhere, but the doctor and her room. She is not allowed to use any other restrooms in her own home. Last I was visiting her there. I learnt that mom was forced to wear TWO diapers to go wet longer. Proof will be seen in how my brother used 2 to 3 times more diapers that I did the months we shared my mom. They didn’t care.

Was the disabled returned to the same abusive situation? YES

Did the court direct that the abusers (attorneys, GAL’s, case managers) investigate allegations of abuse? My mother is not allowed any investigation since court accept for the rape kit, which said she should not be returned. Also there were two other occasions that went unreported due to our family is not allowed any way to stop abuse. There was a small bruise on the inner leg that looked like rubbing it was on one leg. Then there was a tall man, used for relations, this was never said as sexual by my mom, but he was always mentioned and when I told my brother, it stopped. Mom quit asking for her tall guy that she wanted to talk to who liked her. Nothing else we can do.

Abuse can consist of bruises, cuts, broken bones, broken skin, bed sores (very serious), aspiration of food into lungs (because patient was not sitting while eating, very serious), malnutrition, dehydration, etc. There was only ONE injury looked like a bb gun shot, found out later as guardians and my brother tried to hide it from me. The sore was deep perfectly round and meaty? Mom said the kids were hurting her, spring of 2014, but her foot was in so much pain (FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES) and I wasn’t allowed to help her get medical treatment.

Was a feeding tube inserted against the disabled’s will? NO, my brother is not going to allow them to take mom out of the house because he wants to have the home free. During the time that I was literally not allowed visits, the police and prosecution said that my mother would be thrown into a nursing home. This was over a year ago, because mom was nearly bed ridden from lack of care or concern. Now nurses work for my brother and may be forcing her to sit up and walk around?

What is the hygiene of each place the disabled has been placed into? Please list any incidents where the disabled was living in filthy conditions and the approx. dates. Hygiene meets the bare necessities, but seem to be legal. The worst is that she does not have help to remind her to go to the toilet and the use of two diapers for her to sit longer.

Have you made any complaints? If so list dates and brief summary of complaint and its outcome. There are hundreds of emails to the guardians, letters to the APS, the Congresswoman Susan Brooks, Calls to State Reps Amanda Banks and Kevin Mahan.

Were you told you could visit, but then you were blocked by the guardian? No, just couldn’t take the abuse anymore and the ignoring of how the ENTIRE family was suffeing. Once Lester Earl Barber, accompanied my son to pick up medicine for my mother and was afraid that he would be physically attacked. The guardians could NOT send a lady to my mom’s home alone because they were all afraid of my brother so they had to hire a man to deal with my brother. But mother is forced to live in it. Because of a cruel and corrupt judge who told me that he didn’t care if I never saw my mother again.

Did the court issue orders you could visit, but then the visits never happened? No

Did the disabled want to live at home or with a relative but the court ordered them into a nursing home? No, the disabled wanted me to care for her immediately after court as my brother promised her that she would drive her car again and have total control over her home if she just keep me blocked away and if she didn’t do it that she would be put in a nursing home and lose everything. I was told this immediately after court October, 2013. I didn’t report it until later in November because mom was easily tricked by my brother, which would make her forget all he did to her and do what he told her to do.

Did the court find it was all right to pay a nursing home for care but not pay a family member to care for the disabled at home or in the relative’s home? Unknown, my brother has sole care, but tells my children that he rarely ever sees her because a nurse does that. Also he cut her nails off because she was supposedly attacking him.

If there was isolation, how many times did you see your loved one per week, month or year? For the first year, 5 hrs, one day per week and one weekend. Then just not allowed at all from Novemeber 2014 to February, 2015. Then from 1: 00 PM Monday to 1: 00 PM Friday then my brother took mom for the weekend from Friday to Monday when she always clearly was unhappy and voiced it to guardians. But the guardians FORCED her to go to the abuse they said because the judge wants it like this. I was losing my son, my health is such that I don’t handle being abused I literally get uncontrollable high blood pressure and kidney problems. Watching mom tormented like this with absolutely no way to end it was making me life threatening ill so for the sake of our family and my health I had to give up in ordered not to live in the abuse. My mother and I were best friends. We were so much caring for one another. I realized that my relationship was highly unusual in that mom and I never had any serious arguments while she did not suffer from dementia. I loved just laying in bed with her and going to her world of her child hood. Since my brother doesn’t know my mom he can’t talk to her like that. We listened to music, watched the same movies together, Mr Ed, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Archie Bunker, and mom loved it. Nothing for mom, with my brother just walls. He lies that he reads the Bible to mom because mom loves to hear a man read the Bible. Any of mom’s friends, co workers can reveal this to be a lie that mom just wants to be read to and no company or conversation. Mom did not know who my brother was since 2014. But if you mentioned Sandra or Sandy, mom always was happy to hear of me. By now she may have forgotten, but I think my mom will still know me just by the mention of my name. My brother was shocked when my daughter was able to say the first syllable and mom could finish her name while she doesn’t even know my brother’s name even if you mention it. That’s because they were NEVER close in life.
5. Abuse of Family

Have you or any family members been falsely arrested because of the guardianship? Please provide details, if so. NO

Have you been defamed, false lighted, slandered or libeled by the court or any attorneys?
YES,
Elijah, who was never in mom’s life changed his life, for my life and told the court that I was everywhere, but Marion, Indiana. Misleading the court to think that I wasn’t in mom’s life. In reality, my brother was never in mom’s life other than what he could take from her and they both despised each other in the end until dementia, when mom seemed to forgive him. I didn’t think of mom’s character. If you ask my brother he will tell you that mom’s favorite saying. I’ll forgive, but I’ll never forget. My brother made me out to be so poor I was trying to rip my mother off. I have a life insurance policy of 100,000.00 dollars for incase anything every happened to me that I have kept up since I was 35. My brother has nothing for his children. Has no relationship with any family member other than a son who plays Xbox for now. His two daughters, myself, and my daughters, nor son have any relationship with me. I have his daughter on my AT&T phone account. I have never ever yelled or cussed his children, nor do they LOATHE me. My children loathe him for the severe dishonesty against me and the abuse they told me later he did to them BOTH physically and emotionally. My children report horror stories of being beat with a boot, hair dryer, having to hide under the bed from him out of fear of him, and several beatings.

In my family, my brothers were together, and mom and I were together. My Brother Pat’s letter in my book will verify that as truth even though he is trying to support our brother Elijah. Trying to say that mom is not sick that I was making it all up because I never saw mom mad at me. So now it was my turn to get what the boys always got. But they were judged for dealing drugs, taking drugs, being cruel, abusive, and unappreciative. I was a complete opposite.

Warren Haas was given a deposition by a nurse (Barbara Daniels also in my book) for my mother who explained that my brother was not close to my mother. In his order he make ZERO mention of mom’s nurse to her home for years testimony and goes solely off what mother was told to tell the GAL that I said if she didn’t give me control of her money I would throw her into a nursing home. It was this testimony that the judge said that he didn’t care if I never saw my mother again.
If so, please list approximate dates and what was falsely said about you.
Have false civil charges been brought against you or a family member? NO, I tried to have the prosecutor get my brother for perjury which is 100% provable. I was told it can not be done unless the judge in the case wanted to pursue it. Yes, the corrupt judge who wanted my mother stuck in hell for my forcing his colleague to recuse.

False accusations of theft, missing assets blamed on the wrong person, etc?

Yes, my brother just lied about everything and since he had mom (by changing the locks and kicking me out of the house) to make it easier on the case they GAL and Judge Dana Kenworthy just said it was truth without asking anyone so whatever about my brother’s character. Then just made it automatic that I had a disability therefore no matter what that was automatic unfit.

Were you the subject of a gag order not to talk about or post information on social media, blogs and the internet (please attach order). No

6. Constitutional Rights

Has the court issued any gag orders or “location” orders where the disabled person cannot travel as desired. No, we just don’t have access by the guardian.

List dates of all gag or location orders, a brief summary of the content.

Did the disabled ask for an attorney and receive one prior to the hearing for guardianship? no

Was the attorney clearly independent, or did s/he not fight for the disabled’s rights? no

Were you told that the attorney must come from a secret list the court keeps? no

Was the disabled given a choice of attorneys? no If the disabled could not choose, did the family choose freely? no

Did the disabled come to all court hearings? yes

Was anyone told not to talk about the case on social media or on the internet? Explain. no

Were they prevented from coming to any hearings? I was ordered REMOVED as a person of interest even though I petitioned the court. The clerk was ordered to throw away any motions or attempts by me to move the court. If not, why not? Was transportation provided? no

Was the disabled ever told not to speak in court when they wanted to make a point? no

Were any of the family members told not to speak in court when a family member wanted to make a point? Yes, my son, but he was a minor at age 14. He wanted to tell how abusive my brother was, but the court Dana Kenworthy said he could not speak.

Did the disabled person want to waive any rights (right to a hearing, right to an attorney, right to be present at their hearing, who would be the Guardian?) Was the waiver of rights recorded? no

7. Mental Exam

Did the disabled get a full and fair mental exam by an independent doctor of the disabled’s choice? No

Why or why not? They didn’t ask

Did the court appoint any evaluators? Only a GAL who did not try at all to determine what type of person I was or what type my brother was. Just my brother had her, although I testified that he did not like my mother, it did not matter. Same with APS if you were able to con the elderly then that meant your were the one who should be with her. There were several predators into mom’s home. The first a man who mom got angry at me for telling her that he was a predator. So when the lady (Shynithia Cook) came around the first part of 2010, she moved in on my mom with her daughter and I was too afraid of alienation by mom to tell her that this woman was a predator. So I called the APS out to look at what was going on with my mother. I told them about the delusional AT&T rants, and the fact that mom moved this person who is practically a stranger to her. He did not investigate, instead he went out and socialized with my mother and the predator and since the house was clean. Steve Sumner went back and reported that I was the problem because the house was clean and the predator had mom happy. The GAL never contacted APS to know this had happened. She did the same things with my brother. When Dana Kenworthy orders mom stuck with my brother. My brother then kicks out the predator Shyinthia Cook who was using mom to baby-sit her daughter while she went out on the town. And I happened by with no one in the home but mom with her eyes swollen shut from crying and I write letters to congress to get help for mom. This is when in 2012 Blackwell (I believe) calls my brother so that he can fix the visit and have mom happy.

Did these evaluators come from a secret list the judge had? no

Was a full physical exam conducted before the mental exam to determine if there were any treatable conditions? No, mom was determined incompetent solely due to the doctor’s stated of dementia and our family statements. The GAL had planned to say nothing was at all to matter with mom, but when she called about the 5,000 dollars mom took out of her savings to pay my brother’s loan that he made her take out and mom didn’t remember. That made her automatically incompetent. Elijah got angry because he wanted full control so he filed that the court was racist. I too requested reconsideration and then at this time the APS was called in and ordered to fully investigate mom’s cause. By the day of the court BOTH GAL and APS said they didn’t have time to investigate that they knew that did enough and stand by their reports. They NEVER investigated and the judge ruled.

Was the disabled informed in advance of the exam to prepare for the exam? no

Was the disabled told in advance the results would be used in court to guardianize him or her? no

Did the disabled sign a waiver they knew the results would be used in court against them to guardianize them? no

During the exam did the disabled have their glasses and hearing aids and did they function properly? She had dementia

8. Final Days on earth – not for our case yet

Did the disabled receive appropriate medical treatment and medicines at all times? unknown

Was the disabled put in hospice against his or her will or instructions?

Did the disabled leave a Medical Power of Attorney or living will that said “no hospice”?

Does the disabled’s religion prohibit hospice (Roman Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, etc.)

Was the disabled narcotized to death with psychotropic drugs while food and water were withheld?

Was the disabled cremated to destroy evidence of the murder?

9. Assets

Were any assets missing from the inventory or accounting that you were aware? YES, mom’s burial insurance is gone and the guardians have told me that they are going to lie and say that it never existed even though the GAL recorded it as existing. Mom’s furniture, car, many assets were sold all her movies, her home was rented out by my brother he is on recording saying that he collected the first and last rent. I suspect him holding the mom’s things hostage.

Please list any valuable asset that was missing and if an inusrance or Bonding claim was filed and the result of the claim.

I didn’t know the name of the insurance, I just knew of its existence. Anyone who knows my mother knows our family believes heavily in insurances, but not my brother as he did not consider himself family with us. I always tried to unite him and get him to change how he didn’t see us (Mom and I) as family. That’s how he found out to take mom from me is because I called him for help to let mom have a break so that she wouldn’t be so angry and then he voiced no, he wanted to take mom over.

Did a nursing home get paid any kickbacks for placing the disabled there? NO, But mom’s car was given away to someone, but no one was allowed in the family. The guardian was stating that my brother thought he would get the car if I was happy he didn’t. I told her of course not. I know that I, my daughter, and mom’s niece all inquired to buy or sell the car, but we were all blocked away. Then when my brother does what he does, took over and went to the bank to buy it the guardian sold it out from under him. I would rather my brother have the car than an outsider. Now my brother is the type who would rather see mom or I lose than what’s fair due to his hatred. But even after all that my brother has done I do not hate because he’s been sick all his life. From the age of about 4 or five years old my brother sold our baby brother Pat to our neighbor for a candy bar and never tried to get him back. This is the way he was from birth just sick greedy.

Did the disabled get the funeral and burial of his or her choice? My brother does not KNOW my mother he will not be able to fulfill her wishes because he doesn’t know them.

Further Comments:

If you need the daily documented emails you can create a folder for my emails and I can send the many of them. Or I could send a sample of a few emails. The video of mom talking about having sex with my brother can be available here is the video EXACTLY ONE WEEK LATER with mother depressed for losing her lover. My brother said that I brain washed my mother into saying that she was having sex with him. But you could see the video this is a pure academy award acting. How could a person of dementia be taught to act like that and what was she going to gain? When my brother said to say that she did not want me to have guardianship she would get everything back from the court and her car and drive again. Of course mom didn’t want me for guardianship. She wanted her promise he had offered her. But what possibly can I offer mom with a five hour visit to act like she was having sex with my brother. And by the time she goes to the rape kit on Monday two days later she still is having a serious relationship with my brother, but by Friday she’s depressed and I supposedly made that all happen. Here’s mom depressed over losing her boyfriend, my brother.
This is so sad for me, but I can’t believe they forced mom to live like this. This was 2014. I can up load her happy excited about having sex with my brother but would put a privacy code. I can’t allow that video to be public it is so horrible for her to be on top of the world and happy because she’s having sex with her son.

This video is exactly one week later. Remember that I can’t have but 5 hours with my mother ONCE PER WEEK. They said mom can not be moved solely because no sperm was found even though the nurse told me that she can not RULE OUT that sexual act didn’t occur because this was three days later and mom could have not shown it, but just how mother talks about him not wanting the police to get him and her saying that she was married to him, that they are together this is a problem. Once week later you can see that mom understand that the relationship changed and that what my brother was doing before he is no longer doing. But the police over the rape, the guardians, prosecutors, APS all don’t want to help my mother out of this ordeal.

Let me know if you want more documentation of action emails.