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Guardianship is often exploited by unscrupulous characters who go to great lengths to take advantage of their wards.
Mudslinging and character assassination is an expected part of politics. It’s what you signed up for. Running for public office means opening yourself up to intrusive probings into your personal life, hit jobs from political reporters, and even attacks on your close friends and family members. These types of dirty tricks, common in politics should be nowhere near our legal guardianship systems. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The legal system is supposed to provide a refuge of justice and protection for the innocent and the abused. It should never be used as a weapon to steal an unsu...
What do a megastar singer, Britney Spears, and an elderly Alabama philanthropist, Joann Bashinsky, have in common? A whole lot more than you think. As we learned from the recent hit documentary about Britney Spears' ongoing conservatorship battle to regain control of her life, abuse of this legal mechanism is a national epidemic in need of drastic reform. The New York Times feature, which was released in early February, exposed shocking details about Spears' legal dispute with her father, who has done everything in his power to keep control over the singer’s personal finances since s...
We like to think that judges are impartial arbiters of justice and that medical professionals--as a physician myself, I know this should always be true--only have the best interests of their patients at heart. Unfortunately, as a growing number of elderly Americans and their families are discovering, that isn’t always the case. Conservatorship abuse has been a largely silent problem for decades, but the recent documentary about Britney Spears’s problems has given it a higher profile. Unlike Ms. Spears, who has legions of fans eager to speak in her behalf, most victims of conservatorship a...
Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, right, listens to a news conference, Friday, Sept. 25, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. Family attorney Ben Crump is calling for the Kentucky attorney general to release the transcripts from the grand jury that decided not to charge any of the officers involved in the Black woman's death. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) By Erica Wright The Birmingham Times What’s left to say about 2020 except that it’s over. But what a year with the well-chronicled coronavirus pandemic that killed more than 300,000; racial unrest that created division in across many comm...