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Science Forum Index » Medicine - Lyme Forum » Hartford Courant: "Welcome to the Hotel Connecticut. Come vi
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| Usenet Supreme Loser Chuc |
 Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 5:27 pm |
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Subject:
Hartford Courant: "Welcome to the Hotel Connecticut. Come visit and
you can never leave."
Date:
Friday, January 19, 2007 3:13:45 PM
courant.com
http://www.courant.com/news/local/columnists/hc-ctrgreen0119.artjan19,0,7082789.column
Probate Court: Offering Unequal Protection Under The Law
Rick Green
January 19 2007
Welcome to the Hotel Connecticut. Come visit and you can never leave.
Because if you're elderly and frail and don't watch out, there's a
probate court
judge somewhere out there willing to lock you up in a nursing home. For
your own
good, of course, Grandma.
Unless something dramatic happens, another session of the General
Assembly will
slide by without probate reform. Oh, they'll hold hearings again, but
don't bet
on our elected leaders actually disrupting a system steeped in decades
of
old-boy politics and favoritism.
So this court system - where even the rules of evidence and
recordkeeping are
inconsistent and the legal experience of judges is uncertain - marches
on,
unimpeded.
The latest outrage-of-the-month comes from the Woodbridge probate
district,
where a judge last year denied a request by the children and husband of
an elderly New Jersey woman, Maydelle Trambarulo,
that she be allowed to leave a Connecticut nursing facility and return
home.
Trambarulo was brought here for treatment in 2004 by a niece. Soon
after, the
niece went to probate court in Connecticut and had a conservator
appointed to
oversee her finances and health care, handing over the 76-year-old New
Jersey
woman's liberty - and control of her money - to probate.
"The husband is in New Jersey. The wife was brought here for
rehabilitation by a
relative. Then the relative had her conserved," said John Peters, a
lawyer who
won freedom for Daniel Gross, a Long Island man held against his will
in a
Waterbury nursing home.
Do I need to add that the Trambarulo estate is worth more than $1
million and
that this fight, if nothing else, continues to provide thousands of
dollars
worth of work for lawyers?
It doesn't matter that this family could be a dysfunctional mess. It's
not up to
a Connecticut probate court to decide.
A former West Hartford probate judge who previously represented the
Trambarulo
family, John Berman, understood this when he said in court papers in
December
2005 that the "court lacks jurisdiction to appoint a conservator."
Clifford D. Hoyle, the acting judge in Woodbridge, ruled, instead, that
he was
"not convinced that the respondent's family is willing to make the time
commitments necessary to care for her."
Peters, now representing the Trambarulo family, told me that Maydelle
"doesn't
live here. The judge doesn't have jurisdiction. The fact that you are
here
doesn't mean you are a resident. She wants to go home."
Royal Stark, director of the health law clinic at the Quinnipiac
University
School of Law, said the legislature must limit the power that probate
courts
hand to conservators.
"Until I got a glimpse of it, I didn't realize what was at stake and
how bad
things could go," Stark said. For example, Stark said that once a
person has
been "conserved" by probate court, it is nearly impossible to remove
the conservator.
Reform-minded lawyers want basic changes, such as mandating that courts
respect
previous requests made by the elderly, known as "advance directives."
Courts
should also follow the rules of evidence and proceedings should be
conducted on
the record. They also want to make it easier to appeal decisions.
"We are going to wade into it and see if there are solutions for it,"
promised
state Sen. Andrew McDonald, the chairman of the judiciary committee. "A
lot of
this operates in the shadows."
There you have it - a court system that operates in the dark. Time to
turn the
lights on.
Rick Green's column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached
at
rgreen@courant.com.
Copyright 2007, Hartford Courant
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