Rachel Aviv, How the Elderly Lose Their Rights. Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent–and reap a profit from it. The New Yorker, 9 October 2017. “For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 A.M. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast…. Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages…. On the Friday before Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just finished their toast when a nurse, who visited five times a week to help Rennie bathe and dress, came to their house, in Sun City Aliante, an ‘active adult’ community in Las Vegas…. Rudy chatted with the nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry, until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to ‘remove’ them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. ‘Go and gather your things,’ she said. Rennie began crying. ‘This is my home,’ she said.”
One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue….
Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate that read ‘CRTGRDN,’ for ‘court guardian.’ In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.
Without realizing it, the Norths had become temporary wards of the court. Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an exception to the rule that both parties must be notified of any argument before a judge. She had alleged that the Norths posed a ‘substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.’ She submitted a brief letter from a physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating that ‘the patient’s husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient at home as his dementia is progressing.’ She also submitted a letter from one of Rudy’s doctors, who described him as ‘confused and agitated.’
Rudy and Rennie had not undergone any cognitive assessments. They had never received a diagnosis of dementia….
Guardianship derives from the state’s parens patriae power, its duty to act as a parent for those considered too vulnerable to care for themselves. ‘The King shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries,’ reads the English statute De Prerogative Regis, from 1324. The law was imported to the colonies—guardianship is still controlled by state, not federal, law—and has remained largely intact for the past eight hundred years. It establishes a relationship between ward and guardian that is rooted in trust.
In the United States, a million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets, according to an auditor for the guardianship fraud program in Palm Beach County. Little is known about the outcome of these arrangements, because states do not keep complete figures on guardianship cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most jurisdictions, the court records are sealed. A Government Accountability report from 2010 said, ‘We could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive information on this issue.’ A study published this year by the American Bar Association found that ‘an unknown number of adults languish under guardianship’ when they no longer need it, or never did. The authors wrote that ‘guardianship is generally permanent, leaving no way out—until death do us part.’…