Monthly Archives: November 2014
Court Appointed Guardianship Abuses Run Rampant in American Courts
On Facebook, I followed the elder abuse case of Sherry Johnston’s mother, Willie Jo Mills, a victim of guardianship abuse under Ginger Lott, David Dexel and Judge Christine Butts. This was happening in Harris County, Texas. Judge Butts had the power to stop the abuse and allow Sherry to take her mother home and care for her but refused to do so; instead allowing the abuse to continue up until the day she died.
As in my own mother’s case, Judge Asarch had the power to release my mother from the nursing home Mary Giordano placed her in. Mom died before she was able to taste freedom again.
We all mourn the passing of Willie Jo Mills. She is now free from her abusers. May she rest in peace.
November 21, 2014
by Mike Volpe
Following multiple RebelPundit reports on guardianship abuse, our latest investigation reveals this problem is widespread across the country and there is top to bottom corruption in court appointed guardianship in Harris County, Texas.
After speaking to victims, lawyers, and activists, the investigation reveals that the probate court in Harris County works much like a good ole boys club where judges receive campaign contributions from lawyers who then receive favorable rulings. In a court with little oversight, several victims suffered physical and mental abuse and were left to effectively be euthanized.
Guardianship is a court created power to take decisions of healthcare and finances away from those the court has deemed incapacitated and unable to make those decisions for themselves.
Initially started to protect the elderly and mentally challenged from being taken advantage of, it has often been corrupted, having the opposite effect. Those perfectly healthy who are effectively jailed and held against their wills, often end up in nursing homes away from their families.
Sherry Johnston told RebelPundit her mother was one of those victims. Her mother died in September 2014, weighing less than thirty pounds her normal weight. She provided Rebel Pundit with a series of photos which showed bruising, bed sores, and she made a You Tube video of doctors and guardianship professionals refusing to provide her mother with treatment, instead choosing to send her to hospice care to die.
Johnston said her ordeal started when a family dispute led to an order placing her mother, Willie Jo Mills, in guardianship. Rather than choosing a family member to be her guardian, Judge Christine Butts, appointed David Dexel to be the guardian.
The judge also appointed a Guardian ad Litem (GAL) and an Attorney ad Litem to oversee the case, all at the expense of the estate. Rather than allowing Mills to live with Johnston, as both wanted, Dexel placed Mills in the Silverado Nursing Home in Kingwood, Texas, in the spring 2009.
The estate was charged $7,000 a month for the care.
“At Sliverado she was abused, isolated and neglected,” Johnston told RebelPundit.
Dexel, whose name came up repeatedly in the investigation, is out of the office until December, according to his law office, and didn’t respond with a statement on this and other cases.
According to campaign finance records, Dexel contributed $1,000 to Butts’ campaign while the GAL in the case, Howard Reiner, contributed $2,500 to Butts campaign in 2013.
Reiner didn’t return a phone message left at his law office.
Butts was re-elected in November 2014.
Johnston said her mother’s estate has been charged nearly $300,000 in total fees by court professionals, including lawyers like Dexel and Reiner who charged between $250-300 per hour for their services.
Debbie Valdez, President of Guardianship Reform Advocates for the Disabled and Elderly (GRADE) is not surprised and said poorly thought out legislation has led to problems in the State of Texas and Harris County.
She told Rebel Pundit that her group has received complaints against three of the four elected probate judges in Harris County.
The most notorious judge is Mike Wood who has been featured in a number of exposes in Houston area media. Valdez said in 2005, Woods was one of several judges to testify in front of the Texas legislature to argue for more ambitious guardianship laws, claiming elderly would be victimized without them.
The result was bill SB 6, which Valdez told RebelPundit has done the opposite, leading to far more corruption and abuse.
One problem is that the law turned Texas into a court initiated guardianship state. By this Valdez explained, once any report is made of an individual to probate court, they are immediately put into the guardianship system even before its determined, if in fact, the ward is incapacitated.
“We see court initiated guardianship as very dangerous.”
That’s exactly what happened to her mother said Johnston.
“She never had due process,” Johnston said of her mother. “She never saw a judge or anything (before being put into the guardianship system).”
This creates a “presumed guilty” dynamic.
Another problem is that courts are run entirely through a network the judge controls. In the case of Mills, her family wasn’t allowed to hire an attorney for her, but was instead appointed an attorney by the courts.
Valdez added, with attorneys and social workers are being invited into a dynamic where they are looking to please the judge and to make decisions which will prolong guardianship and thus add to the fees.
Possibly the most disturbing story was that of Helen Hale.
In an extensive expose, Lise Olsen of the Houston Chronicle wrote:
Under a court-ordered guardianship, 86-year-old widow Helen Hale was plucked from the house she and her husband had built on wooded acreage in Cypress for their retirement and relocated to an unlicensed group home run by a caregiver with a criminal history.
In some of the state’s largest counties, like Harris, Travis and Bexar, so many people are in guardianships that each probate judge oversees from 1,500 to 3,000 ‘wards’ of the court. Yet most judges have only a single investigator to check out potential problems.
Upon speaking with Hale’s family, the end result is that more than three years later nothing has changed.
RebelPundit conducted interviews with Hale’s daughter Susan Staley and her granddaughter, Jennifer Goings, and though Hale has six children, Judge Butts, without explanation, chose a daughter with a history of drug use who had recently spent more than a decade without seeing her mother, as her guardian.
Goings provided RebelPundit with a series of photos which show bruises, bed sores, and other signs of neglect perpetrated on her grandmother.
The photos of Hale’s bed sores from one of the unsanitary nursing homes she’s been forced to stay in were to graphic for publishing.
Staley said she can’t remember the last time she’s seen her mother, because in order to do that she’d first need to get permission from her estranged sibling guardian.
“I won’t give her the satisfaction.” Staley said.
The Goings family has written a series of letters and emails begging Judge Butts to reconsider this decision including one written by Ron Goings on April 4, 2012.
“She (Helen Hale) has asked us to please get her out of this situation. At every turn we have been painted into a corner as being aggressive, manipulative and now as terrorists. I cannot understand how the court and its investigators and supposed guardians can be so blind.”
Harris County has a population of 4.1 million people, according to the 2010 census, making it the largest county in Texas and third largest in the country. It includes the cities of Houston and Sugar Land.
Judge Butts provided a statement to RebelPundit addressing these two cases:
I am unable to comment specifically on the cases you identified, as the Code of Judicial Conduct provides in part that, ‘A judge shall abstain from public comment about a pending or impending proceeding which may come before the judge’s court in a manner which suggests to a reasonable person the judge’s probable decision on any particular case.’
However, I will tell you that, with regard to the cases involving Helen Hale and Willie Jo Mills, such cases were contested in that the children of Ms. Hale and Ms. Mills were in dispute as to the appropriate choice of guardian. With regard to all cases in Probate Court 4, copies of the pleadings (which include orders of the court and reports of the court investigator) are available through the Harris County Clerk’s office.
“Ms. Mills due process rights were violated when she was not allowed to participate in resolving the dispute in Judge Butts court, instead Judge Butts removed all her civil, constitutional and human rights by forcing a guardianship upon her which ultimately placed Ms. Mills in an abusive and exploitive lifestyle until she died.” Sherry Johnston said in response to Butts’ statement. “Ms. Mills guardian ad litem, attorney ad litem, guardian, were and remain to be much better protected by the guardianship placed on Ms. Mills than she was,while she suffered, and her estate paid for the abuse, neglect and exploitation she was subjected to. Her only protection would have been by and from Judge Christine Butts.”
IN GOD WE STILL TRUST…AMERICA’S SONG FOR THE PEOPLE
On Facebook today, November 11, 2014, I saw this video and heard this song by Diamond Rio for the first time, In God We Still Trust. I was extremely moved by this song, not just because it is Veteran’s Day and my Dad was a World War II veteran; not just because my mother was kidnapped and imprisoned until her death by Mary Giordano, elder care attorney with Franchina and Giordano in Garden City, NY ; but because of the horrible state of affairs our amazing country is in.
“You place your hand on His Bible and you swear to tell the truth.” I watched that happen in the courtroom during my mother’s guardianship trial; they all swore to tell the truth…none did. I watched them commit perjury and sat there in shock, wondering how they could just lie and lie and lie and how Judge Joel Asarch just allowed it to go on, while he sat under the flag of our great country.
People are the ones who make up a country. There are a small percentage of individuals in the world who are working very hard towards the destruction of America. Let’s stop them now. Let us work as one and save our great land from those whose only goal is to destroy America. To take a quote from another great song, “This is my country, land that I love.”
How New York’s Elderly Lose Their Homes to Guardianship
I decided to go public on Facebook with my mother’s story the day she was kidnapped, August 22, 2011 in a desperate attempt to save her from the nursing home that Mary Giordano locked her up in. Mom didn’t want to go there nor did she need so-called “skilled” nursing care. I was ready, willing and able to care for her in my own home 24/7. When I went public, others started reaching out to me about their own horrific and abusive experiences with this lawyer and judge.
It has been three years since Mom passed, and these same abuses are still occurring. What will it take for our so-called criminal justice system; DA Kathleen Rice; the New York State Judicial Commission; the New York State Bar Association to investigate and disbar this lawyer and the others involved? What more do they need?
I was introduced to Investigative Reporter Michael Volpe and told him my story. I provided him with all of the documentation. He could not understand why the DA did not investigate the financial abuses; he also told me that in his opinion Mary Giordano is a murderer. I feel the same way.
by Michael Volpe
October 29, 2014
Mary Giordano is a partner with the New York State law firm, Franchina and Giordano, and among her duties is that Giordano is routinely chosen by the Nassau County Superior Court system to be a guardian for elderly guardianship cases.
But two relatives involved in cases in which Giordano was a guardian say their relatives were forcibly removed from their homes, their assets plundered, and their family members had the life sucked out of them until they died depressed and isolated.
Diane Wilson found her mother Dorothy Wilson on the floor at her home on December 8, 2008. Advised due to long-standing family disputes to enter her mother into guardianship, Wilson said by March 2009, at the order of then Nassau Supreme Court Judge Joel Asarch (pictured above) Asarch appointed Giordano as the court appointed guardian.
As Wilson’s guardian, Giordano was given power over nearly every decision in Wilson’s life including how her money was spent, where she lived, and her medical care.
Giordano ordered a reverse mortgage be placed on Dorothy Wilson’s home which netted about $275,000 and along with Wilson’s pension of about $2,300 month, Judge Asarch claimed in court the money would last for five years.
But it only lasted two years, and Diane Wilson told RebelPundit that proper accounting of the expenses were never provided by Giordano.
Worse yet, in November 2010, Wilson was tricked and forced to move out of her home and into a nursing home.
“Dorothy Wilson is currently placed in the Bristal, an assisted living facility in Massapequa. She was taken there on November 3, 2010, on the pretense of having lunch, by her daughter, Candice Bruder,” Diane Wilson said in a complaint to the New York State Unified Court Grievance Committee. “After she was there, she was told she was moving in there and her clothes were brought later that same day. She is not allowed to leave the Bristal at all, including Thanksgiving. The family is only permitted to go there and visit.”
The elder Wilson, who was 87 at the beginning of the process, was miserable and felt like a prisoner her entire time at Bristal.
On November 15 (2010), after placing three phone calls during a 3 ½ hour period, I was finally able to speak with my mother. During the entire phone call her “caseworker”, Tracy, sat next to her while my mother begged me to come and pick her up and take her home. She had no privacy. When I went to visit her in the evening, she cried the entire time, begging me to take her home, asking me over and over again why I never came, why no one visited her, why no one called,” Diane Wilson said the same complaint.
Wilson was forced to stay in the facility for thirty days at a cost of $53,000, and Giordano never provided a line by line breakdown of why the costs were so high.
On August 22, 2011, on the direction of Giordano, Dorothy Wilson was again moved to Meadowbrook Care Nursing Home in Freeport, New York again against her will
On September 2, 2011, Giordano again moved Wilson into another nursing home Maria Regina Nursing Home in Brentwood, NY. Giordano also attempted to sell Wilson’s house.
What followed was a series of furious court maneuvers until on October 18, 2011, Giordano resigned as guardian but still Judge Asarch kept Dorothy Wilson in the nursing home. She died there on October 23, 2011.
Throughout the process Dorothy Wilson sent a series of letters to the judge begging to be allowed to be cared for by her daughter.
“It’s very strange that my daughter Diane is not allowed to go into my house.” Dorothy Wilson said in a letter dated October 20, 2011. “She is the only one I trust.”
Dorothy Wilson also made a series of You Tube videos begging to be released.
“I hate it here. I want to go home.” Dorothy Wilson said while holding back tears in one You Tube video. “I feel like I’m locked up in a jail.”
A call to Giordano’s law firm was left unreturned.
JUDICIAL DESTRUCTION OF DOROTHY WILSON 