> O’Malley described a 2010 case in which Parks, after receiving a tip from a social worker, began “cold-calling” rehabilitation centers, searching for a seventy-nine-year-old woman, Patricia Smoak, who had nearly seven hundred thousand dollars and no children. Parks finally found her, but Smoak’s physician wouldn’t sign a certificate of incapacity. “The doctor is not playing ball,” Parks wrote to her lawyer. She quickly found a different doctor to sign the certificate, and Norheim approved the guardianship. (Both Parks and Norheim declined to speak with me.)
> Last March, Parks and her lawyer, along with her office manager and her husband, were indicted for perjury and theft, among other charges. The indictment was narrowly focussed on their double billings and their sloppy accounting, but, in a detailed summary of the investigation, Jaclyn O’Malley, who led the probe for the Nevada Attorney General’s Office, made passing references to the “collusion of hospital social workers and medical staff” who profited from their connection to Parks. At Parks’s grand-jury trial, her assistant testified that she and Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices for the purpose of “building relationships to generate more client leads.”
But I agree with you. Having lived in this country for 10 years, I am still shocked by the audacity of these kinds of legal loophole scammers and also amazed that we don't see more retaliatory murders when the legal system fails, considering how easy it is to get a gun in most of these states.
You're amazed that most Americans do not resort to murder when the legal system fails them?
That's why we have appeals courts. To appeal decisions by judges that you believe have failed you.
Where do you come from if you don't mind my asking?
The right answer to those failures is to pressure the system to change, as this newspaper article is helping to do.
If we are going to assume that the government is always right and there is no reason for violence ever, then we should just do away with the second amendment. I dont think that amendment is super useful in the age of tanks, jets and nukes, but the idea of violent revolt against unjust rule is still there
I agree. In this particular case though, I wouldn't blame the victim if they'd consider kneecapping a proportionate response.
Preying on the weak like that is deeply, deeply subhuman.
That's why we created a justice system, because that mode of justice is not a good thing.
The justice system failed them, so logically, they'd be forced to go back to putting people in holes.
Many many years ago, a jury in Tennessee disagreed with your first claim, and literally took the law into their own hands in the courtroom against the government as they watched a persons rights get wholesale violated. That jury was flat-out exonerated IIRC. So there's legal precedent against your first claim and a good inherent pressure for your second claim. People would be far less likely to violate the law so egregiously if they knew that people could just kill them and walk away without a second thought of jail time.
Almost every paragraph has some completely f*d up situation. I can't believe this isn't flagged as a conflict of interest.
Fleecing old people must be a great business.
As a marginally civilized society, we have dealt with it - it involved international tribunals, nazi hunters, quick trials and bullets between the eyes after which gold dealers as if by magic were not taking gold teeth and art dealers were not taking magically re-appearing artworks.
this is the type of law and regulation that only gets changed if something outlandish gets championed by the local press or they step on the wrong person' toes. seeing how this goes down I would not be surprised if people like Parks hire detectives to dig up possible "clients" just so they know who is an easy take.
Most certainly needs to be changed and those participating need to be held accountable.
Facilitating fraud like this is blatantly unethical: if only 'legal ethics' actually stood for anything worthwhile
In the camps, the people were systematically starved and beaten to maintain their helplessness. Even so, some did try to rebel and were killed.
The people who heard whispers about what had happened couldn't believe it - it was too vile to contemplate.
The parallels between that unspeakable crime and this story are:
- People who have become marginalized (our society does not exactly honor the elderly, except - sometimes - relatives).
- Preying on unsuspecting people with their guards down.
- State-sanctioned abuse (if unintentional) in the name of protection.
- Victims who lacked the mental capacity and physical stamina to understand what was happening and to resist.
- "Somebody else's problem"; disinterest in the plight of the marginalized people who some see as less than human.
- Trust in authority figures.
"...But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that the Organs [of state security] are humanely logical institutions: they will set things straight and let you out.
Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you'll only make your situation worse; you'll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won't hear.
At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about any one of them individually - especially at a time when the thoughts of the person arrested are wrapped tightly around the big question: 'What for?' - and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest."
I think same kind of thoughts go through peoples' heads in all manner of less serious circumstances. They might know it doesn't feel right or that it's wrong, but they feel that surely someone will help them correct the mistake. And if they just go along for now, they'll be in better standing when they finally find the right time to raise their objection.
>During Rennie North’s first year at Lakeview Terrace, she gained sixty pounds. Parks had switched the Norths’ insurance, for reasons she never explained, and Rennie began seeing new doctors, who prescribed Valium, Prozac, the sedative Temazepam, Oxycodone, and Fentanyl. The doses steadily increased.
EDIT: I've been downvoted, so maybe I should explain my complaint. The article describes an "emergency ex-parte" hearing as one in which only one side is represented. Does that feel like 2017 justice to you, especially in the context of the article?
It's a technical term with a fixed definition. It's not being interpreted, and it doesn't matter if it's English, Latin, or a drawing of a flower.
A lay person being able to guess at the meaning is a minor benefit in some situations, but people guess wrong all the time about how laws work. The end result is a pretty negligible difference.
And looking like normal words without actually being normal words can actually be a detriment to understanding.
This is not really a fair assessment. Law and contracts aren’t all rewritten every few years — old and settled law must be read and understood in the style it was written in, as must precedents and contracts. At one time, the largest settled body of law was the Roman law and so a lot of Latin got dragged forward into the English legal system (and from there into the American, Hong Kong, Canadian, &c.).
The situation is like that in medicine, biology and many other sciences, where the long history of Latin as a language of scholarship is still felt in the choice of technical terms.
Yes it is. Most people making an appeal wouldn't know what a prima facie case is. It is in fact how most self-done appeals fail in the first place. Most people don't know when they file for themselves to file pro se - a big failing for initial cases. Little technical crap like that which relies upon a dead language that only us geeks bothered taking in high school as their elective foreign language. WE get the advantage, the common person does not. Then to boot, we pretty much eliminated civics, so most people don't know how to file a lawsuit or defend themselves, let alone know the Latin terms to utilize in the first place!
And the NEW laws are still written in the OLD American English. No bueno.
While people might not have to interact with engineering jargon, they are often forced to interact with legal jargon at some of the worst times in their life; I think it's good signaling if they can easily identify whether someone's entering into a "legal interaction" with them rather than just a regular talk.
In contrast, English terms of art may be misleading based on their common interpretation - how often do people misunderstand "fair use" of copyrighted material?
1. That's horrifying, especially considering their daughter was minutes away. How was she not involved or at the bare minimum notified? This does sound like a kidnapping.
2. The couple and daughter had no relationship with April Parks (the guardian) prior, how did she get involved? More importantly, how did she get letters from the couple's doctor?
3. How was Parks allowed to hold a hearing without involving at minimum the emergency contacts for the couple? The doctor would have had that information.
4. Once underway, it appears that further hearings, costs, etc can be billed to the estate. How f*d is that?