Hijacking Legal Control Of The Elderly & Their Assets Thru Court-Sanctioned Guardianship Rackets Appears Alive & Well In New Mexico

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Albuquerque Journal reports:

• Investigative journalist Diane Dimond, whose weekly syndicated column on crime and justice appears in the Journal, is preparing a book on the nation’s elder guardianship system. It’s a system designed to protect the elderly from the unscrupulous.
  
  But as Dimond discovered, it can be dominated by a core group of court-appointed, for-profit professionals who are accused of isolating family members and draining the elders’ estates. New Mexico is no exception.
  
  ***
  The legal effect of [Judge Beatrice] Brickhouse’s ruling was to immediately reduce [78-year old] Blair to protected-person status, a “ward of the court,” and strip her of all her civil rights.
  
  Blair Darnell lost her right to manage her own money, sign a contract, vote, marry, decide where she could travel, who could come into her home and what doctors and medicines she could use. Every aspect of her life was to be decided by court appointees who were strangers.

For more, see Who guards the guardians? (first installment of a five-part Albuquerque Journal series).

For the rest of the series, see:

• Part 2: Cottage industry of guardians, conservators and caretakers can quickly drain estates,
• Part 3: Family members say they were shut out,
• Part 4: Family members feel helpless when court takes control,
• Part 5: Families feel steamrolled as estates disappear,
• Postscript: Fixing a well-meaning but flawed guardian system.

See, generally, U.S. Government Accountability Office: ELDER ABUSE: The Extent of Abuse by Guardians Is Unknown, but Some Measures Exist to Help Protect Older Adults (November, 2016).