Guardianship News:

White Papers

At AAAPG, our mission statement reads: Educate, Advocate, Legislate so from time to time we publish White Papers about Guardianship and related topics.

May 27, 2015 The Definition of Barratry.the word “barratry” best describes the practice of guardianship, probate and trust law as commonly conducted by attorneys, and presided over by judges in all 50 states.

May 18, 2015 The Duplicity of Bar Associations.  If only the victims in guardianship had a tiny fraction of the due process that judges and lawyers enjoy what a different world it would be.

May 17, 2015 How it goes down in Texas. How many probate attorneys, including those in the REPTL (Real Estate Probate Trust Lawyers) Section of the State Bar of Texas, donate to election campaigns of legislators; How many to judges? While we do not know how many attorneys, or how much money is donated, we do know why.

May 4, 2015 What the hell is incapacity anyway? “The typical Ward has fewer rights than the typical convicted felon. It is in one short sentence… The most punitive civil penalty that can be levied against an American citizen with the exception of the death penalty.” ~ The late US Representative Claude Pepper…. But when it comes to locking you down permanently in a life sentence of guardianship, the court has to at least go through the motions of proving (if only to itself) that you must have guardianship “protection”—that you are “incapacitated”. What does that even mean? Incapacity is a term unfamiliar to the general public, but it is the key that unlocks a greed-based system of court sanctioned estate rape in probate courts across the country.

May 3, 2015 Guardianship Dollars: “Follow the money”  – Huge numbers of older Americans are trapped in Guardianships which impoverish them under color of Law—as many as 100,000 of them Florida alone. Where does their money go? The following is a brief fiscal examination of guardianship that “follows the money”.

April 27, 2015 Too much, too many – A recent article in the New York Times indicates that a large number of law school graduates from 2010 has not been able to find employment in the legal sector and are burdened with huge educational loans that need to be repaid. They obviously chose the wrong profession. Instead of amassing hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans to get a law degree and maybe earn $160,000 a year as a starting salary, they should have considered becoming professional for profit guardians.

April 26, 2015 A New and Disgusting Page from the ever-growing Guardian Abuse Playbook – We’ve all heard stories about guardians doing straw man sales of the homes of victims. But what if a surviving spouse or family member is still in the house and refuses to move?

April 23, 2015 A Guardianship Manifesto for 2015 – Guardianships are shrouded in mystery because these begin as mental health cases. The 18th century mindset of being ashamed of and having to hide mental disorders lives on in Probate Court. It is an über potent from of legal humiliation and degradation.

April 12, 2015 If justice is removed – A discussion of Guardianship as an extreme and unjust form of Capitalism.

March 29, 2015 The crazy world of guardianship – It’s helpful to compare what happens in guardianship to what happens in other sectors of the legal and healthcare world. Let’s examine situations in which businesses control the lives of vulnerable individuals. For example hospitals have almost complete control over human beings under their roof and these patients often are transferred to less acute care settings.

February 18, 2015 Position paper on guardianship reform in Florida – The primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens. Statutes governing guardianship, a
process designed and intended to assist vulnerable, destitute individuals with assistance from the state to provide basic needs, have become an existential threat to the well-being of middle class Floridians with assets.

February 11, 2015 Are abusive guardians terrorists – For victims and families victimized by abusive guardianships, it is often impossible to understand the motivations of the stakeholders in the system that causes so much pain under the guise of protection. Simply ascribing their actions to greed is an oversimplification. A more sophisticated analysis would include the fact that in every abusers psyche there is buried the psychological pull of sadomasochism—the thrill of superiority, power, and control that comes from inflicting pain on others with impunity. This is the unspoken driver of the appeal of the absolute power that comes with guardianship which leads to absolute corruption.

January 26, 2015 Objective analysis of conflicts of interest and authority in Florida – As if the for-profit Guardianship system was not complex enough on its face, there are
certain legalistic issues that confound attempts at reform. The tripartite system of state government which creates the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, creates inevitable crossovers in responsibility and authority which confuse the administration of the law and promulgated rules and procedures that are at odds with one another from time to time. This is the situation in guardianship.

December 25, 2014 Barriers to reform in probate guardianship – Only under the most exceptional circumstances should an innocent individual’s basic human rights be taken by government.

December 24, 2014 Protect Your Loved Ones – Will you be able to protect your loved ones and stand up for the lives of our elders or the disabled in their time of need?

December 23, 2014 Abusive Guardianship is a form of Institutional Elder Abuse and Human Trafficking – Although guardianship laws originated with the intent to protect vulnerable, poor seniors from exploitation, and increasing number of guardianships awarded in Florida’s Probate Courts and ruled by that statute have been clearly abusive, criminal and egregious. These particular guardianships usually involve large estates which are typically drained of their assets over the course of a guardianships lifetime in outrageous legal fees, Guardian fees and endless litigation.

December 22, 2014 Crisis in Guardianship – The majority of judges, guardians and attorneys in the state of Florida are good people doing their jobs well. Our concerns stem from a large and growing file of personal experiences, which we have documented with sworn affidavits, with a minority of judges guardians and attorneys across the State who seem to repeatedly generate the most egregious abuses against our loved ones. We believe that this minority subverts the system designed to protect vulnerable
individuals and instead uses it for their own purposes and benefit.

September 14, 2014 The Other Side – Given how baffling events that take place in probate can be, I often wonder what the other side—the people we rail against– actually thinks. To be politically correct and open-minded, I reached out and spoke to an individual very familiar with many of the judges, about whom we complain. I wondered what their explanation for their actions might be. Here is a condensed version of that conversation.

2012 Fall issue The Paradox of Adult Guardianship: A Solution to – and a Source for – Elder Abuse - by Erica F. Wood, from Elder Abuse and the Elder Justice Movement in America. “The real-world picture of guardianship is less than ideal: guardianship can be a godsend or a gulag, a help or a hindrance.”