January 19, 2007
Welcome to the Hotel Connecticut. Come visit and you can never leave.
Because if you're elderly and frail and don't watch out, there's a probate court judge somewhere out there willing to lock you up in a nursing home. For your own good, of course, Grandma.
Unless something dramatic happens, another session of the General Assembly will slide by without probate reform. Oh, they'll hold hearings again, but don't bet on our elected leaders actually disrupting a system steeped in decades of old-boy politics and favoritism.
So this court system - where even the rules of evidence and recordkeeping are inconsistent and the legal experience of judges is uncertain - marches on, unimpeded.
The latest outrage-of-the-month comes from the Woodbridge probate district, where a judge last year denied a request by the children and husband of an elderly New Jersey woman, Maydelle Trambarulo, that she be allowed to leave a Connecticut nursing facility and return home.
Trambarulo was brought here for treatment in 2004 by a niece. Soon after, the niece went to probate court in Connecticut and had a conservator appointed to oversee her finances and health care, handing over the 76-year-old New Jersey woman's liberty - and control of her money - to probate.
"The husband is in New Jersey. The wife was brought here for rehabilitation by a relative. Then the relative had her conserved," said John Peters, a lawyer who won freedom for Daniel Gross, a Long Island man held against his will in a Waterbury nursing home.
Do I need to add that the Trambarulo estate is worth more than $1 million and that this fight, if nothing else, continues to provide thousands of dollars worth of work for lawyers?
It doesn't matter that this family could be a dysfunctional mess. It's not up to a Connecticut probate court to decide.
A former West Hartford probate judge who previously represented the Trambarulo family, John Berman, understood this when he said in court papers in December 2005 that the "court lacks jurisdiction to appoint a conservator."
Clifford D. Hoyle, the acting judge in Woodbridge, ruled, instead, that he was "not convinced that the respondent's family is willing to make the time commitments necessary to care for her."
Peters, now representing the Trambarulo family, told me that Maydelle "doesn't live here. The judge doesn't have jurisdiction. The fact that you are here doesn't mean you are a resident. She wants to go home."
Royal Stark, director of the health law clinic at the Quinnipiac University School of Law, said the legislature must limit the power that probate courts hand to conservators.
"Until I got a glimpse of it, I didn't realize what was at stake and how bad things could go," Stark said. For example, Stark said that once a person has been "conserved" by probate court, it is nearly impossible to remove the conservator.
Reform-minded lawyers want basic changes, such as mandating that courts respect previous requests made by the elderly, known as "advance directives." Courts should also follow the rules of evidence and proceedings should be conducted on the record. They also want to make it easier to appeal decisions.
"We are going to wade into it and see if there are solutions for it," promised state Sen. Andrew McDonald, the chairman of the judiciary committee. "A lot of this operates in the shadows."
There you have it - a court system that operates in the dark. Time to turn the lights on.
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