Posts Tagged ‘God’

ABC News – July 22, 2008
By Megan Chuchmach

Hundreds of thousands of senior citizens are at risk because they are living among registered sex offenders, parolees and residents with violent histories, according to a nursing home watchdog who studied residents at nursing homes, assisted living homes and long tern care facilities.

“What is shocking is we have now found 1,600 registered sex offenders across the country [in facilities with seniors],” said Wes Bledsoe, who is set to testify tomorrow at a Congressional hearing on predators in these facilities. Bledsoe tracked the number of offenders living at these homes over the past four years by matching addresses from sex offender registries with a database of care facilities from Medicare.

Bledsoe said that in many of these cases the offenders are young adults who are often placed in the facilities because of disabilities or behavioral problems.

“We found teenagers, two nineteen year olds living in these facilities, many in their twenties, thirties, and forties,” Bledsoe said.

“We have also documented over 60 rapes, murders, and assaults committed by criminal offenders in these facilities,” he said.

Pennsylvania Attorney Sean McDonough will appear at the hearing to speak about Lillian Guernsey, who was 86 years-old in 2002 when she was raped by another resident at a Pennsylvania facility. The assailant, a 31 year old fellow resident, had eight prior adult arrests, three convictions and two adult commitments to correctional facilities before he arrived at the home, according to McDonough’s statement. Her assailant is now in prison, convicted of rape and sexual assault.

And six years to the day after her elderly mother was raped in a Florida nursing home, Sandra Banning will also testify.

Banning said she had no choice but to place her mother Virginia Thurston in a nursing home after Thurston, who suffered from dementia, was repeatedly found wandering the streets alone in the middle of the night.

“Growing up, Momma always said, ‘If you place me in a nursing home, I’d never forgive you’,” said Banning. “But that’s what we had to do for her safety.”

Banning, 60, said she had no idea that the facility she placed her mother in was also the home of a violent offender with a history of arrests. She found out after nursing home staff called her July 23, 2002 to tell her the offender had raped Thurston, then 77, in her bed.

“They found him right in the act,” said Banning. “This man was 83 years-old and in a wheelchair. Not someone you’d think would be a rapist.”

But Batming says it was only after the rape occurred that she found out the man had been arrested 58 times and that a court ordered him to move from a homeless shelter into the assisted-living facility.

Banning said she’ll never forget the “look of terror” in her mother’s eyes when she had to explain to her that she had been raped or the moment when she had to hold her mother’s hand inside a sexual assault response center when she was examined.

“I think that at that point reality was there and she knew what was going on,” Banning said of her mother, who didn’t recall the rape because of her dementia. “The tears were streaming out of her eyes.”

Banning says that despite physical evidence of sexual assault, the man was found incompetent to stand trial and has since been relocated to another Florida nursing home. She won a civil suit against the nursing home in the amount of $750,000 last year, which has not yet been paid out.
“She was my best friend,” said Banning of her mother, who passed away in 2003. “After that happened, I had such guilt from putting her away where that could happen. So I vowed that I would make a change.”

Tomorrow, Banning will tell her story to Congress, an opportunity she calls “awesome.” And when she retires August 1 from her job as a medical staff manager for the Navy Medicine Support Command, she says she will “take up predators in nursing homes full-time.”

“I believe that’s why God put me here on this Earth,” said Banning, fighting off tears. “It may be trips back and forth to Washington, but I’d go to the moon if I had to. Because someday it could be me; it could be you.”

‘There is no law, federal or state, that keeps violent or sexual offenders out of long-term care facilities as residents,” said Bledsoe, who founded the citizens’ advocacy organization A Perfect Cause in 2001 after his grandmother died in an Oklahoma City nursing home from what he says were negligent acts. A civil suit against the facility was settled out of court.

“The problem we have is that these offenders are being warehoused in nursing homes because the excuse is, ‘Well, where else are we going to put them?’”

Bledsoe will present his findings on what he calls a “national disgrace” to the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight tomorrow. In his prepared testimony, Bledsoe calls for the establishment of separate and secure long-term care facilities for violent and sexual offenders, criminal background checks for all residents, and notification of offenders residing in the facilities, among other recommendations.

Bledsoe said that offenders are placed in long-term care facilities by district court judges, county sheriffs, adult protective services workers, and corrections workers, as well as by offenders themselves and their families. And he said that while these offenders deserve care, seniors living in the homes deserve protection.

“I hope that some of the congressional leaders don’t sleep soundly tomorrow,” said Bledsoe, “and that this makes an impression on them that right now, in this moment, we have people in harm’s way.”

Rep. Mary Fallin (R-OK), who organized tomorrow’s hearing, issued a statement today in which she described seniors living in long-term care facilities as “some of the most vulnerable of our citizens.”

“The rare cases of sexual assault and abuse that have been documented in these facilities are particularly abhorrent,” said Fallin, adding that the hearing will “investigate both the scope of the problem and the possible roles the federal government might play to eliminate it.”

Joining Bledsoe to speak at the hearing will also be Oklahoma State Representative Kris Steele, who authored legislation passed in Oklahoma in May to establish separate living facilities for registered sex offenders. The state is now preparing a request for private bids to build such a facility.

Megan Chuchmach is a 2008 Carnegie Fellow at ABC News in New York. She recently graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

The January 14th edition of the New York Times contains a thought-provoking editorial piece authored by Adam Cohen that addresses a “legal Catch-22″ created by tort reform measures in Alabama. Mr. Cohen’s article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/opinion/14sun2.html

THEY SAY WE HAVE TOO MANY LAWSUITS? TELL THAT TO JACK CLINE

By ADAM COHEN
Published: January 14, 2007
Birmingham, Ala.

Jack Cline is in a hospital here fighting for his life, stricken by leukemia that he says he got from exposure to benzene at his factory job. In most states, he would be able to sue the companies that made the benzene. But Alabama’s all-Republican, wildly pro-business Supreme Court threw out his case.

In a ruling that would have done Kafka proud, the court held that there was never a valid time for Mr. Cline to sue. If he had sued when he was exposed to the benzene, it would have been too early. Alabama law requires people exposed to dangerous chemicals to wait until a “manifest” injury develops. But when his leukemia developed years later, it was too late. Alabama’s statute of limitations requires that suits be brought within two years of exposure.

Mr. Cline, who says God has kept him alive so he can challenge the unfairness of Alabama’s law, told his lawyer, Robert Palmer, to keep fighting. Mr. Palmer started a statewide petition drive, wrote a flurry of op-ed pieces and asked the court to reconsider. In an extraordinary move, it reopened the case and heard new arguments last spring.

Big business and its allies are loudly promoting “tort reform” by arguing that America is drowning in frivolous lawsuits. They are winning the public relations battle. Everyone knows the story of the woman who sued McDonald’s because she was burned by hot coffee. But few people know of the Jack Clines — and there are many of them — who have been denied their day in court.

Corporate America — with its large contributions to political and judicial candidates, and its top-dollar lobbyists — has had remarkable success persuading legislatures and courts to erode the bedrock principle of civil law: when people are injured, they are entitled to sue for damages.

At the top of industry’s list of tactics is immunity — the rather brazen notion that companies should be shielded from lawsuits no matter how negligently or dishonestly they act. Gun makers and dealers, notoriously, persuaded Congress in 2005 to give them immunity when their guns are used to maim and kill.

Industries are also winning immunity at the state level, and attracting far less attention. Pharmaceutical companies pushed through a law in Michigan protecting them when their drugs injure or kill people, as long as the drugs were approved by the Food and Drug Administration. There is no reason F.D.A. approval, a deeply flawed process, should be a shield.

When corporations do end up in court, they have lowered the stakes substantially by undermining punitive damages, which have long been one of the main ways that society deters people from unreasonably putting others at risk. The United States Supreme Court struck a major blow against punitive damages a decade ago, ruling that it was unconstitutional for a jury to award $2 million in punitive damages against an auto dealer that knowingly sold a damaged, repainted BMW as new.

Lower federal court judges, many of whom have been screened by the Bush administration for pro-business sympathies, and state court judges, many of whose campaigns were bankrolled by big business, are eagerly joining in. So are state legislatures. Last month Ohio’s legislature voted to cap punitive damages in many cases against paint companies — which have been accused of selling lead-based paint that causes retardation in children — at a paltry $5,000.

Perhaps the most insidious tactic for slamming the courthouse door on injured people is the stealth use of “pre-emption.” When federal and state laws conflict, the federal law pre-empts, or invalidates, the state law. The Bush administration is taking advantage of this principle by issuing weak regulations in a wide range of areas to wipe out stronger state-law protections. When people try to sue, they may find that their legal rights have been swept away. Among the areas the administration has focused on are automobile roof crushes and mattress flammability.

These incursions on the right to sue, taken together, are a serious assault on justice. In the most extreme cases, they may also be unconstitutional. Mr. Cline’s lawyer, Mr. Palmer, argued that preventing him from ever suing denied him his rights under the Alabama Constitution to seek a legal remedy for his injuries.

Mr. Palmer was encouraged when the Alabama Supreme Court reopened the case. He also saw it as a good sign when it scheduled oral arguments for a special public session on a law school campus, an indication it considered the case particularly significant. The arguments went well. “Questions asked by several justices indicated they were troubled by the legal Catch-22,” The Birmingham News reported.

The court ruled this month. It affirmed the dismissal of Mr. Cline’s case by a 5-to-4 vote. If Mr. Cline wanted to challenge the unfairness of the rules, it said, he would have to take it up with the State Legislature — a body every bit as pro-business as the Alabama Supreme Court.

Mr. Palmer intends to take the case to the United States Supreme Court. In the meantime, Mr. Cline can take some small comfort in the close vote. Four Alabama justices, at least, would not accept a legal system that told people like him that “no matter when” they “file the action, it is either too soon or too late.”

SOURCE: The New York Times, Sunday, January 14, 2007