Justice Sleeps While Seniors Suffer

Probate courts are supposed to watch conservators' conduct and discipline those who abuse their authority. They've failed dismally in this vital role.

By Jack Leonard, Robin Fields and Evelyn Larrubia | Times Staff Writers

November 14, 2005

Emmeline Frey was wheeled toward the bench, escorted by a family friend. She was 93 years old and frail, suffering from dementia and a broken hip.

In San Diego County's busy Probate Court, it was up to Judge Thomas R. Mitchell to decide how to preserve the $1 million she had amassed pinching pennies over a lifetime. On the recommendation of Frey's attorney, he appointed a professional conservator named Donna Daum.

Frey's affairs were now in the hands of a caretaker acting under court supervision. Her money should have been safe.

It was not.

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Daum gave her son, a car salesman turned financial advisor, more than $500,000 of Frey's savings to invest. Over the next four years, the investments lost more than $100,000 in value while the son collected commissions.

Mitchell, who described himself as the "super father" of the seniors who entered his courtroom, never questioned what Daum was doing with her client's money or why her son was involved.

The case illustrates how inaction and inattention by the courts have left many elderly Californians vulnerable to abuse by the very people entrusted with their care.

Professional conservators wield enormous power over people deemed too infirm to look after themselves. They choose their doctors, control their bank accounts and decide where they will live — even who can visit them.

Probate courts, which appoint conservators, are supposed to monitor their conduct, scrutinize their financial reports and fine or remove those who misuse their authority.

Yet the courts have failed dismally in this vital role.

A Times examination of more than 2,400 conservatorship cases since 1997 found that judges frequently overlooked incompetence, neglect and outright theft.

Some conservators steered business to friends and relatives without protest or punishment from the courts, records show. Some failed to pay their clients' bills. Others pocketed their cash and jewelry.

In most cases, evidence of these abuses was in the courts' own files.

An online registry created six years ago to identify and track problem conservators has proved a failure. The reason: Most county courts have ignored it, even though participation is mandatory.

"The real problem is sloth, taking the easy way," said Marc Hankin, a Los Angeles attorney who helped write laws on elder abuse.

"The last thing the judge wants to do is make a decision."

Probate judges say that they do their best, but that the courts are swamped with cases and short of staff.

The conservatorship system was designed to help family members take care of loved ones. Now, more and more cases are handled by for-profit caretakers like Daum, whose fees are paid from their clients' bank accounts.

Elderly wards often have no surviving friends or family members to speak up for them. Yet the culture of the probate courts, stuck in an earlier era, reflexively grants conservators the benefit of the doubt.

They are assumed to be acting in their clients' best interests — in some cases even when their own filings with the court suggest otherwise.