OVERVIEW OF THE JUSTINA PELLETIER CASE FROM THE "ABOUT" SECTION OF "A MIRACLE FOR JUSTINA" ON FACEBOOK!

**Justina's Story**

On February 10, 2013 Justina's doctors sent her to Boston Children"s Hospital to receive their prescribed treatment for symptoms of Mitochondrial Disease, which had evolved following a flu-like illness. Justina's GI specialist had transferred from Tufts to Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) and was expecting to admit her under his care,
Instead, a BCH neurologist intercepted the direct admission, asserting "Mitochondrial Disease does not exist", and supporting a young psychologist's premature diagnosis: "Undifferentiated Somatoform Disorder", meaning it was psychosomatic or "all in her head."

When Justina's parents disagreed with the 'new' diagnosis and treatment plan presented to them on day 3 of Justina's hospital admission, the admitting physician ignored their concerns and asserted himself as the ultimate authority on Justina, The Pelletiers were instructed in writing that they could not be in contact with any of Justina's doctors, nor could they seek the medical care they trusted prior to coming to BCH.

On February 14, day 4, Justina's parents formally requested a transfer for their daughter- asserting their parental right to make medical decisions for their daughter, including discharge from BCH. Rather than acknowledge parental rights and demonstrate respect for parents dealing with their daughter's long standing medical problems, BCH petitioned for the Department of Children & Families (DCF) to seize custody of Justina, which was granted in court the next day.

Since February 15th, BCH has exerted control over all aspects of Justina's health care and her life-- BCH executed the traumatic separation of Justina from her family, friends and trusted doctors and continues to use coercion and force to treat Justina -- against her will.

Now in addition they have only let her family see her for an hour a week and only two people can visit her and they are supervised. There are only two twenty minute phone calls a week which are supervised as well. She has even had her rights taken away by not even allowing her to talk to any of her friends. She cannot speak out for what she wants and how she feels! To this point there has been no investigation by Mass DCF of her family. Now they have been threatening her and the family that she will never go home and will be put in foster care.  Her health has gone downhill without her medical treatment and where she was skating before she is now not able to walk and in a wheelchair. She is scared and wants to come home!

Justina's supportive community is expanding to meet the daunting challenge of exposing the egregious human rights violations committed by world renowned BCH and their cohorts, the Department of Children and Families in MA. This costly battle is fueled by the love and commitment of Justina's family , friends and those who have been inspired to fight against this injustice through close connection to their story.

Only through exposure and accountability of BCH and DCF for the pain and suffering they have caused Justina and her family can we hope to secure protection of our own rights!!

 

Tax deductible donations to support Justina's parents' efforts to rescue her can be made at www.freejustina.com.

Also, PsychRights is selling #FreeJustina T-Shirts with the profits to go to the Free Justina nonprofit.

 

The Twitter hastag for the Free Justina effort is #FreeJustina.

 

  

 

THE PRICE ATTORNEYS PAY FOR BEING SCUMBAGS: SUICIDE AND DEATH, PART II

I can recall when I first began to have problems in my own divorce.  At one point, I was calling around to speak to attorneys to find one who would be willing to work with me. Sometimes when I was calling around, I ended up having conversations with attorneys focusing on the many litigants who end up committing suicide.  I certainly believe that the subject of litigants and suicide might be one worth exploring. 

None of these attorneys mentioned that there is an issue in their own profession.  But, as my discussion in the first part of this report indicated, there are is a serious public health problem in connection to attorneys and their high rate of suicide.

Among the factors I mentioned involved in the high rate of suicide among attorneys is the drive to make money at all costs.  But in addition, another issue is that many attorneys are terribly overworked and overburdened.  On the website "Legal Cheek" one blogger put it this way, "The prevailing culture of 24/7 availability only makes matters worse.  And then there is the unwritten expectation that lawyers should put their work and firm first."

 

Another factor is personality.  According to journalist Deborah Cassens Weiss, "Personality characteristics often associated with lawyers, such as perfectionism and competitiveness, when combined with depression may  be contributing to a higher suicide rate in the legal profession." 

I noticed these qualities frequently when I worked as a temporary employee when I first arrived in Hartford in the late 1980s.  The attorneys I worked with were frequently very stressed out, very impatient and brusque, and unwilling to allow me any time to get oriented when I first arrived in their offices. 

In fact, I can recall that it was in an attorney's office that I had my first experience of actually calling my temp agency and asking them to "get me out of here right away!"  This attorney firm was criticizing my work even before I had a chance to walk from the front entrance over to the desk they had assigned me to. 

This was despite the fact that in those days I was highly skilled as an administrative assistant -- I was the fastest typist in my class, and I was also able to take stenographic dictation.  But it wasn't enough--I could tell within the first ten minutes. 

If attorneys have to work in such environments, and they aren't able to send out an S.O.S. to their supervisors, I can imagine how difficult it must be for them. 

Commentator Stuart Mauney also suggests that the problem is that the legal profession attracts pessimists.  As he put it, "Recent studies have shown that in all graduate school programs, in all professional fields except one, optimists outperform pessimists.  The one exception:  law school." 

He further noted, "Pessimism helps lawyers excel by making us skeptical of what our clients, our witnesses, opposing counsel, and judges tell us.  It helps us anticipate the worst and thus prepare for it."  I will say that people who are pessimistic are actually more realistic, or even more sane than the average, if you want to put it that way.  Even so, pessimism is bad for our mental health! 

 

 

Attorneys can also end up being socially isolated because they have argumentative and abrasive personalities that again, might make them successful in the courtroom, but also make them unpopular.  In general, Americans do not feel comfortable with intellectual exploration, critical thinking, or challenging ideas.  Instead, they value concensus and cooperation. 

America's homegrown promoter of this kind of harmonious  vision is Dale Carnegie of "How to Make Friends and Influence People" fame whose prime tenet was , "Don't Argue!"  Of course, if attorneys didn't argue, they couldn't earn a living!  

Has anyone watched the House of Commons in England confront the Prime Minister on television?  If you can, you should watch it sometime.  In these debates, representatives interrupt each other, they contradict each other, confront one another, and above all they challenge the Prime Minister directly and ask for immediate responses to the questions they pose.  If representatives don't get the kinds of answers they are looking for, they will call out the Prime Minister and each other on the flaws to their comments and demand better answers.  

This kind of direct confrontation and debate is very uncomfortable to most Americans.  Then look at attorneys and see that attorneys behave this way all the time!  It is their job to be this way!  

Unfortunately, however, annoying, irritating, demanding and challenging personalities simply do not play well in your average social situation, and for attorneys who cannot turn themselves off after court is over, this could lead to considerable social isolation. 

 

Further compounding the social isolation that might result purely based on personality, the practice of law has become increasingly isolated in recent years.  Some of this is the result of advances in technology which mean that attorneys can get a lot of their work done alone in their offices typing into a computer.  Thus, in an article published in the CT Law Tribune, one attorney, Frederic C. Ury wrote, "Unless you attend court on a regular basis or participate in bar association events, you no longer interact face-to-face with your fellow attorneys.  Instead, face-to-face has given way to Facebook, listservers, e-mail, text messaging and sometimes the antiquated telephone."

 

After reading this information, I have a better understanding of why the CT Bar Examiners are concerned about identifying those people who might have difficulties and seeking to monitor them.  However, it is always the spirit in which these tasks are done which counts.  It is one thing if you are seeking to undercut and stigmatize.  It is another thing to keep track so that you can intervene and be supportive if anything comes up and if you are trying to convey that help is available in time of need. 

 

On that note, for attorneys who need support here in CT there is a program known as Lawyers Concerned For Lawyers, which offers complete confidentiality.  

If you are interested in obtaining more information about this program, please click on the link below:

http://www.lclct.org/resources.htm

Online, I also took a look at another blog which I think would be helpful; see below:

http://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/

THE PRICE ATTORNEYS PAY FOR BEING SCUMBAGS--SUICIDE AND DEATH: PART I

As a Court Watcher, I have heard many attorneys point the finger at litigants and say he or she has a mental health disability and needs supervised visitation, or should be denied access to the children. 

 

Turns out this is a bit of the kettle calling the pot black because attorneys have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country! 

 

From the articles I have read on the subject, this means that I am supposed to have more compassion for attorneys because of the sad fate they have in store for them because of the profession they have chosen.  One commentator said, you know that joke that goes, "How do you describe hundreds of lawyers at the bottom of the Ocean?  Answer:  A good start!"  Apparently, that joke isn't so funny in the light of the reality that there is an epidemic of depression and suicide among attorneys throughout the nation. 

 

Of course, I can't help responding that this epidemic is pretty much self-inflicted, and is nothing in comparison to the pain and suffering of the victims these attorneys leave behind.  But perhaps that is an argument for another day.

 

Let's get the data.  What I did was review several articles on the issue of attorneys, depression, and suicide and the following is the sum total of what was said:

 

1.  Lawyers, as a group, are 3.6 times more likely to experience depression than the general population;

 

2.  Of 104 occupations, lawyers were the most likely to suffer depression;

 

3.  A 1989 National Institute for Safety and Health found that male lawyers between the ages of 20 and 64 are more than twice as likely to die from suicide than men of the same age in other occupations;

 

4.  In 1990, a quality of life survey by the North Carolina Bar Association revealed that almost 26% of respondents exhibit symptoms of clinical depression, and almost 12% said they contemplated suicide at least once a month.  Studies in other states have found similar results.  In recent years, several states have been averaging one lawyer suicide per month.

 

5.  A 1991 North Carolina Bar Association study found that 25% of lawyers suffered symptoms of anxiety three or more times a month in the last year;

 

6.  In a 1997 study, suicide accounted for 10.8% of deaths among lawyers in the U.S. and Canada, and was the third leading cause of death among this group;

 

7.  Furthermore, the study concluded that the suicide rate of attorneys was 6 times as much as the rate of the general population;

 

8.  According to a study by Prof. Andy Benjamin (U. of Washington) by the spring of their 1L year, 32% of law students are clinically depressed, despite being no more depressed than the general public (about 8%) when they entered law school.  By graduation, this number has risen to 40%.  While this percentage dropped to 17% two years after graduation, this rate of depression was still double that of the general public;

 

9.  Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among attorneys, but only the 10th leading cause of death in the general population;

 

10.  Attorneys are 3 times as likely to be depressed as the general population;

 

11.  Attorneys are 2 times as likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol as the general population;  (Then people who struggle with substance abuse are about six times more likely to kill themselves)

 

12. A John Hopkins study found lawyers have the highest rate of depression of any profession;

 

These are pretty sobering statistics.

 

The majority of individuals who are at risk are lawyers and judges aged 48-65, trial lawyers, or as one journalist put it, "It's men in their 50s." 

 

So what is going on?  Why is this happening? 

 

One person, Yvette Hourigan of the Kentucky Lawyer Assistance Program speculated that the reason is that legal work involves a high level of stress. 

 

As she put it, "There are a lot of high stress professions.  However, when the surgeon goes into the surgical suite to perform his surgery, they don't send another physician in to try to kill the patient.  You know, they're all on the same team trying to do one job.  In the legal profession, adversity is the nature of our game." 

 

I think that what brought this issue to the forefront of so many people's minds was the 2009 suicide of Attorney Mark Levy, one of the most skilled appellate lawyers in the country, and friend to many powerful individuals in Washington.  He was around 59 years old and had just been let go from the firm Kilpatrick Stockton when he came to work in the morning, pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.  

 

While many expressed puzzlement for his decision to kill himself, after a while the picture emerged of a profession for whom money is the bottom line. 

 

An attorney who cannot generate major income by generating hefty bills to clients will not be successful.  

 

Unfortunately, the focus on cold cash was an approach to the legal profession that Attorney Levy did not feel comfortable with and this was a substantial reason for his death.   

 

As journalist Richard B. Schmitt put it, "Levy loved the practice of law, but he struggled with the business of law.  Without a firm stable of paying clients, he grew vulnerable in a world where rainmaking is often valued over skill and judgment." 

 

Further, "He was not interested in compromising to make law a business."

 

And "Levy never relished the role of salesman." "He was a superb lawyer but he wasn't a business-getter." 

 

Finally, "his disdain for marketing and client recruitment again seemed to undermine his standing with firm management." 

 

In a field such as the law, where attorneys and their supervisors expect to make six digit salaries or more, ideals, ethics, and sometimes basic human compassion end up on the wayside, as we litigants in family court have observed and experienced. 

 

But the attorneys who make those kinds of decisions to let go of basic human decency inevitably pay the price for that, if not professionally, then indeed personally.  If you are a good person and you don't go along with the "money is everything" mentality, you are doomed to suffer in terms of your career.  So, in a way, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. 

 

(More on this topic in Part II.) 

ANNE STEVENSON, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST, DEMANDS ACCESS TO INFO ON GAL FEES!

(CLICK ON THE STORY BELOW TO LINK TO THE ENTIRE ARTICLE!)

CONNECTICUT, April 8, 2014 — Massachusetts attorney Maureen Martowska was reviewing charges related to her son Matthew Martowska’s custody case when she noticed something irregular. She realized that the Connecticut State Comptroller had paid guardian ad litem Barry Armata’s $988.12 for his work on the case. However, the family had been following court orders to pay Armata thousands of dollars out of their own pockets.
While Martowska does not rule out the possibility that Armata’s bill may have been a clerical error, she said the mistake raises serious questions about how GAL’s in the State of Connecticut are paid.
Last week, the Judiciary Committee approved RB-494, which if passed by the State Legislature would set limits on the way the State’s out of control guardian ad litem system does business.

DR. RUDOLPH BEE: EARLY VICTIM OF FAMILY COURT!

I have long taken an interest in Dr. Rudolph Bee because he was one of the first to protest the corruption of Family Court here in Connecticut. His divorce broke out in the late 1990s just around the time when cases like this began to appear. 

 

I came to know him through his website featuring the documents in his divorce which contained evidence of what happened in his case. Also, he wrote a letter to the Attorney General regarding the wrong doing and posted that online. Indeed, he was the first person to validate my own experiences of corruption in Family Court.

 

I always intended to write a story about Dr. Bee, but he passed away a few years ago and his family took down his website.  Still, I did locate a copy of Dr. Bee's appeal to the Appellate Court in 2003, five years after his divorce case started and I thought that might be good to use as the basis for a discussion regarding his case. 

 

To begin with, I'm a woman so it kind of goes without saying that I support child support, I support alimony.  I think that it is only reasonable for a divorced father to provide health care for his underage children, and to maintain life insurance with your children as beneficiaries while they are underage, that is a no-brainer for me.  

 

Dr. Rudolph Bee appealed decisions that required him to provide all these things, and personally, I have no patience for his complaint.  He was always the primary wage earner and his wife worked for him, so what else did he expect, really.  You have three young children and a wife who always depended on you.  Then you get a divorce--you need to be paying for the family that always depended on you, and give us all a break about the complaining. 

 

What bothers me when I read this Appellate document for Dr. Bee's case A.C. 21741 is the way these attorneys took this guy for a ride and took all his money.  Who were these attorneys?  It looks as though Attorney Eliot Nerenberg was for the Plaintiff, Mrs. Johanna Bee and Attorney Steve Dembo was Dr. Rudolf Bee's attorney. 

 

Judge Caruso was the trial judge.  I know a little about Judge Caruso--wasn't he the judge who was fired for feeling up female judicial employees? 

 

Be that as it may, Dr. Bee filed an appeal that he wanted all the financial orders in his case revoked.  The reason why Dr. Bee requested this was because at trial both attorneys failed to submit to the Trial Court Judge, Judge Caruso, copies of the child support guidelines worksheet which were required by then Practice Book Sec. 25-30 (e).  This is the worksheet that determines what is the appropriate amount of child support an individual should pay based upon their income.

 

I was pulling my hair out when I saw that.  Are you kidding me?  BOTH attorneys forgot to file copies of the child support guidelines worksheet that is required by The Practice Book? 

 

How could they possibly do this? 

 

How? 

 

Please tell me how that can ever happen? 

 

If you were talking to me about attorneys who are idiots of the year, I'd say, yeah, well, you know how dumb some of these attorneys can be.  But how could two of the top Family Law attorneys in the state of Connecticut, one of them a Connecticut Bar Association President (Attorney Eliot Nerenberg) possibly make a mistake like this? 

 

Ok, well, maybe Steve Dembo just showed up for the appellate part of this case, but still, I'll bet that Dr. Bee was as finicky about his original attorneys as he was about any later ones he had. 

 

The bottom line is that attorneys on this level do not just "forget" or "overlook" passing in one of the central documents you need to establish something as important as child support. 

 

What is more, the judge wouldn't overlook it either.  

 

Imagine you are the judge--you have maybe four really important documents that must be filled out in order for a couple to obtain a divorce.  One of those important documents is missing. 

 

What do you do?  Do you just shrug your shoulders, go what the heck, and continue on with guess work? 

 

No, you don't, not if you have any kind of common sense! 

 

You return to court and send out an Order requesting that both parties submit their Child Support Guidelines Worksheet and wait until you get them before issuing orders. 

 

How hard is that? 

 

It is called "How to Avoid Getting Your Judgments Appealed 101." 

 

This is what bothers me.  As a litigant, attorneys will tell you that you have to obey rules, follow court orders, act in accordance to the proper procedures and then you go into trial court and the judge and those very attorneys will immediately proceed to blow off the rules, the court orders, and the proper procedures. 

 

I was in trial court the other day waiting to have the judge sign off on an agreement between my ex and me.  I wanted to hurry up the process a bit so I went to the Caseflow Coordinator and asked if we could get in front of the judge as soon as possible. 

 

In response, the Caseflow Coordinator told me it is the rule that you must obey that before you see the judge you must go to family relations in advance.  I said, why should I do that?  In my case, in the last nine years, we haven't ever seen family relations.  Why should we start now?  And this is someone who knows our case and knows that what I'm saying is true.

 

This is the point. The rules are the rules until some attorneys or the judge pretty much blows them off.  The rules are only the rules when they serve the attorneys to manipulate a case and get the kinds of results they want.  Otherwise, forget the rules, the court orders, and the procedures.  They are all up for grabs. 

 

Bottom line in Dr. Rudolph Bee's case is that it looks as though Attorney Nerenberg, Attorney Dembo (if it was Dembo, as I have said) and Judge Caruso were all on the same page when it came to blowing off one of the most important financial documents in a divorce trial.  

 

That must have been the result of one of those lovely in-chambers meetings which us litigants are not allowed to participate in!  No wonder Dr. Bee wanted to appeal the decision.

 

If I had faced this situation, unlike Dr. Rudolph Bee, I wouldn't have bothered with Appellate court, I would have gone straight to Statewide Grievance or even Civil Court. 

 

Of course, I might not have had better results, but perhaps I wouldn't have spent as much money as Dr. Bee probably did on the appeal! 

 

So how did the Appellate Court rule in regard to this miserable failure of legal competence?  It stated, "We conclude that a party who has failed to submit a child support guidelines worksheet as required by Practice Book Sec. 25-30 (e) cannot complain of the court's alleged failure to comply with the guidelines." 

 

No?  Ok, then. I'm not sure why not.   

 

There were a few other things that interested me in this decision.  For instance, the Appellate Court described Dr. Bee as dissipating the family assets.  I thought for sure he had siphoned money off and put them in hidden accounts or headed off for a few Bermuda vacations during the pendente lite period.  Instead, it turns out that he used whatever money that was involved to pay around $70,000 in attorney's fees.  That was over and above the $35,000 in attorney's fees that he paid for his wife's attorney. 

 

Isn't that typical?  You do something you think is right like pay your attorney's fees and the court criticizes you for it and acts like you killed your grandmother or something!

 

It looks to me as though everyone, i.e. attorneys, was having a big party with Dr. Bee's money. 

 

You might wonder how the attorneys did that, i.e. sucking money out of Dr. Bee. 

 

I'll tell you how--by finding all sorts of reasons to expand further conflict! 

 

For instance, part VI of the ruling talks about how the parties' attorneys were asked to submit supplemental briefs on whether the court had the right to order the defendant to make his kids the beneficiaries of his life insurance. 

 

Can you imagine how much money it cost Dr. Bee for his attorney to do the research and whip up another brief on this particular legal point.  Plus, I am assuming he was forced to, again, pay for his wife's attorneys fees when the wife's attorney wrote up a brief as well.  So that means paying for two supplemental briefs. 

 

That is a considerable amount of money when it gets down to it.  And what was the conclusion of the appellate court? 

 

The Court determined what it already knew I'm sure even without extra briefs, which is that it is not allowed to order Dr. Rudolph Bee to give his children anything beyond the age of 18.  However, the court can order Dr. Bee to give money to his children as long as they are minors.  And since Judge Caruso when he ordered Dr. Bee to maintain his children as beneficiaries referred to those children as "minors" that was a perfectly acceptable order. 

 

I'm not sure if such an obvious conclusion required supplemental briefs and the thousands and thousands of dollars it took to create them, but there you have the story if you were wondering! 

 

If I had been Dr. Bee's attorney, before going to appeal on that point, which is considerably expensive, I would have explained that it was not winnable and saved him the money! 

 

But who am I to speak.  I'm just a writer, not an attorney. 

 

This is just the tip of the iceberg in regard to what happened with this terribly destructive case which caused harm and  damage not only to Dr. Rudolph Bee, but to his family as well.  I believe it caused Dr. Rudolph Bee untold emotional pain, the destruction of his faith in a just world and led to his early death.  But, as can be said with so many of these cases, the attorneys got their money--that's for sure.

UPDATE ON KELLY RUTHERFORD ON "SWEDEN WITH LOVE"!

"When actress Kelly Rutherford‘s children Hermes, 7, and Helena, 4, arrive at their mom’s home in New York City, they usually change straight into their pajamas, jump into their mom’s bed — with her two bunny rabbits and two kittens! — smother her with hugs and then beg her to cook a delicious meal. “They’re like little monkeys!” says Kelly with a laugh. “All they want to do is cuddle up and talk about how much we love each other. Even though it’s incredibly hard to be separated, this situation has given us a whole new level of connection. They know we’re going through this together.”

 

What Kelly is referring to is her much-publicized custody battle with her ex-husband, a German businessman. Two years ago, the case took a shocking turn when his U.S. visa was revoked. Kelly, who has joint custody and wants her children to have a close relationship with their father, offered to fly with them to France every school holiday and summer breaks until his visa had been restored. But the kids — who had lived primarily with Kelly since birth, were attending preschool in New York and had never spent more than two consecutive nights away from her — were ordered to leave the U.S. and live in France."

 

For more information on this topic, please click on the link below:

http://www.swedenwithlove.com/2014/04/kelly-rutherford/

NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING ON RULES AND FORMS!

"There will be a public hearing to receive suggestions for new rules and forms, and for changes to existing rules and forms that regulate pleading, practice and procedure in Connecticut state courts. The existing rules of practice and forms are posted on the judicial branch website.

The hearing will be held on Monday, April 14, 2014, at 10 a.m. in the Supreme Court in Hartford. It will be conducted by the justices of the Supreme Court or a committee of the justices under Section 51-14 (c) of the Connecticut General Statutes."

For more information on this meeting, please click on the link below:

https://www.jud.ct.gov/external/news/press369.htm