Elderly, mentally ill and children trapped in broken court system

Thousands of Ohio’s most vulnerable residents are trapped in a system that was created to protect them but instead allows unscrupulous guardians to rob them of their freedom, dignity and money. Even judges who oversee the system acknowledge that it is broken, that it has ripped apart families, rendered the mentally ill voiceless, and left some elderly Ohioans dying penniless in nursing homes, a yearlong Columbus Dispatch investigation found.

Children under guardianship are all but forgotten. Adults without an estate are virtually ignored. And those who aren’t really mentally incompetent find it nearly impossible to end a guardianship. The 5-day series, which concludes May 22, has prompted criminal investigations by the Franklin County Prosecutor and Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.

The V-22 Osprey’s deadliest accident stemmed partly from “undeniably intense” pressure to show progress for the new tilt-rotor aircraft, according to the U.S. Marine Corps commandant.

While the accident happened more than 13 years ago, the lessons cited in the December letter, obtained by Bloomberg News under the Freedom of Information Act, may apply to similar pressures the military is under today to prove the value of new weapons such as Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT)’s F-35 fighter and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship in a time of defense budget cuts.

Read the full story by Bloomberg News here.

Three years after back surgery, Grace Nestler-Bramm learned that a drug designed to repair her spine was causing new bone to wrap around it and compress nerves.

In March, the Cedar Grove resident became one of nearly 1,000 people who are suing Medtronic, the company that markets Infuse — a number certain to grow.

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today analysis of U.S. Food and Drug Administration data found that more than 6,500 reports of Infuse-related problems have been registered with the agency's medical device reporting system since 2002, the year Infuse was approved. Roughly half of those — some 3,300 — were filed last year alone.

Read the full story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel here. 

Robert Wiesner stood to receive tens of thousands of dollars through a major county public safety project by working for a contractor that he helped to hire, the state Attorney General's Office claims in newly available court documents.

Wiesner, one of four defendants in a wide-ranging bid-rigging criminal case, is the former security director of the Monroe County Water Authority and the husband of County Executive Maggie Brooks.

Read the full story from the Democrat and Chronicle here.

The Phoenix VA Health Care System is under a federal Justice Department investigation for reports that it maintained a secret waiting list to conceal the extent of its patient delays, in part because of complaints such as Laird's. But there are now clear signs that veterans' health centers across the U.S. are juggling appointments and sometimes manipulating wait lists to disguise long delays for primary and follow-up appointments, according to federal reports, congressional investigators and interviews with VA employees and patients.

The growing evidence suggests a VA system with overworked physicians, high turnover and schedulers who are often hiding the extent to which patients are forced to wait for medical care.

Read the full story from the Los Angeles Times here.

They started turning up in emergency rooms early last November. One after another and then another. By the time the torrent subsided in February, some 280 people had overdosed in Dutchess County from what many believed was heroin but was often street drugs laced with an exponentially stronger narcotic called fentanyl.

The overdoses and deaths are part of a longer-term resurgence of heroin, a street drug that has become plentiful, is cheap, and was, in this case, tainted. But as the dust settled and the rash of patients in cardiac and respiratory distress slowed — it most certainly has not stopped — something else became painfully clear.

This particular run on drugs was not driven just by some faraway drug lord hawking a crop of potent poppies. However inadvertently, it was abetted by a law, passed 174-0 by the New York State Legislature, that last August stanched the supply of pain medications to which thousands of New Yorkers were and are addicted.

Read the full story in the Poughkeepsie Journal here.

The Richmond Public Housing Police Department’s web page claimed that "the department provides city-wide law enforcement authority which enables officers to make arrests on and off RRHA property."

But who granted the public housing police, authority to make arrests off public housing property? An investigation by WRIC-Richmond discovered the answer to that is - no one.

Every police department is supposed to have its jurisdiction spelled out and filed in an official court document. But the court has no record of any kind regarding RRHA and its officers' jurisdiction.

The Richmond Commonwealth Attorney's office is looking into this situation and has written a letter to RRHA telling them to preserve all their arrest records.

Check out the full story from WRIC here.

Missouri's failure to release records regarding the drugs it uses in executions keeps the public from providing oversight of the death penalty. That's what the Associated Press and four other news organizations are arguing in a suit filed Thursday against the state. Another suit filed the same day by a reporter for St. Louis Public Radio, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri also challenges the secrecy.

The journalists say the public has a constitutional right to know what drugs are being used in executions carried out by the state. But the Missouri Department of Corrections maintains that drug providers are part of the "execution team." Under state law, the identity of members of the execution team cannot be disclosed.

The news organizations had previously submitted requests for records that would provide details including the name, source and chemical composition of execution drugs used by the state. They also wanted records that dealt with the "assessment or approval" of these drugs. The state denied these requests "pursuant to the state secret doctrine."

Eleven years of data analyzed by the Columbus Dispatch showed that those charged multiple times with operating a vehicle while impaired were able to get their charges reduced through a plea deal almost as often as those who had no recent drunk driving charges. 

Some say repeat offenders know how to beat the system. Drivers can refuse to submit to a breath test if they are pulled over by police. In 2009, defendants refused chemical tests in 36 percent of the cases handled by city prosecutors. In 2013, it was 41 percent. Without the results of such tests, prosecutors lack a key piece of evidence. 

In Knox County, Tennessee some students are ending up in jail even though they haven't committed any crimes. Federal and state laws are supposed to keep juveniles who have committed status offenses - like truancy or running away - out of jail. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found evidence that Knox County courts may have broken the law by sending juveniles to jail without a valid court order.

Juveniles' rights to legal representation in these cases are not firmly established, and legal experts have argued that truant students are not getting the representation they need to protect themselves in court.