Ahead of a scheduled court hearing this week that may end pop star Britney Spears’s 13-year conservatorship, a Tuesday Senate committee hearing examined the practice of conservatorships and their implications for individual rights.
Conservatorships, also known as guardianships, occur when a court determines that a person is unable to care for their person or finances and appoints a conservator or guardian to make decisions for that person, with the elderly and disabled most commonly affected.
NEWSOM MAKES VOTE-BY-MAIL PERMANENT IN CALIFORNIA
The issue of conservatorships rose to the forefront this year after outcry when Spears went public with allegations of abuse under the terms of her conservatorship, telling a California judge, “My dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship and my management who played a huge role in punishing me when I said no … should be in jail.”
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, and Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, held a hearing Tuesday they called “Toxic Conservatorships: The Need for Reform.”
“Toxic” is both a single by Spears and how she characterizes the conservatorship to which she has been subject since 2008, when a judge gave her father, Jamie Spears, broad control over her person and finances after she suffered a public breakdown. The singer, who continued to work as a performer during the conservatorship, alleged that she has been isolated from family and friends, has been surveilled, and had a contraceptive device placed in her body without her consent. Jamie Spears has claimed he was acting in his daughter’s best interest.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Blumenthal said conservatorships can “wrest control” from individuals with “legal straitjackets.”
“Through a lack of fundamental due process, some people who could care for themselves become entrapped,” Blumenthal said, adding it’s shocking “how easily they can be abused, and how difficult it is to escape.”
Cruz said that sometimes an injustice “captures the attention of the nation” and calls for action.
“I find myself emphatically in the #FreeBritney camp,” Cruz said.
Cruz said despite Spears’s challenges to the case, “at each critical juncture, the legal system has been designed not for her benefit, but to trample on her rights.”
Blumenthal called Spears’s allegations “chilling” but added that they are not unique, and many under conservatorships do not have her platform.
“The only thing unusual about her story is people are paying attention,” Blumenthal said, adding, “There are many others whose names, lives, and stories we don’t know.”
The senators said there are an estimated 1.3 million individuals in the United States who are living under conservatorships. While acknowledging that conservatorships in some cases can be necessary, they said these arrangements can also be abused, as in the Spears case.
One of the witnesses at the hearing, Nicholas Clouse, said he was the victim of an unnecessary guardianship that turned him “back into a child” after he was in a car crash. His parents became his legal guardians with “no discussion about what this meant long-term, what rights would be taken away, what it meant for my life, or whether something less restrictive might have met my needs at the time,” he said.
“I had to get permission from my stepfather to buy diapers and formula for my daughter,” Clouse, 28, said, saying his earnings from his job went to his conservators to pay their legal fees instead of to support his family.
Clouse credited the support of his wife, Chelsi, and finally being able to speak to an attorney “other than my parents’ lawyer” with ending the guardianship he said left him feeling “worthless.”
Zoe Brennan-Krohn, staff attorney for Disability Rights Programs at the American Civil Liberties Union, said “the idea of guardianship is supposed to be this benevolent idea of helping people and in so many cases it isn’t.”
David Slayton, the vice president of Court Consulting Services at the National Center for State Courts, said conservatorships are “the most restrictive form of oversight a court can place on an individual outside of the criminal context—sometimes referred to as the civil death penalty.”
“Guardianship is meant to protect wards from abuse or exploitation by others due to the limitation in their mental capacity,” Slayton said. “In most guardianships, this is exactly what happens—family members or friends protect their loved ones with intense attention to the needs of the individual. But sometimes this does not happen.”
Also on Tuesday, Sens. Susan Collins and Bob Casey introduced the Guardianship Accountability Act, which would provide federal grants for states to track information about conservatorships in their states.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The next hearing in Spears’s challenge to her conservatorship is scheduled for Sept. 29 at the Los Angeles Superior Court.
