'They Just Took Me Away' ADULTS DECLARED "INCAPACITATED" BY THE COURTS CAN LOSE EVERYTHING--THEIR HOMES, THEIR SAVINGS, THEIR FREEDOM--TO FLORIDA'S SPRAWLING GUARDIANSHIP SYSTEM.

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.

IT'S BEEN A year since Jan Garwood, a 72-year-old central Florida woman, won her freedom back and started trying to piece together what was left of her life.

In 2017, Garwood was placed in an assisted living facility against her will. A judge had declared her mentally incompetent and put her in the care of a professional guardian to protect her health and finances. The system was supposed to help her. Instead, Garwood felt like a prisoner.

She was stuck in a lockdown ward for three years, until a local activist and two attorneys managed to get her rights restored. By then, though, she'd lost more than three years. Her guardian had sold her house, leaving her temporarily homeless. All of her possessions were missing. Her savings and the proceeds from the sale of her house were in a trust that she didn't have direct access to.

Garwood's case is extreme, but it illustrates the complexities, uncertainties, and sometimes bizarre twists of guardianship cases, also known as conservatorships. Last year, the saga of Britney Spears' successful efforts to free herself from an onerous conservatorship shined a spotlight on the issue. It was the first time many Americans had heard of conservatorships, but this relatively obscure area of the law, in which the state essentially determines that an adult should be treated like a child, sometimes involuntarily, exerts enormous power over the people who find themselves in the system.

In the worst cases of guardianship abuse, functioning adults are completely stripped of their autonomy: where they live, where they can go, who they can talk to, how their financial assets are handled, even how and where they will die.

In Florida, a chilling scandal where a guardian filed "do not resuscitate" (DNR) orders against her elderly wards' wishes led to calls for state and national reform. With its large number of retirees, Florida is especially ripe for elder abuse and fraud. Some state officials have been working to strengthen the system over the past few years, but senior citizens like Garwood have continued to slip through the cracks. Even with comparatively strong oversight, the state shows how bad actors, conflicts of interest, and crushing caseloads can undermine those protections.

Over the phone, Garwood is clear and cogent, although she swings from relief and philosophical acceptance to despair over how her plans for her golden years were upended.

"I was just sitting in my office working when the doorbell rang," Garwood recalls. "There was a lady with a police officer, and she said, 'Give me the keys to the house and car, you're coming with me.' They just took me away."

'A VULNERABLE AT-RISK SENIOR'

GARWOOD WAS PLACED in a court-appointed guardianship in 2017. She had been in a car crash shortly after the death of one of her sons, and she was, by her own and her lawyers' accounts, in a downward spiral of grief. She was at one point held under Florida's Baker Act, which allows authorities to commit someone to a hospital temporarily for a psychiatric evaluation.

Guardians make personal, medical, and financial decisions for minors, people with developmental disabilities, and senior citizens who can't handle their own affairs. In Florida, the legal term of art for such a person is "incapacitated." Family members often fill this role, but when people with disabilities don't have family qualified to take care of them, courts appoint professional guardians.

In Florida, a professional guardian is someone who has received fees for providing services to three or more wards. The guardian must pass a background check, take a 40-hour course and final exam (along with continuing education requirements), and be registered and bonded with the state. There are also public guardians that courts can appoint in cases of indigency. The majority of the roughly 500 professional guardians across the state of Florida are scrupulous and compassionate in their duties. One elderly Florida woman, for example, was admitted to a hospital after a neighbor called 911 over concerns about her living conditions and health. The hospital discharged her to a rehab facility that wasn't equipped to handle her advancing dementia, and the rehab facility in turn discharged her and sent her back to her unsafe apartment. The woman's sister lived in Colorado and couldn't care for her, so she petitioned a court to appoint a professional guardian to make sure she received appropriate medical care, get her apartment cleaned, and sort out her finances.

The sad truth is that professional guardians are also sometimes the best option to protect vulnerable seniors from their own family, and to defuse messy family squabbles over their care and property. This is, professional guardians say, their purpose: to act in the best interest of someone who can't act for themselves.

But handing someone that much power over other people's lives, in some cases against their and their families' will, is an enormous act of trust. When guardians fail to act in their wards' interests, it can lead to neglect, theft, and worse.

According to a guardianship petition filed in Garwood's case, Rebecca Fierle, the Florida woman who would become her guardian, told a judge that Garwood "suffers from a seizure disorder, [has] poor insight and judgment, and is a vulnerable at-risk senior who is a victim of potential financial exploitation, and as a result, she is unable to make healthcare and other decisions or manage her finances."

Florida has a unique system, more stringent than many states, where a three-person examining committee is required to recommend a guardianship. One person on the committee must be a doctor.

Garwood and her lawyers don't know who referred her to Fierle or how the woman found out about her; they suspect it was one of her cousins. At the time in Florida, a professional guardian could file a petition against anyone. The Florida legislature changed the law in 2020 to restrict guardians from filing such petitions unless they're related to the person in care.

There was no such law then, so the examining committee, followed by a judge, found Garwood incapacitated. She lost the right to vote, to have a driver's license, to choose her attorney, to apply for or hold a job, to travel, to marry, to...