Probate court judges in the state are elected for a four-year term, work part-time hours and usually also have a private law practice. Until a recent reorganization, they were paid a percentage of the value of the estates they processed. There have been several high-profile cases in recent years of probate judges accused of abusing their power or improperly enriching themselves.
Yet, when the courts were reorganized last year, reducing 123 probate districts to 59, including five regional children’s courts, little was done to change the way that they operate.
Judges in Branford, New London, Middletown, Westbrook, Portland and Southington have had complaints filed against them to the Council of Probate Judicial Conduct in the past eight years. When the council took the rare step of publicly censuring Southington judge Bryan Meccariello last September, Meccariello withdrew his re-election bid and is no longer serving.
John Fertig, who had been the probate judge in Oxford for 21 years before the districts were consolidated, said that one of the changes made by the recent law is that probate judges are now paid according to a formula that considers how large a population they serve and how much work they usually do.
“The billing system is still the same,” he said. “There are application fees and a percentage of a decedent’s estate,” he said. “The only difference is that the money is sent up to Hartford and checks are sent out to the judges and clerks.”
One of the criticisms sometimes heard about probate judges is that they tend to hire the same people to serve as conservators of estates and of people too incapacitated to handle their own affairs. Conservators pay the bills and manage the assets of the estate. Fertig said the same people tend to get that work “because you reach a certain comfort level with someone. There is a list that you are supposed to draw from on a rotating basis but some of them were not very good and I’d scratch them off,” Fertig said. “You tend to avoid going outside of the people you know.”
The code of ethics for probate judges forbids them from hiring other members of their private law firms from serving as guardians or conservators in their courts. Judge James Kinsella ran afoul of that rule in 1983 and was referred for impeachment by the Council on Probate Judicial Conduct.
The council didn’t tell Meccariello that he had to withdraw from the race last year, said Richard Banbury, an attorney who is also the executive director of the Council on Probate Judicial Conduct. “But other people did, to avoid giving a black eye to the profession.”
The council had found that Meccariello replaced the person a dying woman had chosen as her conservator with a friend of his. The new conservator set up two trusts and funneled the assets of the estate into them, bypassing the woman’s chosen beneficiaries.
Banbury said that his disciplinary panel has received between 18 and 24 complaints about probate judges in the past seven years.
“They break down into two categories,” he said. “We can give a private reprimand for what we’d consider `venal sins,’ basically telling the judge: `You shouldn’t be doing that.’ We can hold public hearings and censure judges for misconduct, for the hardcore violations, but we have few of these, maybe one a year.”
Fertig said there have been bad judges, “but not that many. Those are the cases that people jump on and they usually come out of a situation where no one was paying attention. When they happen, it’s because there is a smell of money around, or a family member isn’t happy with a decision.”
Attribution:
Policing probate court
Frank Juliano
May 28, 2011
ctpost.com
http://www.ctpost.com/default/article/Policing-probate-court-1400436.php
Estate of Denial® provides news, analysis and commentary on abusive practices occurring in probate courts and via probate instruments (wills, trusts, guardianships, powers of attorney). We provide original perspective to educate the public regarding this growing threat to both individual freedoms and property rights.
