Free Britney?

[Sheilbh]

Yeah agreed on all of that.

And I don't know English law in this area either but my impression of it is unless someone is a serious risk to themselves or others, then their assets and earning might be held by a trust but not themselves personally. Which is the thing I find baffling.

[The Minsky Moment]

It's not that baffling.

Either someone screwed up or someone got paid off.

Probably #1 because never of the principle of never ascribe to malice what which can be explained by incompetence, although the system is so riddled with inherent conflicts of interest how do your disentangle the two?

[The Minsky Moment]

Her testimony, while far from a model of clarity, was more cogent then a filing I received last month from an attorney that was recently reinstated to the Bar (apparently despite evidence of mental instability). Comparing to others in the entertainment profession, it was more coherent then the average Kanye West pronouncement and displayed a better grasp of the spoken English language then (for example) Justin Bieber or Donald Trump.

[crazy canuck]

I don't understand why she could not collapse the Conservatorship when she reached the age of majority.  Here the only thing she would have to establish is that she is competent - and that is a pretty low bar.

It was established when she was an adult.

Even more inexplicable.

It's not that baffling.

Either someone screwed up or someone got paid off.

Probably #1 because never of the principle of never ascribe to malice what which can be explained by incompetence, although the system is so riddled with inherent conflicts of interest how do your disentangle the two?

If #1, one wonders how flawed the system must be and how many less high profile people are being victimized.

There must be perverse economic incentives built into the legal system in which this was permitted to occur.

[The Minsky Moment]

If #1, one wonders how flawed the system must be and how many less high profile people are being victimized.

Wild guess, I'd say about 7 or 8 out of 10, and as to the latter it depends how much money they have.
Spears is notable not just for her fame but because she has such a large present stream of earnings.

There must be perverse economic incentives built into the legal system in which this was permitted to occur.

Well lawyers get paid when a guardianship is in place but not if it isn't.  You can do the math right there.

[crazy canuck]

If #1, one wonders how flawed the system must be and how many less high profile people are being victimized.

Wild guess, I'd say about 7 or 8 out of 10, and as to the latter it depends how much money they have.
Spears is notable not just for her fame but because she has such a large present stream of earnings.

There must be perverse economic incentives built into the legal system in which this was permitted to occur.

Well lawyers get paid when a guardianship is in place but not if it isn't.  You can do the math right there.

Is there no oversight?  Here that role is performed by Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee.

[The Minsky Moment]

Is there no oversight?  Here that role is performed by Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee.

Every state has there own system but typically oversight is through the judicial system - in NY for example the "Surrogates Court"
The Canadian system seems superior in that respect but its gubmint that taxes would have to be to support so not the 'murican way.

[Sheilbh]

This article is good - it doesn't add much not in the docs I've seen etc. But is still interesting:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/britney-spears-conservatorship-nightmare

And the details on her legal rights and the way people are making money on her is still incredible:

From the earliest days of the conservatorship, Spears appeared to chafe against her constraints. While hospitalized, she had contacted a lawyer named Adam Streisand. He represented her in a court hearing on February 4th, attesting that Spears had a "strong desire" that Jamie not be a conservator. But the judge, based on a report from Ingham and testimony from Spar, ruled that Spears had no capacity to retain an attorney. Spears spoke with another lawyer, Jon Eardley, who attempted to move the case to federal court. The lawyers for the conservatorship argued that "Britney lacked the capacity to hire Mr. Eardley to file the Notice of Removal on her behalf, and therefore could not have hired him." The lawyers noted that Spears did have the right to meet with legal counsel: Sam Ingham, who met with Spears for about fifteen minutes two days after the conservatorship was granted, when he visited her at the U.C.L.A. hospital. Several sources close to the situation felt that Ingham was loyal to the conservatorship and to Jamie, despite nominally representing Spears. Butcher recalled Jamie saying that Ingham reported to him on Spears's movements and activities. (Ingham did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)
[...]
As Spears privately resisted her father's involvement in the conservatorship, he used her money to fight back. Recent court documents show that Jamie's lawyers billed nearly nine hundred thousand dollars for four months of work, from October, 2020, to February, 2021. The bill accounts for hundreds of hours of work by crisis-P.R. specialists who charged between five hundred and nine hundred dollars an hour to respond, they claimed, to media requests.
[...]
Conservatorships can protect people who are elderly, or who live with profound disabilities or catastrophic mental illness. But there is also a wide range of alternatives to conservatorship that are less strict than what Spears has experienced, such as conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of finances. As conservatorship law is written, the court is required to determine that a conservatorship is—and remains—necessary. "In practice," Zoë Brennan-Krohn, a disability-rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "this is absolutely not the case. What should be happening is that a judge at a reëvaluation hearing would ask, 'What else have you tried? Why isn't anything else working?' And, if the conservator hasn't shown that they've tried less restrictive options, the conservatorship should be suspended. But I've never heard of a judge asking that in any situation."
[...]
The idea that Spears needs this conservatorship to function is, to some degree, self-reinforcing. In that respect, experts said, her case is common. Martinis, the disability-rights lawyer, said that many guardianships can prove inescapable, which is why they are vulnerable to abuse. In the extreme cases, he said, "the strategy is isolate, medicate, liquidate. You isolate them, medicate them to keep them quiet, liquidate the assets." If a conservatee functions well under conservatorship, it can be framed as proof of the arrangement's necessity; if a conservatee struggles under conservatorship, the same conclusion can be drawn. And if a conservatee gets out, and stumbles into crisis or manipulation—a likelihood increased by time spent formally disempowered—this, too, might reinforce the argument for their prior legal restraints. "Our mistakes make us who we are, and teach us who we can be," Martinis said. "Without bad choices, we can't be wholly human. And with the best of intentions, we say to people with disabilities: we'll keep you from ever making a mistake." He added, "Should Britney get out, just watch. The first mistake she makes, fingers will wag, and people will say this would never have happened if she were under guardianship."

"There's this concept of the dignity of risk," Brennan-Krohn, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said. "Most of us have a very wide range of bad choices we can make that society is O.K. with, but, in a conservatorship, you're subject to the decision-making rubric of best interest. And it's possible we'd all be better off if someone was making decisions for us like that, but those are not the values of the society we live in." In her remarks this June, Spears gestured, briefly, to the wider world of broken guardianships: "We can sit here all day and say, 'Oh, conservatorships are here to help people,' but, Ma'am, there's a thousand conservatorships that are abusive, as well." As she said this, the #FreeBritney supporters at the courthouse, their glittery signs laid down on the concrete, let out an impassioned "Yes!"

[jimmy olsen]

https://twitter.com/IGGYAZALEA/status/1410433707052204034

[garbon]

Iggy?

[jimmy olsen]

Iggy?

She's a witness.

[garbon]

And her father is stepping down.

[Sheilbh]

[The Larch]

And she's free!

Britney Spears's conservatorship terminated after nearly 14 years
Musician regains independence after legal arrangement denied her right to make key life decisions

A judge has approved the termination of Britney Spears's conservatorship, freeing the pop star from the controversial legal arrangement that has controlled her life for nearly 14 years.

The ruling marks an extraordinary victory for the singer who had fought for years to regain her independence from the courts, which in 2008 took away her rights to make basic decisions about her finances, career and personal life.

Friday's decision to dissolve the conservatorship, a form of court-appointed guardianship, means that Spears will retake control of her estate and will no longer be required to pay a team of professionals and attorneys to oversee her affairs.

"The conservatorship of the person and of the estate of Britney Jean Spears is hereby terminated," said the Los Angeles judge Brenda Penny, announcing the ruling.

The end of the conservatorship comes five months after Spears, 39, spoke publicly about the arrangement for the first time in court, saying she had been forced to take medications and perform against her will, and that her father, Jamie Spears, had been an abusive conservator who tightly controlled intimidate details of her life. A judge suspended her father from the conservatorship in September.

The case has sparked international protests and prompted widespread scrutiny of the media's treatment of female pop stars and of the opaque guardianship system that affects millions of people. Fans, who have been organizing #FreeBritney demonstrations for years, shut down the street outside the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles on Friday to rally in support of termination and planned a "freedom party" in the evening.

Spears was first placed into a conservatorship while facing apparent mental health struggles amid vicious paparazzi abuse in 2008. She quickly objected to the arrangement and her father's role in it, reporting has since revealed, and she tried to hire her own lawyer to advocate for her. But the courts ruled that she did not have the capacity to select an attorney, and instead gave her a court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D Ingham III.

Conservatorships are typically put in place for older or infirm people who can no longer make decisions for themselves, but in Spears's case, the courts established an indefinite conservatorship even as she continued with her hugely successful career. The arrangement forced her to pay Ingham, her father and his legal team, and others involved in the court case.

Spears strongly objected to the arrangement for years, the New York Times reported this year, citing confidential court documents, but Ingham, who made an estimated $3m representing Spears, charging $475 an hour, did not advocate for the conservatorship to end. In 2016, while Spears was performing her hit Las Vegas residency and releasing her ninth studio album, she outlined a range of disturbing allegations to a court investigator, the records showed.

She allegedly told the court that those involved in the conservatorship had made her perform while sick with a fever, that her security team and assistant held her credit card and used it whenever they wanted, that she was limited to a weekly allowance, and that her father prohibited her from making cosmetic changes to her kitchen. In a closed-door hearing that year, the Times reported, she also said she was forced into a mental health facility against her will, which she viewed as retaliation for speaking up in a rehearsal.

Despite those private objections, the arrangement continued for years with few changes. Ingham more recently began raising concerns about Jamie's treatment of his daughter, saying in court last year that she was "afraid of her father", but the lawyer did not file for Spears to regain her independence.

The case took a dramatic turn in June when Spears requested that she be allowed to speak publicly and then detailed her complaints, including claims that her boyfriend wasn't allowed to drive her in his car and that she was barred from removing her birth control. She also said she did not know that she could file a petition to end the conservatorship.

In July, Spears was allowed to hire her own lawyer, Mathew Rosengart, who has since aggressively advocated for Jamie to be removed and has vowed to investigate his actions and handling of her money.

Amid the upheaval prompted by Spears's testimony and two explosive documentaries about the case, the parties on all sides of the conservatorship came out and said they now supported termination.

Junior Olivas, one of the first fans to protest outside court, said when he had begun rallying in April 2019, he thought Spears would be freed from the conservatorship within a month. He had no idea it would be a years-long battle: "It took documentaries and the whole world talking about it, but oh my God, we're finally here ... I knew this day would come. But it felt like it took for ever."

Meg Radford, another longtime #FreeBritney organizer, noted that it was just earlier this year that Jamie was calling fans "conspiracy theorists" for expressing concerns about her wellbeing. "Jamie Spears was able to control the narrative by calling us crazy ... and the court records were sealed for so long that people weren't able to find the truth."

Even with the arrangement terminated, Rosengart has said he will continue investigating Jamie, including the recent claims that he hired a security team that monitored his daughter's private communications.

The case has prompted guardianship reform efforts at the state and federal level, with California recently passing a law that establishes conservatees' rights to hire their own counsel.

Jasmine E Harris, a University of Pennsylvania law professor and expert in conservatorships, said this kind of termination was rare. Once a court deemed someone incapable of making decisions, she said, it was difficult for that person to prove that their rights should be restored, and most often, conservatorships lasted until the individual died.

"I think this would have gone another 13 years had it not been for that moment ... when Britney was allowed to speak on her own behalf," Harris said, adding that she hoped the public now understood that people of all ages could lose their independence through the guardianship system, and that this was a disability rights issue. She also urged more investments to alternatives to conservatorship so that people could get the support they needed without the "nuclear option" of having their fundamental rights stripped away.

Radford said the #FreeBritney activists would continue to fight for accountability in Spears's conservatorship and for broader reform: "I think this court case will go down in history books, and Britney's case will be the catalyst for significant change for conservatorships and guardianships and how we treat our elderly and our disabled in the court system."

She added: "I hope Britney takes time to heal and learn how to re-enter the world ... And when she's ready, if she wants to tell her story, I would love to hear this story from Britney directly someday."

[The Brain]