California attorney general's office to ramp up elder-abuse investigations

This article reveals that the bottom line is that the Attorney General’s office will not prosecute a nursing home operator if the operator is “very cooperative and [takes] immediate action when the situation [comes] to light” as a result of some family member perseverating and somehow getting the case into the newspapers — which embarrasses both the nursing home and the Attorney General’s office. In practical terms, neglect will continue to be a virtual certainty because a nursing home operator is free to overload its nurses and CNAs, so that nurses make false nursing notes claiming they provided services the patients needed but the nurses not have the time to provide. The nursing home operator can easily avoid a criminal prosecution against the facility’s management, by turning against the overloaded nurse or CNA, whose grotesque work overload eventually made the nurse or CNA callous, leading to the case that gets into the newspaper. To make the problem go away, the nursing home operator need only help prosecutors to convict the nurse or CNA of being a callous aberrant criminal, so that the Attorney General’s office and the nursing home operator will be able to get the media spotlight off their back.  This article tells us what will happen.  The guilty nurse’s life will be ruined, the deceased patient’s case will get media attention, and the nursing home operator will continue to do business as usual, getting reimbursement from Medicare, Medi-Cal and other insurance providers -- for care that violates California's federally mandated duty to make a good faith effort to “provide . . . safeguards … to assure that … care…will be provided, in a manner consistent with . . . the best interests of the recipients.”  42 USC § 1396a(19). The BMFEA does not provide those safeguards; the BMFEA under Mark Zahner undermines those safeguards. The article misstates the law. The article insinuates that the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the nursing home operator or the worker "intended to harm the patient." BMFEA's Chief of Prosecutions, Mark Zahner and his deputy Melissa Biederman in the Burbank, California BMFEA office, told me that too. Their false statement of what the law really is, helps them to justify their decisions to not prosecute cases. The fact that our prosecutors gave Reporter Lundstrom a false statement about what the law is tells us much about what the prosecutors actually intend to do, or more accurately, what prosecutors intend to not do. Recklessness or “criminal negligence” (Pen. Code §368; CALCRIM 582) does not require a specific intent to harm. In other words, a person acts with criminal negligence [or recklessness] if the way he or she acts is so different from how an ordinarily careful person would act in the same situation that his or her act amounts to disregard for human life or indifference to the consequences of that act. Recklessness or “criminal negligence” (Pen. Code §368; CALCRIM 582) does not require a specific intent to harm. Recklessness or “criminal negligence” requires only an “act [that] amounts to disregard … or indifference to the consequences of” the wrongful conduct. Acts of omission and/or abandonment can be acts that “amount to disregards...or indifference...” A person acts with criminal negligence when: 1. He or she acts in a reckless way that creates a high risk of death or great bodily injury; and 2. A reasonable person would have known that acting in that way would create such a risk. What possible justification is there for the AG's office having given such false information to Reporter Lundstrom? I drafted the original version of the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act (Welf & Inst. C. sections 15657 et seq.), and I spent five years of my life getting it enacted. I have come to believe that I wasted my time.