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thomas davison

Jailed in secret - for trying to rescue her father from care home where she believed he would die

Wanda Maddocks is first person to be imprisoned by Court of Protection
It settles the affairs of people too ill to make their own decisions
Jailed because she ignored orders not to try to remove her father from home

By Steve Doughty and Andy Dolan

PUBLISHED: 23:27, 23 April 2013 | UPDATED: 08:07, 24 April 2013

A woman was jailed �in secret� for trying to remove her father from a care home where his family thought he was in danger of dying.

Wanda Maddocks, 50, is the first person known to be imprisoned by the Court of Protection, which settles the affairs of people too ill to make their own decisions.

A judge ruled that she should go to prison for five months for contempt of court even though she was not present or represented by a lawyer.

Details of the case were made public for the first time yesterday and provoked a fresh row over behind-closed-doors justice.
Wanda Maddocks was jailed 'in secret' for trying to remove her father from a care home where his family thought he was in danger of dying
John Maddocks was being held in a care home against his families wishes under the Labour government's Mental Capacity Act

Secret 'justice': Wanda Maddocks, left, was jailed for taking her father John, right, out of his care home against the instructions of a court order that he should not be moved

Miss Maddocks, who served six weeks of her sentence, was jailed because she ignored the court�s orders not to try to remove her father John from the home.

She was condemned for incidents including taking the 80-year-old dementia sufferer to a court hearing and to see a solicitor.

She was also censured for producing a leaflet to try to publicise details of the case and giving her father a wooden cross �to ward off evil� in the care home.

Her family said Mr Maddocks, a retired painter and decorator from Stoke-on-Trent, had been held �like a prisoner� on the orders of a local council.

Miss Maddocks was initially not allowed to be named after the hearing and was identified only by her initials WM.

And the court�s ruling containing details of her sentence was not published.

The Court of Protection is a branch of the High Court and its hearings are always conducted in private.

Judge Martin Cardinal merely went through the motions of observing open justice when he handed down his sentence.

He ordered the doors of his courtroom in Birmingham to be unlocked and told ushers to announce in the corridor that members of the public were free to come in.
Miss Maddocks was jailed on September 11 last year after the sentencing in her absence by the Court of Protection in Birmingham, and sent to Foston Hall prison in Derby

Miss Maddocks was jailed on September 11 last year after the sentencing in her absence by the Court of Protection in Birmingham, and sent to Foston Hall prison in Derby

But there was no wider announcement of the judgment and no-one who was not directly involved is thought to have attended.

The ban on naming Miss Maddocks was lifted because there was no reason for it to remain in place after her release. Mr Maddocks has since died.

He separated from wife June more than 30 years ago. She remarried but now suffers from Parkinson�s Disease.

The extraordinary case began when the grandfather-of-one was found collapsed at his own home last year.

He was placed in a care home and the local authority applied for a legal order which said he must stay there.

These are introduced when officials believe someone could be at risk of harm, and put the Official Solicitor in charge of their affairs.

After a few months Miss Maddocks� brother Ivan took him out of the care home for lunch.

Miss Maddocks was alerted and flew her father to Turkey, where she owns a number of properties.

They stayed for 13 weeks before returning to Britain, and her father went to a different care home.

Mr Maddocks said: �Wanda was certain she could care for him herself but the social services said he had to be put in the home. Wanda was very angry that they were taking Dad away from us.�

Miss Maddocks, a former buy-to-let landlord, was jailed on September 11 last year after the sentencing in her absence by the Court of Protection in Birmingham.

She was freed from Foston Hall prison in Derby on November 1 after returning to the court to purge her contempt by apologising to the judge.

Judge Cardinal said in his ruling that �there is a history of the family being difficult with the local authority� and that Miss Maddocks knew she had been ordered not to interfere with her father.

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He said she had done so on a number of occasions. On one she took him from his care home to attend a court hearing. On another she took him to Birmingham to talk to a solicitor.

The judge recorded that she also gave her father a wooden cross �to prevent the evil in the home from hurting him�.

Miss Maddocks also �produced and distributed a leaflet prior to and during the final hearing giving details of the case, containing a idiot of her father and other information so as to identify him and that is in breach of Court of Protection rules.�

Miss Maddocks was said to have left a long and abusive message on a social worker�s voicemail describing �you in your tarty little stuck up voice� and to have called council staff names including �arrogant little cunning b*******�.

In one message she said: �I hope you all end up where my Dad is and I hope you all end up cursed.�
Judge Cardinal said she had �the attitude of someone who is simply not going to obey court orders�.

He said Miss Maddocks was causing her father �very considerable grief� and �it seems to be only right she should go to prison�.

But the whistleblowing MP who first learned of the case, Lib Dem John Hemming, said: �The jailing of people in secret for contempt is not supposed to happen.

�No records have been collected. I believe the judges have broken the rules of their own courts, but nobody is doing anything about it.�
COURT THATS DOGGED BY CONTROVERSY.jpg

�One of the charges against the woman was that she took her father from his care home to see a solicitor. We now live in a country where ordinary people get locked up for taking their father to see a lawyer. Even in Iran they do not jail people for taking legal advice.�

Councillor Gwen Hassall, Stoke-on-Trent city council cabinet member for social services, said: �This is clearly an extreme case, but one that the Court of Protection supported the council on. It was the court�s decision to issue a custodial sentence to Wanda Maddocks.

�Our chief concern was always centred around the welfare of her father, who was suffering from a deteriorating condition and required 24-hour supervision in a stable environment.

�This was a decision reached by medical consultants, geriatricians, social workers, community psychiatric nurses, dieticians, consultant health and nursing professionals and others who were involved in assessing his needs.�

She added: �This decision was also ratified by the Court of Protection, which carried out its own independent assessment of his needs.

�Unfortunately safeguards had to be put in place to ensure he had the support of a stable environment because there were no signs that this could be provided otherwise.

'Safeguards also had to be put in place to protect the care professionals who looked after Mr Maddocks.�
THEY TREATED OUR DAD LIKE A PRISONER.jpg

The sinister spread of justice behind closed doors, writes Christopher Brooker

Today�s revelations in the Mail about Wanda Maddocks, the woman imprisoned by a judge for trying to remove her 80-year-old father from a care home where he was being held against his family�s wishes, are truly shocking.

Most disturbing of all is that it is only thanks to persistent inquiries by the Mail that we know of her fate at all � for the court heard the case in secret and chose not to publish the ruling containing details of her sentence.

The court that conducted itself in this manner is the mysterious and secretive Court of Protection, set up in 2005 under the Labour government�s Mental Capacity Act to give state officials quite extraordinary powers over the lives of people who are deemed no longer fit to handle their own affairs.

Miss Maddocks was found guilty of contempt because she ignored the Court of Protection�s orders not to interfere with her father�s life in the care home.
What angered the judge and the council involved, Stoke-on-Trent (pictured) was not just that Miss Maddocks took father away but that she desperately tried to publicise what was happening to him

What angered the judge and the council involved, Stoke-on-Trent (pictured) was not just that Miss Maddocks took father away but that she desperately tried to publicise what was happening to him

What angered the judge and the council involved, Stoke-on-Trent, was not just that she took her father away but that she desperately tried to publicise what was happening to him by writing a leaflet about it.

Of course, the case is complicated and highly emotive � one in which family members concerned for their ailing, elderly father are pitted against professionals and state employees who insist they know better.

But it is also part of a deeply worrying trend of secret justice taking hold across Britain, where journalists, the public and even defendants are barred from hearing evidence, while those in the dock often have no legal representation.

The Court of Protection is making huge numbers of judgments in secret which devastate families such as that of Wanda Maddocks.

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Only this week, there was the tragic case of a 64-year-old mother from a working-class family who left her husband and ran off with her neighbour to the Midlands, without an explanation.

The family spent months trying to track her down, and finally found her in a nursing home after she had suffered a massive stroke that left her needing 24-hour care. When they called to see her, the nursing home � claiming she had written letters saying she wanted to break off contact with them � called the police.

After hearing the evidence in secret, the judge decided the family should no longer have contact with their mother � even though an American forensic expert who used computer analysis on handwriting testified that he was �99.9 per cent� certain the letters were written by the man she ran off with.

For months I have been following a terrifying case involving a council which cannot be named, and which has similarly been hidden away from public view by another judge of the same Court of Protection.

The story would make your hair curl. But because it is under the aegis of the Court of Protection, I am forbidden from reporting on it at all. None of its details can be made public.

Local press that did cover the story so irked the council and the judge that other media were told that any further reporting of the case would be a contempt of court, punishable by imprisonment.

Like the case of Miss Maddocks, it highlights a tendency to allow Britain�s courts to hide their workings from public view behind a wall of secrecy.

The Mail mounted a hard-hitting campaign for open justice after the Government proposed last year that judges could be allowed to hold secret hearings in terrorist cases, on the grounds that allowing these to be reported might be damaging to �national security�.

Similar concerns have been expressed over the fear that the Leveson inquiry might trigger a massive extension in the powers of judges to throw up a blanket of secrecy around other types of cases they are hearing, such as those involving celebrities keen to preserve their reputation.

But the terrifying fact is that we already have a whole swathe of secret courts in this country, where judges are allowed to exclude the public and the Press, and to issue draconian gagging orders to prevent anything being reported of what goes on.

Any breach of those orders can be ruled a contempt of court, punishable not just by imprisonment but by the confiscation of an offender�s possessions.

One of the most glaring examples of justice behind closed doors is to be found in the extraordinary goings on of our so-called �child protection� system, where social workers using family courts can too often tear families apart for the flimsiest and most dubious of reasons,

In such cases, all the normal principles of British justice can be turned on their heads. The rules, which in criminal courts require evidence to be put to a proper test, can be routinely ignored.

Social workers and lawyers can trot out hearsay allegations which are accepted by the court as if they were proven fact, �expert psychologists� are paid thousands of pounds to come up with patently ridiculous reports, which parents fearful that they may lose their children for ever are not permitted to question.
Secretive route: Police could soon be banned from identifying people they have arrested by a recommendation of the Leveson Inquiry

Police could soon be banned from identifying people they have arrested by a recommendation of the Leveson Inquiry

What is so shocking to parents who fall foul of this system � as I have learned from talking to scores of them over the years � is how they can find themselves being treated, without any need for proof, as criminals, having to listen to any kind of allegation being made against them without being given a right of reply.

The point is that none of these abuses could take place if the judges had not been allowed to hide away the workings of these courts behind a far greater wall of secrecy than anything intended by the politicians who passed the supposedly well-meaning Acts of Parliament which gave them their powers in the first place.

The overwhelming moral of all this is that wherever courts are allowed to operate in secret, the system is likely to be corrupted.

Few things are more sinister in Britain today than all those pressures to extend even further that suffocating blanket of secrecy, for we can already see � as in the frightening case of Miss Maddocks and the Court of Protection � how easily it can lead to any sense of justice being thrown out of the window

So now we have the GESTAPO COURTS , soon you will be wisked away at 3 am never to be seen or heard of again, BRITISH JUSTICE IS A LIE THERE IS NONE NOW, THERE IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY IN THIS COUNTRY ANYMORE.

thomas davison · Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2013 7:32 am Post subject:

HOW LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS ARE MADE IN SECRET

The Court of Protection was set up in 2005 under the Mental Capacity Act � one of Tony Blair�s most contentious laws.

It gave legal force to �living wills�, instructions from patients ordering doctors to let them die if they became gravely ill. Here STEVE DOUGHTY looks at how the court works:

The court makes life-or-death decisions when the power to withdraw life-sustaining treatment is in dispute. It also governs the correct use of Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, orders which can give care homes and hospitals the right to prevent a resident or patient leaving, if it is considered in their best interests. Backbench Labour MPs feared the legislation could be used to withdraw fluids and food from patients who might not wish to die.
The court makes rulings on power of attorney � decisions on who should have control of the money and property of those deemed no longer competent to handle their own affairs.
Originally Labour ministers said Court of Protection cases should be heard in public, but in 2006 the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, issued guidance which said �the court may order that identities of people involved in a case are not disclosed if it is considered necessary to protect their interests�. He added: �The circumstances under which the court may consider that all or part of a hearing should be heard in private are wide.�
Court of Protection judges rule in hundreds of everyday power of attorney cases, where people want control of the bank accounts of elderly relatives with dementia. In the past this function had been handled quickly and efficiently by officials as a matter of routine. Now families can suffer long delays.
By 2009 the average delay was four months � at a typical cost of �400 and the Court of Protection had attracted 4,000 complaints. The court is currently handing 2,700 cases a year � more than ten for every working day � and long delays continue.
Among the court�s current caseload is thought to be 30 life-or-death cases. Recent examples that came to light when judges published their rulings included a case in which a Muslim family tried to save their father. Hospital doctors said he should be allowed to die, but some witnesses had seen the man move his eyelids and grimace. In another case a judge ruled that a man with a disabling disease had consented to a living will by blinking at his wife and that his breathing machine could be disconnected.
No-one involved in any such case has ever been named. The secrecy maintained by the Court of Protection is such that in 2011 it obtained an injunction which forbade a newspaper to speak to any of 65 people, or to allow its journalists to go within 50 yards of a care home. The case involved a family who wanted an incapacitated elderly relative to be allowed to die.
Only one Court of Protection case is ever known to have been conducted under media scrutiny. The 2010 case involved the welfare of the Duchess of Cornwall�s nephew, blind and autistic pianist Derek Paravicini, and journalists were allowed in only after a lengthy application process.
And although Wanda Maddocks is thought to be the first person jailed by the court, no-one can be sure � someone else might have been imprisoned behind the court�s accustomed closed doors.

The head of the NHS gets a bonus for murdering 1700 people and this woman gets jailed for trying to give her father a better life, where is the justice in this country now!!!
Terrorists get paid to live here, illegal immigrants get more thought of than Real British people, Muslims get special treatment to take over our country and dismiss what ever laws we have left as it is their right.
THERE IS NO LAW IN THIS COUNTRY ANYMORE, THERE IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY, YOU CAN KILL, RAPE , ROB, HUMAN TRAFFIC AND YOU GET 2 YEARS IN A HOLIDAY CAMP JAIL, AND YOU ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN,