Sex Offender Fights Removal From Hospice

See also: Dying, Wheelchair-Bound Sex Offender Must Leave Hospice Care Because There's a Preschool Nearby and especially: RSOL

9-10-16 Florida:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CN) - A Florida city's sex-offender law faces scrutiny in litigation over whether a wheelchair-bound former doctor, convicted of patient abuse in the 1980s, should be forced out of a hospice due to its proximity to a school.

A Palm Beach County court petition filed Aug. 31 claims Jack Ehrhart, a hospice patient with end-stage Alzheimer's disease, has been threatened with arrest if he does not move out of Heartland of Boynton Beach, a nursing home near a local preschool.

The City of Boynton Beach purportedly issued a notice to Ehrhart and the hospice accusing them of violating an ordinance that prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school, daycare center or playground.

"Heartland claims to be incurring fines imposed by the city due to plaintiff's status and has threatened to have Boynton Beach Police arrest [him] for a violation of the ordinance," according to the emergency petition, filed by Ehrhart's wife under a power of attorney.

The pleading insists that a criminal prosecution of Ehrhart would have to show he made a "purposeful decision" to maintain residency within the restricted area. His Alzheimer's disease renders him "completely incapable of having the requisite intent or mens rea necessary" to prove as much, the filing states.

Heartland has tried to relocate Ehrhart to another facility, but options are scarce because the former gynecologist remains in the Florida sex-offender registry, on account of his conviction for felony indecent assault in Massachusetts.

Sex offender with Alzheimer's says he can't remember abuse, gets 2 years in jail

4-10-15 New York:

Fabius, NY -- A Cortland County man told authorities he can't remember sexually abusing two children a decade ago.

John Webb, 66, of 104 Pine Hills Trailer Park, Homer, was sentenced today to two years in jail for the abuse.

He was arrested Oct. 9, 2013 after a Fabius girl reported one of the incidents to school officials, who contacted Child Protective Services, according to Onondaga County sheriff's deputies. A second victim came forward later.

The abuse apparently happened a decade ago. Webb, who has advanced Alzheimer's Disease, told authorities he just didn't remember it, his lawyer, Robert Baska, said in court.

Ohio prison system liable for injuries of rapist, 80, who fell out of top bunk, court rules

2-15-15 Ohio:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is liable for the injuries of an 80-year-old inmate who fell out of his top bunk, a state court says.

A ruling by Ohio Court of Claims magistrate earlier this month says the state prison system knew the risks and shouldn't have assigned inmate Roy Buchanan to a top bunk.

The order does not rule on amount of monetary damages, which would be determined in a separate proceeding, the Ohio Supreme Court's news service said (See News Service of case below).

Buchanan's complaint said he lost his balance and fell out of his bunk onto the concrete floor of the dorm where he lived at the Hocking Correctional Facility in December 2012.

Can a Wife With Dementia Say Yes to Sex?

12-11-2014 Iowa:

More than 350 people attended the wedding reception of Donna Lou Young and Henry V. Rayhons in Duncan, Iowa, on Dec. 15, 2007. Family and friends ate pork roast and danced polkas to celebrate the union of a widow and a widower, both in their 70s, who had found unexpected love after the deaths of their long-time spouses.

For the next six-and-a-half years, Henry and Donna Rayhons were inseparable. She sat near him in the state House chamber while he worked as a Republican legislator. He helped with her beekeeping. She rode alongside him in a combine as he harvested corn and soybeans on his 700 acres in northern Iowa. They sang in the choir at Sunday Mass. “We just loved being together,” Henry Rayhons says.

Today, he’s awaiting trial on a felony charge that he raped Donna at a nursing home where she was living. The Iowa Attorney General’s office says Rayhons had intercourse with his wife when she lacked the mental capacity to consent because she had Alzheimer’s. She died on Aug. 8, four days short of her 79th birthday, of complications from the disease. One week later, Rayhons, 78, was arrested. He pleaded not guilty.

To convict Rayhons, prosecutors must first convince a jury that a sex act occurred in his wife’s room at the Concord Care Center in Garner, Iowa, on May 23. If prosecutors prove that, his guilt or innocence will turn on whether Donna wanted sex or not, and whether her dementia prevented her from making that judgment and communicating her wishes.

Some Curbs on Sex Offenders Called Ineffective, Inhumane

11-22-2006 Georgia:

As convicted sex offenders go, they seem to pose little danger.

One is 100 years old. Another can barely walk and is in the late stages of Alzheimer's disease. Another is dying of heart disease in a nursing home.

Yet under a new Georgia law, thousands of registered sex offenders, even the old and feeble, could be pushed from their homes and hospices.

"He doesn't really know anything about it," said Ruby Anderson, 77, whose husband was convicted of having sex with a minor in 1997 and, at 81, no longer recognizes members of his family because of Alzheimer's disease. "The trouble is, I just don't know where we can go."

As states around the country have sought in recent years to control the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders, Georgia's law stands out as one of the toughest, a testament to the daunting public fears regarding children's safety.

Early memory lapses may be sign of dementia

9-24-2014 National:

CNN) -- At least once a week a patient will come into Dr. Thomas Loepfe's busy geriatric clinic in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, with a worry. She will tell him she's been misplacing her glasses lately, or he'll say he's concerned about losing the car keys.

"Age is the biggest risk factor for forgetfulness, so this can be perfectly normal," Loepfe said. As a geriatrician in the Mayo Clinic Health System, his patient population struggles with memory issues more than a pediatrician's. "I tell them it doesn't always mean there is something serious going on."

But a new study in the American Academy of Neurology this week is giving Loepfe some pause.

The research suggests that people who feel they are forgetting more things may need to be concerned, even if bigger issues aren't yet showing up on cognitive tests. Participants who reported memory problems at the beginning of the study were more likely to have dementia down the road than those who did not.

"Now we have more evidence that this is something we should watch from appointment to appointment," Loepfe said.

Reduce your risk of dementia right now

9-17-2014 National:

The bottom line is that it's never too late to make some changes to improve your physical and mental well-being. Here are five things you can do right now to reduce your risk of dementia:

1. Look after your heart.
2. Be physically active.
3. Follow a healthy diet.
4. Challenge your brain.
5. Enjoy social activity.

The 10 warnings signs of Alzheimer's

The strongest evidence exists in linking dementia to a lack of education in early life, hypertension in midlife and smoking and diabetes across a lifetime, according to the new report.

"There's also relatively strong evidence that people in low-education countries have a higher risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias," said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs for the Alzheimer's Association. "(This) can be controlled across the lifespan. Taking people and giving them a better education in grade school, high school, and college significantly lowers risk at the population level."

It's also important to keep our brains buzzing as we get older.

"While we don't endorse specific activity like crosswords or mazes," Fargo said, "we say, 'Find a mentally challenging activity that's fun or enjoyable for you, and you'll maintain it. That's going to be good for your brain health as you age.' "

"If we can all enter old age with better developed, healthier brains," the report concludes, "we are likely to live longer, happier and more independent lives, with a much reduced chance of developing dementia." ..To read the full article.. by Ben Tinker, CNN

A Test for Alzheimer's Disease Raises Thorny Ethical Issues

5-13-2014 National:

Experts weigh in on value of knowing without availability of effective treatments

When researchers recently announced a promising new blood test for Alzheimer's disease — one that could be as simple to perform as a standard cholesterol test — reactions were mixed. While some experts heralded the news, others worried that, until effective treatments are available, learning that you're likely to develop Alzheimer's could cause more harm than good.

To know or not to know

Experts say that developing a test for Alzheimer's allows for the possibility of more effective treatment. "The main problem with treating Alzheimer's disease today is that the medicines are probably given too late to do much good," says Howard Federoff, M.D., professor of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, who was part of the team that developed the test. "Our research reports a biomarker that will allow us to select patients who have very early disease, and we can determine if medicines are more effective when given earlier.

There's already good evidence that simple lifestyle changes can help slow the likelihood of developing dementia, says Jason Karlawish, M.D., professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in developing the test. "A heart-healthy diet, physical activity, and social and cognitive stimulation can help preserve cognitive function," he says. People who learn that they are at high risk of developing Alzheimer's may be more motivated to make healthy changes.

Norfolk case highlights aging sex offenders debate

3-30-2014 Virginia:

Willie Jefferson Combo Jr. arrived at Norfolk Circuit Court on a cold December morning, guilty and worried.

On his mind was a pink slip buried in his mailbox for days - maybe weeks. The small piece of paper was a receipt for a registered letter from the state. His freedom depended on it.

Combo, 68, is a convicted violent sex offender. The letter represented his remaining debt to Virginia. Every month, he is required to return it to the Virginia State Police with his fingerprints and signature.

For the past 14 years, his lawyer estimated, he met that responsibility 166 of 168 times. His failure to be perfect has earned him one thing - prison.

In 1966, Combo was convicted in Chesapeake of attempted rape and assault of a woman. The 21-year-old was sentenced to life, served more than three decades and won parole in 1999. Except for twice failing to register with the state, he has no criminal record since his release.

His case highlights what some say is a shortcoming in Virginia's approach to aging offenders. Critics say state law captures Combo and others in a life of dependency, costing public money and resources to follow men who usually pose little threat to the community.

In early Alzheimer's, when to give up the car keys

4-18-2009 National:

WASHINGTON — Scientists are creating tests to show when it's time for people with early Alzheimer's disease to stop driving.

It's one of a family's most wrenching decisions, and as Alzheimer's increasingly is diagnosed in its earliest stages, it can be hard to tell when a loved one is poised to become a danger.

Factor in that much of the country lacks public transportation, and quitting too soon restricts independence for someone who otherwise may function well for several years.

"That's a real cost to the individual and family and society," says Jeffrey Dawson of the University of Iowa. "You have to have some sort of trade-off between the individual's independence along with the safety of the driver and with other people on the road."

Typically, specialists say, patients gradually scale back their driving, avoiding busy freeways or night trips or left-turn intersections. Alzheimer's Association adviser Sue Pinder, 58, recently gave up big-city driving even though it meant fewer visits to a daughter in Dallas.

Shortly after Pinder's diagnosis in 2004, she signed a form designating her husband to decide when she'll quit driving altogether. He gave her a GPS system for her last birthday. It helped Pinder navigate unfamiliar streets when, to be near another daughter, the couple recently moved to West Monroe, La., from a nearby town.

"That's helped a lot where I don't have to worry, I can concentrate on my driving and not the directions," Pinder says.

Working on ways to help similar patients, Dawson's team in Iowa developed an intricate behind-the-wheel exam: A 35-mile drive through rural, residential and urban streets in a tricked-out Ford Taurus able to record just about every action the driver takes, much like an airplane "black box" does. Lipstick-size video cameras were positioned to show oncoming traffic, too.

Researchers recruited 40 people with early-stage Alzheimer's who still had their driver's licenses to take the road test, and compared how 115 older drivers without dementia handled the same trip.

The results, reported in the journal Neurology, are striking. On average, the Alzheimer's drivers committed 42 safety mistakes, compared with 33 for the other drivers.

Lane violations, such as swerving or hugging the center line as another car approaches, were the biggest problem for the Alzheimer's drivers. They performed 50 percent worse.

Overall errors rose with increasing age whether or not the driver had Alzheimer's, an extra 2 1/2 mistakes for every five years of age.

But some Alzheimer's patients drove just as well as their healthier counterparts, stresses Dawson, a biostatistics professor. Here's the key: Researchers also checked whether any of a battery of neuropsychological tests given beforehand accurately predicted who would drive worse _ and some did.

Flunking simple memory tests didn't make a difference. Standard neurologic tests of multitasking abilities did, ones that assess if people's cognitive, visual and motor skills work together in a way to make quick decisions. Examples include showing patients geometric figures for a few seconds and having them draw the shape from memory, or drawing paths between a sequence of numbers and letters.

Alzheimer's patients who scored average or better on those types of written tests were likewise no worse behind the wheel than other older drivers _ but those who scored worse than average tended to commit about 50 percent more errors on the road, Dawson says.

More research is needed but the ultimate goal is an easy doctor's-office exam to help guide when patients should give up the keys.

About 600,000 elderly adults stop driving for some health reason every year, according to the National Institute on Aging. But there's little clear guidance for the roughly 2 million people estimated to be in Alzheimer's early stages, and the disease is poised to skyrocket in two decades as the population grays.

States have varying laws on when aging drivers must pass a road test for a license renewal, but they seldom address specific diseases; California requires reporting of Alzheimer's diagnoses so driving can be assessed. The Alzheimer's Association tells families warning signs of unsafe driving.

But as Alzheimer's worsens, patients often vehemently deny that they're a hazard, says Dr. Gary Kennedy, geriatric psychiatry chief at New York's Montefiore Medical Center.

"I can be the bad guy," he tells families, sometimes reporting patients to the Department of Motor Vehicles for a driving test or advising relatives to disable the car.

"Giving up the car is not like going into the nursing home," Kennedy counsels patients, trying to recruit relatives or friends to schedule rides. "If as a society we recognize this as a danger, we need to help them compensate." ..Source.. by LAURAN NEERGAARD