State, advocacy organizations fail people with cognitive impairment
Individuals with a cognitive impairment (clients) won a major victory in the Alaska Supreme Court in 1994 but were never told about the failure. The victory: $1.1 billion in assets was set aside to assist those with a cognitive impairment. The failure: To our knowledge, not a single dime was designated (earmarked) to improve their legal rights or to inform them of their rights.
The complaints of individuals with cognitive impairments come out as a whisper in a world where mistreatment is sometimes the norm. In 2005, 11 years after the settlement, individuals locked in state-run Alaska Psychiatric Institute could not file a formal grievance — due process and the appeal process were non-existent. Today there is still no formal appeal process to a state agency.
The state and patient advocacy organizations are out of touch with their clientele. The disabled are handcuffed, transported, locked up at any time. Advocacy organizations take two weeks off for Christmas and go home at 5 and on the weekends.
Those with a disability must be informed of their rights in a uniform way; cognitive disabilities require that the individual is informed in writing and verbally or receive whatever other assistance is necessary for them to understand.
With over $1 billion in assets, the disabled should be allowed to hire an advocacy organization that is available 24 hours a day to represent them. Hospital rules and regulations should be reviewed by an outside auditing firm to determine if they in a real way protect the disabled locked in institutions and promote recovery.
Individuals with a cognitive impairment still need your help.
-- Faith Myers and Dorrance Collins,
mental health advocates,
Anchorage
Justice should reign over process
"With liberty and justice for all," words first written in 1892, are just a myth if members of the bar are allowed to argue that strict adherence to process outweighs the importance of dispensing justice. That's the argument prosecutor Adrienne Bachman makes. She argues that a jury of 12 convicted the Fairbanks Four, and that should be the end without regard to what is learned later. The process has run its course, and it shouldn't matter if a new witness says he and his friends were the real murderers, she argues.
"Trial by jury is the bedrock of our system," she said. Our forefathers, however, employed the best tools available to assure all accused have the benefit of an unwavering commitment to avoid injustice.
Justice is the bedrock of our system, not process.
Prosecutors who hide Mother Justice to sustain a conviction are unfit to practice. New evidence, DNA heretofore undetectable, new witnesses. Any hint of a miscarriage of justice warrants the court's review.
-- Ray Metcalfe
Anchorage
Does Indigenous Peoples Day mark celebration or mourning?
The political correctness behind Indigenous People's Day is understandable but confusing. Does this mark a day of celebration or of mourning for the natives of the Caribbean Islands who unwittingly welcomed Cristobal Colon's New World into their old one?
Columbus debarking in the New World made a small step for man but a giant leap for the destruction by Europeans of the cultures of a hitherto unknown (to "civilization") continent's indigenous people. He also inevitably moved the world "onwards" and eventually to the moon, McDonald's and Pluto. Would indigenous cultures have gone in that direction? Or would they have continued with pagan rituals including enslavement, torture and human sacrifice (Mayans) and the growing of diverse, tasty and healthy foods. No one really knows.
Mathematics and astronomy were quite advanced in many "unknown" cultures. Still, the past is unchangeable. It can be rewritten with bias but that does little good. The present can merely recognize and uncover the past for what it was and make amends where possible. Then the future has, will have had or might have a chance for all cultures to get the acts together without falsely glorifying any. Those ones who first write history do so in their own image. As do the rewriters who come later. Just saying.
-- Ken Green
Cooper Landing
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