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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

They explain a little later in the article how Parks did her research:

> O’Malley described a 2010 case in which Parks, after receiving a tip from a social worker, began “cold-calling” rehabilitation centers, searching for a seventy-nine-year-old woman, Patricia Smoak, who had nearly seven hundred thousand dollars and no children. Parks finally found her, but Smoak’s physician wouldn’t sign a certificate of incapacity. “The doctor is not playing ball,” Parks wrote to her lawyer. She quickly found a different doctor to sign the certificate, and Norheim approved the guardianship. (Both Parks and Norheim declined to speak with me.)

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Obviously I don't have all the facts, but from my read of this, Ms Parks deserves to be locked in a deep, dark, damp hole, for as long as possible.

Racketeering, kidnapping, elder abuse? Yeah.

If you read further, she did get indicted:

> Last March, Parks and her lawyer, along with her office manager and her husband, were indicted for perjury and theft, among other charges. The indictment was narrowly focussed on their double billings and their sloppy accounting, but, in a detailed summary of the investigation, Jaclyn O’Malley, who led the probe for the Nevada Attorney General’s Office, made passing references to the “collusion of hospital social workers and medical staff” who profited from their connection to Parks. At Parks’s grand-jury trial, her assistant testified that she and Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices for the purpose of “building relationships to generate more client leads.”

But I agree with you. Having lived in this country for 10 years, I am still shocked by the audacity of these kinds of legal loophole scammers and also amazed that we don't see more retaliatory murders when the legal system fails, considering how easy it is to get a gun in most of these states.

>amazed that we don't see more retaliatory murders when the legal system fails, considering how easy it is to get a gun in most of these states

You're amazed that most Americans do not resort to murder when the legal system fails them?

That's why we have appeals courts. To appeal decisions by judges that you believe have failed you.

Where do you come from if you don't mind my asking?

The appeals courts and all other levels of government failed these people for years until a newspaper finally took interest.

The right answer to those failures should never be murder.

The right answer to those failures is to pressure the system to change, as this newspaper article is helping to do.

> The right answer to those failures should never be murder.

I agree. In this particular case though, I wouldn't blame the victim if they'd consider kneecapping a proportionate response.

Preying on the weak like that is deeply, deeply subhuman.

If this sort of thing was tried before a court system, the person would've ended up in a hole.

That's why we created a justice system, because that mode of justice is not a good thing.

The justice system failed them, so logically, they'd be forced to go back to putting people in holes.

Not for nothing, but the US was founded on the basis that violence is just in the face of an unjust government. We can't idolize the Revolutionary War, and then turn around and tell people they should always follow the law no matter what.

If we are going to assume that the government is always right and there is no reason for violence ever, then we should just do away with the second amendment. I dont think that amendment is super useful in the age of tanks, jets and nukes, but the idea of violent revolt against unjust rule is still there

"The right answer to those failures should never be murder."

Many many years ago, a jury in Tennessee disagreed with your first claim, and literally took the law into their own hands in the courtroom against the government as they watched a persons rights get wholesale violated. That jury was flat-out exonerated IIRC. So there's legal precedent against your first claim and a good inherent pressure for your second claim. People would be far less likely to violate the law so egregiously if they knew that people could just kill them and walk away without a second thought of jail time.

That's a pretty naive point of view. Obviously the courts are part of the system that enables success from this profit-seeking behaviour. How are they going to help? Everyone from the scammers to the judges to the lawmaker who wrote the laws is probably on the $$$ gravy train.

If I am 79 years old and have had everything taken from me by a monster I might be spending the rest of my life in a different kind of facility than the culprit had in mind.

one with 8-12 inches of standing water in it at all times.

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