Information about my law practice concentrating on advocacy for people with disabilities, seniors and their families. Get to know me not only as a lawyer, but my personal interests, passions and family activities.
Ozzy Osbourne has nixed his North American tour to allow more time for his Parkinson’s disease treatment. The iconic Black Sabbath singer spoke publicly about his diagnosis for the first time a month ago, and said at the time that he would go ahead with all of his scheduled tour dates. He was planning to get the experimental treatment in Switzerland ahead of the tour, but, in a statement, said that had been delayed. “Unfortunately, I won’t be able to get to Switzerland for treatment until April and the treatment takes six-eight weeks,” he said. He was due to take the stage again in Atlanta at the end of May—but now it seems that his next concert will be at the start of his tour of Britain in October. In a statement posted on his website, Osborne said: “I’m so thankful that everyone has been patient because I’ve had a shit year... I don’t want to start a tour and then cancel shows at the last minute, as it’s just not fair to the fans. I’d rather they get a refund now and when I do the North American tour down the road.”
PEKD & Associates is looking for a full time administrative assistant.
Duties include but are not limited to updating the attorney’s calendar, meeting and greeting clients, scheduling all appointments, coordinating with other staff, answering the phones, running errands. Must be an independent worker, organized and comfortable with interacting with a diverse group of clients in a fast pace small law office.
If interested please send resume, and salary requirements to the address or email below. Feel free to share this with folks-- Thanks!
In 1996, Christopher Tapp confessed to the rape and murder of 18-year-old Angie Dodge in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but there was one problem: Tapp was innocent.
After he had already served a decade in jail, the Idaho Innocence Project at Boise State University took up Tapp’s case at the behest of a local public defender.
Greg Hampikian, executive director of the organization, said that it was clear from the beginning that aggressive police interrogation led to the false confession, but that was insufficient to secure Tapp’s freedom.
Hampikian thought that if the innocence project could get enough pieces of redundant evidence that showed someone else had committed the crime, “then we might be able to convince a judge of his innocence,” he says.
Hampikian, a biologist, reexamined a semen sample and pubic hair from the crime scene. The samples matched, but they didn’t match Tapp, a fact known at trial. During his false confession at the age of 20, Tapp said he moved a teddy bear during the commission of the crime. The stuffed animal was swabbed and tested—his DNA was nowhere to be found.
While evidence throwing doubt on his conviction grew, years clipped away as he languished in prison.
After a change in state law in 2012 allowing for retesting of DNA evidence, Hampikian retested samples from the crime scene and with those results used DNA databases and an ancestry website to piece together a family tree. One potential suspect, a filmmaker living in New Orleans, had been to Idaho in the 1990s and could be the perpetrator—so investigators thought. After obtaining a warrant for the filmmaker’s DNA, the lead became a dead end.
Then in 2018, CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, used the original sample from law enforcement to reverse-engineer the suspect’s family tree through the DNA sample, public records and news clippings. Through a process called genetic genealogy, she was able to narrow likely matches to a genetic couple with six male descendants who could be potential suspects. But, again, those people did not fit the profile of the killer.
“When we had pretty much ruled out the other six, I went back to the paper trail,” Moore says. “Sometimes there are people obscured by the record.”
She was right. There was another son in the genetic family tree, Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., who was raised by his mother and had taken a different family name and grown up apart from his biological father’s genealogical line. In 1996, he lived across the street from Dodge, the victim Tapp was convicted of raping and murdering. After his arrest, Dripps admitted to the murder.
The Borchard Fellowship in Law & Aging offers up to three fellowships to law school graduates interested in, and perhaps already in the early stages of pursuing, an academic and/or professional career in law and aging. Fellows have the opportunity to carry out a substantial project related to law and aging in partnership with a host agency as well as to develop their legal skills and knowledge of laws, policies, and programs concerning older adults.
During the fellowship period, the Center’s director and former fellows stand ready to assist each fellow with the further development of their knowledge, skills, and contacts. A legal services or other non-profit organization involved in law and aging must supervise a fellow’s activities and projects. In addition to the fellow's planned activities and project (unless the fellow's project includes the provision of legal services), the fellow is encouraged to provide some pro bono direct legal services to older adults under appropriate supervision. A fellow is expected to provide the Center with monthly activities reports.
The fellowship is $54,000 and is intended as a full-time position only. The fellow’s sponsoring agency is responsible for providing employee benefits, employer’s FICA payment, administrative support, workspace, computer, telephone, and email access, and appropriate professional education program opportunities. Fellows may live and work where they choose in the United States. Fellows must be either U.S. citizens or legal residents of the U.S.
The twelve month fellowship period runs from July 1 to June 30 for those already admitted to the Bar and from not later than September 1 to August 31 for those who must sit for the Bar exam after law school graduation.
Examples of activities and projects by Borchard Fellows include:
Working with an established legal services program to enable vulnerable, isolated, low-income older adults to age in place by addressing their unmet legal needs;
Providing holistic services to older clients facing consumer debt and foreclosure-related concerns;
Implementation of a courthouse project to help elderly pro se tenants achieve long-term housing stabilization through the interdisciplinary use of legal representation and social services, allowing more elderly tenants to age in place at home;
Development of mobile clinics to help Chinese-speaking elders improve their access to public benefits and health care;
Development of a medical-legal partnership for low-income older adults;
Development of legal services and informational materials to caregivers working on behalf of beneficiaries with cognitive impairment;
Development of a non-profit senior law resource center providing direct legal services and public education;
Development of an interdisciplinary elder law clinical program at a major public university law school;
Development of a mediation component for a legal services program elder law hotline;
Development of an interdisciplinary project for graduate students in law, medicine, and health advocacy to foster understanding and collaboration between professions;
Development of training materials and statewide trainings for lawyers, judges and other court personnel, and social service providers on new comprehensive state guardianship laws;
Development of free legal clinics for older clients in suburban areas;
Development of elder abuse resources with community partners;
Writing and publication of state specific, consumer oriented handbooks on legal issues affecting older adults;
Writing and publication of law review articles on law and aging issues;
Advocating for and representing incarcerated older persons and helping formerly incarcerated older adults re-enter the community;
Teaching elder law and related courses at law schools where fellows reside;
Organizing and/or attending national conferences on law and aging issues;
Providing supervised pro bono legal representation of older clients;
Analysis of Medicare policies;
Analysis of SSI non-disability appeals;
Development of legal services programs for older clients in consumer law and small claims matters;
Development of legal services programs and education resources for older Asian clients in elder abuse and financial exploitation matters;
Development, administration, and interpretation of statewide senior legal hotline outcomes study.
Fellowship Application Annual Timeline
Application submission deadline: April 1 (unless otherwise scheduled)
Application review process: April 1 through May 1
Fellows announced: No later than June 1
Fellowship period: July 1 though June 30 (unless otherwise arranged)
Reports due: Monthly reports during the fellowship period; final report no later than one month following the end of the fellowship period.
Application Requirements
Applicants must submit a completed online application including:
an information form with the name of the applicant's host organization and the applicant's name and contact information;
a description of the applicant’s planned activities and projects;
a description of the applicant's interest in law and aging;
a current curriculum vitae;
a law school transcript;
a letter of support from the proposed supervisor at the host agency; and
Dessa Cosma and Teddy Dorsette III - Published 7:00 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2020
This year, we celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
This landmark legislation was designed to positively impact the lives of people with disabilities, ensuring that we have the same rights and opportunities as anyone else. In the last 30 years, we’ve witnessed improvements across the country in access to employment, government services and programs, and goods and services from businesses.
However, when we experience Detroit, whether it’s access to information, criminal justice, education, employment, health care, housing or transportation, there is still much room for improvement. It’s time that Detroiters with disabilities and those with disabilities that want to visit our city experience a Detroit that is welcoming and accessible to all. It’s time for action.
The City of Detroit needs an Office of Disability Affairs.
The Detroit City Council unanimously endorsed the creation of such an office at its first session this year (without allocation of any money). The ball is now in Mayor Mike Duggan's court.
The Office of Disability Affairs would serve as a centralized, convenient, and resourced one-stop shop, representative and reflective of the disability community. Twelve major U.S. cities including New York City, Cambridge, Washington DC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland already have a city office dedicated to serving people with disabilities.
People living with disabilities comprise the largest marginalized group in America. In Detroit, 19% of the population, or 126,001 people, live with disabilities. Disability is a normal part of life. In fact, most people become disabled as they age.
Yet in Detroit, people with disabilities face obstacles to full and equal participation in their community because of barriers to accessible housing, good jobs, safe environments, equitable education, and reliable transportation. The path to improvement requires a new approach, one committed to understanding the challenges people with disabilities face while navigating our city and one that involves impacted residents at every step of the process.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires an employer to provide reasonable accommodations to an employee or job applicant with a disability, unless doing so would create an undue hardship, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
As the 11th Circuit noted in Kassa, "an employer's failure to provide a reasonable accommodation is itself a violation of the ADA," noting that this explains in part why the employer was not eligible for summary judgment on the plaintiff's accommodation claim.
Other federal courts have ruled that breaks are not a reasonable accommodation in certain scenarios, however. In a July 2018 ruling, for example, the 6th Circuit ruled that a receptionist with a genetic disorder who requested an extended lunch break to exercise failed to demonstrate that the requested accommodation was necessary.
More than a dozen families in Flint, Michigan, are suing the public school system, arguing their children were exposed to brain-damaging levels of lead during the water crisis six years ago.
The parents say that exposure may have caused or exacerbated their children’s disability-related needs. These families will make their case in federal court this summer.
“What we're enforcing in this lawsuit in federal court is a federal entitlement statute that children are identified and that their disability-related needs are provided with accommodations and services so that they can access a quality education,” says Kristen Totten, an education attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan.
Lawmakers recently stressed the importance of attending a town hall meeting on elder abuse, and judging by the solid attendance, residents in surrounding communities agreed.
State Rep. Darrin Camilleri (D-Brownstown Twp.), state Sen. Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit) and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel brought people from all over the Downriver area to the Woodhaven Recreation Center to discuss the dangers of elder abuse.
The number of workers with intellectual and developmental disabilities integrated into the workforce has largely plateaued in the past year, and the national turnover rate for those providing direct support for such people is nearing 45 percent, according to a Thursday report from the ANCOR Foundation and United Cerebral Palsy (UCP).
The groups’ 2020 edition of their Case for Inclusion report, exclusively provided to The Hill, found that the percentage of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) in integrated employment — that is, those working alongside abled people and earning market-driven wages — increased only 1 percentage point to 20 percent over the past year.
The report found that nationwide, 127,000 people with I/DD worked in competitive employment, compared to 124,000 the year before. The number of states with at least one third of I/DD residents participating in competitive employment increased from seven in 2019 to 10 in the most recent report.
However, the report also found the total number of people with I/DD on waiting lists for home- and community-based services increased by 49,000 in the past year, reaching 473,000. Waiting lists shrunk in 10 states but grew in 23.
The number of people with I/DD engaged in self-direction, or making their own decisions on some or all of the services or supports they receive, increased 2 points from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2018, to 13 percent, according to the report.
The turnover rate for people in direct support roles comes in high, at 43.8 percent, which the report's authors attributed to low median hourly pay for such providers, $12.09 nationally.
“This report has some minor encouragement, not anywhere near the kind of encouragement we were hoping to see,” ANCOR CEO Barbara Merrill told The Hill, adding that the workforce issues were one of the most troubling aspects.
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