The brother of a woman jailed 'in secret' for trying to remove their father from a care home where they feared he was in danger of dying has spoken today of his anguish at the treatment of their family.
Ivan Maddocks said his sister Wanda has been made ill by their ordeal and called for a full investigation into the care their father John received.
Miss 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.
Ivan Maddocks said his sister Wanda, left, has become ill after being 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
Ivan Maddocks said his family feels powerless after their experiences with the court system.
He said: 'There were so many injunctions it was unreal.
‘It’s wrong. People should be able to speak out. I’ve never heard of anyone being jailed for trying to look after their father.
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‘This has made Wanda ill. There were a lot of bad women in jail with her. One said she was a killer.
'They didn’t believe her when they asked what she was in for. It was really frightening.’
A judge ruled that Miss Maddocks 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.
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 Park Hall care home in Bentilee, a suburb of Stoke on Trent.
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.
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
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 jailed Miss Maddocks for five months
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.
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 Ivan Maddocks 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.
Ivan Maddocks said his family feel powerless after their experience with the court system after his sister was jailed when she tried to remove their father John from Park Hall care home in Bentilee, Stoke on Trent
The inside of Park Hall care home in Bentilee, Stoke on Trent, where Wanda Maddocks's father John was being looked after
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.
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 photograph 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.’
‘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.’
