Avoiding Conflicts Between Your Advance Healthcare Directive and Organ Donation Directive

            If you have or are thinking about obtaining an advanced healthcare directive, an organ donation directive, or both, this information is vital!  An advanced healthcare directive indicates which specific treatments are not desired at the end of your life—whether it be CPR, ventilators, or other life sustaining equipment.  People often think of an advance directive as an indication of when to “pull the plug.”  An organ donation directive indicates your desires about the donation of your organs and/or tissues upon your death.  Individuals may become organ donors in the State of Florida by 1) legally executing a Uniform Donor Card, 2) adding “organ donor” to your driver’s license, 3) legally executing a living will, or 4) obtaining an advance healthcare directive.

             A conflict between your advance healthcare directive and your organ donation directive may occur when you are, for all intents and purposes, dead (i.e. cardiac death or brain dead), but your body still functions so that your organs could be donated.  If you have experienced cardiac death or brain death, your organs are still functioning and may be donated.  However, if you have executed an advance healthcare directive, life sustaining procedures will cease upon your death, and organ death will soon follow.  Because of relatively quick organ death, the time to harvest your organs into a new recipient is extremely (if not impossibly) small.  Therefore, your advance healthcare directive essentially cancels out your organ donation directive because it has become impossible to keep the organs healthy long enough to place them in a recipient.

 To avoid this conflict, contact my office at 904-321-0987 so we can draft your documents to preserve and prioritize your end of life wishes.

Downfalls of Social Networking

Everyone has heard about the benefits of social networking: connecting with old friends, keeping in touch with current friends, making new friends, searching for a new job, meeting new business prospects, meeting new friends who share a mutual interest, promoting yourself or your business, promoting a charity event, etc.

Popular tools for social networking are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, WordPress, and LinkedIn. Users of social networking services can often post messages, articles, photos, and videos. And post they are! As a society, we are living our lives out online, by blogging, and posting messages, photos, and video about the events in our daily lives. These social networking tools have become a digital diary—a diary in which we invite, and indeed encourage, the world to view.

While most of the information shared is innocent, some of the information users post can come back to haunt them, depending on who is viewing the users’ content. Generally, anyone with an internet connection can view the information users post. Viewers include individuals you may not have thought about when you posted those pictures of your latest and greatest adventure: future employers, current employers, criminals, parents, loved ones, friends, and attorneys! Today, we will discuss employers, criminals, and attorneys.

Current and Future Employers
One would be naive to believe that employers, both current and future, do not “google” employees. Employers want to know as much as they can about their employees, particularly a potential new employee. When an employer googles your name, the information you have posted on a social networking site is often displayed in the search results. Your employer will see your blog, messages, friends, and photos. Depending on the content of your site, employers can and will dismiss you from employment, or refuse to hire you. Again, depending on your industry, location, and site content, some employers may contact competitors and notify them about your site. The potential damage to your career could be permanent and unending. (Take a minute to google yourself and see what you find!)

Criminals
Criminals of all types troll the internet daily looking for their next victim. Of particular note are the pedophiles and pimps who are baiting their next money maker. Pedophiles and pimps frequently prey on teens who are insecure or lonely and lure them to a meeting wherein the teen may be used for sex or even sold into the sex slave trade. Other criminals scour social networking sites to steal your identity, by using the information you (or your friends) have posted about yourself.

Attorneys
Attorneys, particularly criminal and family law practitioners search the social networking sites. Attorneys may search their own client’s profiles or the profiles of the opposing party. The reason for this is two-fold. First, clients are not always completely honest about the information they are posting about themselves. Second, the information opposing parties post may be damaging to their side of the case. For example, say an individual posts a picture of him/herself giving a small child alcohol. This could be admissible in both criminal and family law cases. The State Attorney will use the information to build a criminal case against the individual and charge the individual with the applicable crimes. A family law attorney may use the same photo to deny the individual visitation or custody of the minor child. A photo with this type of content can be fatal to your case, and an attorney would like to know about them sooner rather than later.

With the above in mind, be aware of what you are posting online and what your friends are posting online about you. If in doubt, leave it out!

Same Sex Marriage in New Hampshire and Maine

This week, the legislatures of both Maine and New Hampshire have approved same-sex marriage bills.  The governor of Maine immediately signed the same sex marriage bill into law.  New Hampshire’s governor has not yet signed the same-sex marriage bill, and has indicated in the past that because New Hampshire recognizes civil unions, a same-sex marriage law is not necessary. 

Source:  http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/06/maine.same.sex.marriage/index.html?eref=rss_topstories