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| Flowers surround Rob Reiner’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday, December 15, 2025. Rob and Michelle Singer Reiner’s bodies were found in their home in Brentwood on Sunday. The Los Angeles police have arrested Nick Reiner, the son of Rob and Michele Singer Reiner in connection with the deaths. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG) |
By Megan Cole
Just two days after Rob and Michele Reiner were found fatally stabbed
inside their Brentwood home last weekend, their 32-year-old son,
Nick—who has struggled with
Addiction and intermittent homelessness for over half of his life, and
who had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia—was charged with his
parents’ murder.
In the wake of the tragedy, many have wondered: why couldn’t anyone
force Nick to seek substantial support before it was too late? And if
the Reiners could not help their son, what hope is there for the
families of the other 1.2 million Californians living with a serious
mental illness?
Six years ago, my own family suffered the consequences of a decades-old
California law that—to this day—makes it nearly impossible to
involuntarily hospitalize a loved one in crisis. During the last decade
of her life, my aunt, Amy, had struggled with addiction and alcoholism
in addition to severe mental health issues. She cycled through myriad
rehabilitation facilities, endured a half-dozen 5150 holds—72-hour
involuntary psychiatric commitments named for the section of the
California code that introduced them—and shuffled in and out of jails.
Near the end of her life, Amy was living in her car and refusing
medication or hospitalization for her schizoaffective disorder.
On Christmas Eve 2019, for reasons unknown to anyone but Amy, she rented
an SUV and drove it across the southern border. Two weeks later, her
body was found in the back of her rental car in Hermosillo, Mexico. Her
brutal murder remains unsolved to this day.
In the last years of Amy’s life, there was almost nothing our family
could do to help her, due in large part to California’s strict
conservatorship laws. Conservatorships allow an appointed third-party
individual to make decisions for an adult conservatee—usually their
family member—who is gravely incapacitated by mental illness,
alcoholism, or addiction.
In 1967, California passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short (LPS) Act, which
stated that a mentally ill person could not be involuntarily committed
or otherwise “conserved” unless she posed an imminent threat to herself
or others. Other kinds of conservatorships (for those who struggle with
alcoholism or addiction but have not been diagnosed with a psychiatric
disorder, for example) have similar constraints.
The glaring problem in the cases of Nick Reiner and Amy—and tens of
thousands of other struggling Californians—is that families often cannot
secure conservatorships for their loved ones until the worst has
already come to pass.
The LPS act “is attributed by various people as having transformed
Californian society in many, many ways,” says Jonathan Simon, Lance
Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law at the University of
California, Berkeley. “Today we attribute many of our most persistent
evils in this state to having gotten this law either wrong or not right
enough – and that includes unhousedness, that includes rampant public
drug use and drug sales in the center of many of our large cities, it
includes mass incarceration,” and so on.
Recently, celebrities like Britney Spears and Wendy Williams have
brought the issue of conservatorships to national attention; their
controversial conservators have received backlash for allegedly
leveraging their positions to abuse their conservatees and benefit
financially from the management of their estates. However, scholars and
activists have argued that Spears’ and Williams’ cases are exceptions to
the rule.
“In nearly all cases, the [conservatee] is indigent, and there is no
potential financial gain to the family,” said Jill Escher, president of
the National Council on Severe Autism. “To the contrary, the
conservatorship imposes on conservators many affirmative duties,
responsibilities, and burdens, with no potential tangible gain apart
from the knowledge that they can use their legal authority to advance
the well-being of their loved one.”
In most cases, conservatorships are difficult to manage, and even more difficult to acquire.
A 2020 report by California’s state auditor found evidence that in Los
Angeles County, nearly ten thousand people had been placed on at least
10 holds in their lifetime—however, only about 1 in 16 of these
temporary holds resulted in a conservatorship. According to the most
recent statistics from the Department of Health Care Services, fewer
than 1,500 Californians are on LPS conservatorships.
There is evidence, though, that when conservatorships are granted, they
are largely effective. In one California study of 35 patients placed
under conservatorships, “29 (83 percent) remained stable as long as the
conservatorship lasted, but for the 21 patients whose conservatorship
was terminated, only 9 (43 percent) remained stable after termination.”
In an effort to lower barriers for those seeking conservatorships, in 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed the CARE Act.
The act would allow Californians to request intervention by “CARE Court”
on behalf of family members with severe mental illnesses and/or
substance use disorders. The legislature approved it with bipartisan,
near-unanimous support.
However, when CARE Court was introduced statewide last year, it hardly
lived up to its potential. Eligibility for participation had narrowed,
covering only people with severe psychosis and not those with substance
abuse issues. The petition process had become much more unwieldy than
the one originally proposed. Since the launch of CARE Court, the state
has mandated treatment of a mentally ill person in only a handful of
cases, and has not fined counties that have failed to provide
court-ordered services to participants.
In another effort to modernize conservatorship proceedings in
California, Gov. Newsom signed a law in 2023 updating the LPS Act for
the first time in over 50 years.
The new law expands eligibility for conservatorship to anyone unable to
secure their personal safety due to either substance use or mental
health issues. Now, conservatorship laws “[encompass] people with a
severe substance use disorder, such as chronic alcoholism, and no longer
[require] a co-occurring mental health disorder.” Like the CARE Act,
this law took effect last year but counties can postpone its
implementation until 2026.
Of course, Californians with mental illnesses and substance use
disorders should retain their agency and autonomy to the fullest
possible extent. Conservatorships and involuntary treatments should be
temporary measures of last resort. Still, I hope that California
lawmakers will consider amending conservatorship laws so that after all
other avenues have been exhausted, families might have the option to
secure help for their incapacitated loved ones before they become agents
or victims of tragedy.
Full Article & Source:
It’s time to rethink California’s tragically ineffective conservatorship laws
