Court-Ordered Hell — how an errant judge and a controlling sibling stripped Nashville rocker Danny Tate of his money, his livelihood and his legal rights

Danny Tate wasn't in court in early December to plead for the return of his constitutional rights. He couldn't be — not unless he wanted to be handcuffed and thrown into a lockdown psychiatric ward at Vanderbilt University Medical Center a third time, or shipped to some out-of-state in-patient rehab.

That's what he thought his estranged brother, David, seemed to have in mind. If that happened, Tate, a divorcee, could lose all custody of his two young daughters.

So instead of appearing in court as his fate was hashed out by opposing attorneys — both of whom, in a bizarre legal quirk, were clocking hours on his dime — Tate was at the Adventure Science Center with his little girl.

It had been a little more than two years since Tate's brother had petitioned the court for a conservatorship over him. This legal arrangement — in which the court declares someone incapacitated and a ward of the court after being presented with "clear and convincing evidence" — is akin to civil death. The ward loses control of his finances, his property, even his ability to enter into legally binding contracts.

The conservatorship allowed David to seize control of every aspect of his brother's life, from the royalty money he earns from album cuts, to the equipment at the studio where he composes talk show jingles, down to his cell phone, his car and his email account. Legally, Tate became a ghost.

If the name Danny Tate sounds familiar, chances are you spent a lot of time in Nashville clubs in the 1980s. A tall, rangy rocker with radio-ready pop chops, he cut a dashing figure locally in the dawn of the MTV era, when a video-friendly face was currency. His stock rose even higher when Rick Springfield took his song "Affair of the Heart" to the Top 10. When Tate called an early album Sex Will Sell, the title seemed to refer less to the cynical zeitgeist than the fortune foretold by his chiseled, brooding looks.

But that promise petered out in years lost to various addictions. He would notch up impressively long runs of sobriety, only to succumb once more. There was some precedent, then, when Tate's brother David stood before Nashville Judge Randy Kennedy in late October 2007 and told the Probate Court his brother was in the grip of a crack habit so consuming that it threatened his life.

How this hearing actually came about, though, is a mystery. There was no motion to set a hearing, according to court records. No process served to Tate. No police reports demanding urgent action. No one seemed to know anything about it except for Tate's brother and his attorney, Paul Housch.

And yet Judge Kennedy — with no evidence before him but David Tate's say-so, and with no notice or due process given to Tate himself so that he might contest the petition — allowed David to freeze Tate's assets in an ex parte "emergency" hearing, filings indicate. In the rap of a gavel, the ruling effectively removed every citizen's right Tate previously enjoyed.

Tate had no idea that the power of attorney he'd signed that summer to give David the ability to pay his bills while he was in rehab had already been used against him. Only days before the hearing, David used it to pay Housch a $25,000 retainer, which the attorney would earn stripping Tate's rights.

A few weeks later, with only 12 days' notice of the follow-up hearing and no ability to write a check to hire his own attorney, Tate showed up to court with a neighbor who had no experience in this area of law simply to plead for a continuance pro bono. Neither Tate nor his neighbor was provided with any of the evidence upon which his disability was to be determined that day. They weren't even given a report submitted a few days before the hearing by the chief witness — a child psychiatrist without any certification in addiction medicine, who nevertheless labeled Tate disabled. Only after the hearing, once his fate was set in stone and the conservatorship was in place, was an attorney of Kennedy's choosing appointed to counsel Tate.

The Probate Court walked through a gaping hole in Tennessee conservatorship law that shreds constitutionally guaranteed due process rights. Under these circumstances, Tate's attorney Michael Hoskins figures that just about any local musician with assets and a drug problem could conceivably be stripped of his autonomy based on nothing more than hearsay.

Since then, Tate has engaged in what he calls "civil disobedience." Or contempt of court, depending on whom you ask. He's blown off court-ordered drug screenings. What amounts to an arrest warrant has been issued by Kennedy, and Tate has evaded it, living out of cheap motels on the stipend provided by his brother. He fears at any moment he could be seized and remanded to a psychiatric center — making him a man on the lam without ever having been charged or convicted of any crime. He's declined to meet with court-appointed therapists and generally refused to countenance a conservatorship both he and his attorney say will only release him once his assets are utterly exhausted.