More on the facilitated communication abuse case...

This is a comment from a well-informed reader about a Michigan abuse case against the father of an autisitic teenager where the judge was prepared to allow testimony from the girl through facilitated communication. This is referring to a post on January 30, 2008, Judge allows autistic girl's testimony using facilitated communication:

When the judge said he found "nothing scientific" about facilitated communication, he was not saying that FC was not valid. He was making a legal judgment that facilitated communication was not a technique that might be subject to a general scientific test. For instance, a method for measuring the concentration of salt in water would be "scientific."

When the judge denied the defense a Daubert hearing, he explicitly ruled that FC was a form of "interpretation" like translating Spanish into English, and was thus legally immune from a general scientific evaluation. In other words, the judge was accepting the validity of FC as a technique even though FC objectively differs from interpretation in several significant aspects. (A court in Kansas had taken the same position around 1993). The defense would have to attempt to undermine the veracity of the accusations themselves as though they were genuine statements made by the girl. In doing this, judge was adopting a position advanced by Phipps and Ells in an article in the Nebraska Law Review--a position that legal analyst Brian Gorman described as "bad science and bad law."

It is significant that the judge adopted as "guidance" the only two cases in which FC was allowed into court rather than the many in which it was not. Doing so might have been the only way for him to rescue the prosecutor's case, which was not going well. Ironically, one of the cases the judge selected as "guidance" eventually resulted in the dismissal of the charges against the falsely accused parents and a $750,000 settlement in their favor.

Of course, now we know that all the charges were dismissed. However, it is important to note that the prosecution never admitted any mistakes. In fact, its excuse for granting the dismissal, that the girl typed out that she was too afraid to testify, was really just a despicable parting shot against the parents. It also did not ring true. If the authorities were willing to coerce the younger brother as they did, what was to prevent them from pressuring the girl to testify. The reality is that they had nothing but bogus accusations to go on, and would have had to face a very well-prepared defense that had actual facts on its side.

Ann Arbor recreation programs for Spring 2008

The Ann Arbor Rec & Ed catalog for Spring 2008 is available on-line. You can find Adapted Recreation classes for special needs adults and children on page 34 of the catalog. Look at the catalog here and the AA Rec & Ed website here.

The classes currently offered are:

Cooking Cooperatively: Every Wednesday from 4/16 to 6/4, 5:15 - 7:30 pm, at the High Point Young Adult kitchen. The emphasis is on kitchen safety and measuring techniques while creating simple foods.

Dinner & a Movie: Every Thursday from 4/24 to 5/29, 5:30 - 8:30 pm, at the High Point School Young Adult kitchen. Make a simple meal, watch a new movie every week, and become a film critic in the discussion afterwards.

Adapted Swim Sessions: Friday evenings, starting at either 5:30 or 6:00 pm, at the High Point pool, from 4/18 - 5/30. Private instruction or therapeutic swim lessons. Grade K - adult.

Strike Force: Bowl up to two games per week and get an official Strike Force t-shirt. Monday afternoons starting at 4 pm, from 4/14 - 6/9 at Colonial Lanes.

Check the catalog for fees and scholarship opportunities. On-line registration is available here.

U of M Research Opportunity for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Children with severe physical and speech impairments are difficult to test. Conventional testing may not provide accurate information about a child’s abilities because the child must be able to speak or point to answer questions. The Adapted Cognitive Assessment Lab (ACAL) at the University of Michigan in the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation has developed alternative testing methods to provide a more accurate and well-rounded profile of a child’s abilities.

The ACAL research focuses on communication through the development of choice-making skills in children with CP. They hope to foster appropriate supports in school and community settings through the results of ACAL testing. For more information, email:

ANAC-Project@med.umich.edu

or call: 734-936-6023 or 734-936-6604.

Visit the ACAL website for more information and opportunities to participate in various research projects.

Autistic girl's brother becomes collateral damage in abuse case

The Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson devoted two columns (here and here) to the recently dismissed abuse case against the father of an autistic girl. The 14-year old girl, who is unable to speak, accused her father of rape. She did this using facilitated communication in which a school aide assisted her in typing out messages on a keyboard. Testimony obtained through Facilitated Communication has repeatedly been shown to be unreliable as evidence in court. Messages obtained through this method have been shown to originate with the facilitator rather than the autistic person.

The girl's younger brother, who has a milder form of autism called Asperger's syndrome, was also drawn into the case when he was questioned by an investigator without his lawyer present and under circumstances which were considered by experts to be inappropriate and damaging to the boy.

Videotapes were made of the interrogation and excerpts are available on-line.

The 13-year-old brother was questioned by a police detective in early December 2007 after his father was arrested for allegedly raping his sister; his mother was charged with allowing the abuse to happen. The boy and his sister had been placed in foster homes. The interrogator, a police detective, appears to have ignored Michigan child abuse laws which prescribe rules for questioning juveniles in sexual abuse cases. The rules warn investigators to avoid threats, promises, and leading questions, but the investigator used all of those things during his interrogation. As Brian Dickerson reports:

For nearly an hour, Detective Joseph Brousseau had grilled the boy about accusations that he and his autistic sister had been sexually molested by their father.

No, the boy insisted, he'd seen nothing to support the detective's lurid suspicions. Three times, he offered to take a lie detector test.

But Brousseau hammered away, challenging the boy's honesty, his manliness, his loyalty to his disabled sister.

Again and again, the detective told the boy his body language betrayed the burden of a terrible secret.

"What if I told you that one of those videotapes confiscated from your parents' house had you in it?" the detective asked suddenly.

The 13-year-old straightened. "Was it me doing something sexually?"

"I don't think I'd be bringing it up if it wasn't," Brousseau answered. "That's what I'm trying to tell you -- it's going to come out."

If it were merely what it purported to be -- the disclosure of a deviant father's treachery -- the videotaped exchange would be excruciating enough to watch.

But the truth is a good deal uglier than that.

Charges have been dropped. In fact, prosecutors now concede, much of what Brousseau told the boy during his Dec. 4 interrogation was a fabrication.

The damage to the family and especially to the disabled 13-year old brother in this terribly flawed case is incalculable, but a lawsuit by the family is a possibility.

Michigan abuse case against father of autistic teenager dismissed

The Detroit Free Press, on March 11 and March 12, 2008, reported that a judge has dismissed all charges against a West Bloomfield, Michigan man who was accused of raping his 15-year-old autistic daughter. The accusations were supposedly made by the girl through a highly controversial method called facilitated communication. The girl, who is unable to talk, was assisted by a teacher's aide in typing out messages on a keyboard. At a hearing in February, the girl was unable to answer any questions in court when the teacher's aide was prevented from hearing the questions being asked. Experts testified that in cases like this, the messages are consciously or unconsciously those of the facilitator and not the autistic person.

The case against the girl's mother for not stopping the rapes has also been dismissed.

While defense attorneys said there was never any basis for believing the abuse had occurred, the prosecutors said they decided to ask for a dismissal in the case because the girl refused to testify. Assistant prosecutors said they met with the girl four times. In one interview, the girl said, through her teacher's aide and by pointing at yes-no cards, that she was afraid of her father and did not want to testify. The interview was not taped, however, and there was no written record.

According to the attorney for the girl's mother, when the girl was reunited with her father, she ran into his arms and could not stop hugging him. The girl had spent four months in foster care and her father 80 days in jail.

In a separate civil case that sought to remove both the girl and her brother from their parents, a judge ordered the children returned to their parents.

Recent autism studies

An article published in Science News, January 12, 2008, p. 19, reports on recent studies attempting to unravel the possible genetic causes of autism.

Geneticist Mark J. Daly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has found a small stretch of chromosome 16 that promotes autism when it is in an altered form. It is found in about 1% of children with the disorder. The study looked at 751 families with two or more children with autism or a related disorder, for a total of 1,441 affected children. The researchers found additional evidence of both DNA deletion and extra copies of genes within the chromosome 16 area in children diagnosed with autism. In most of the cases, the altered genes arose spontaneously, but some were inherited from parents.

Another study, led by geneticist Aravinda Chakravati of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, identified a small area of chromosome 7 that showed a link to autism. A specific gene on chromosome 7 makes a protein essential for neural communications.

In another study reported in Science News, September 29, 2007, p. 197, researchers found no association between Mercury in vaccines and climbing autism rates. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and enrolled 1,047 children from 7 - 10 years old. The researchers compared the amount of Themerosol, a Mercury based preservative used in vaccines, that children received through the first 7 months of life and the results of a battery of tests for language, memory, motor coordination, attention, and intelligence. They found no correlation between the amount of Mercury the children received and performance on the tests.

In another study by the California Department of Public Health, researcher Robert Schechter found that the prevalence of autism in children aged 3 - 12 years old has increased gradually from 1995 to 2007, even though Themerosol was removed from vaccines from 1999 - 2001.

Science News is available on-line only by subscription.

Take the high road...

“…take the high road. There’s less traffic.” Leonard Pitts, Jr., columnist for the Miami Herald