Columnist: Sex abuse case a legal horror show
March 17th, 2008Why did prosecutor rely on discredited facilitated communication method?
Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson comments again on the sex abuse charges against an Oakland County couple that were recently dropped. The case relied on testimony obtained via facilitated communication from their daughter, who has autism.
… if police and prosecutors had Googled the phrase “facilitated communication” as my Free Press colleague L.L. Brasier did when she first heard about the case, they would have learned that most educators and autism experts had long ago lost faith in FC, and that researchers had repeatedly failed to establish its legitimacy in controlled experiments.
… Alan Zwiebel is a New York civil rights lawyer whose legal crusade against FC culminated in a celebrated 1997 case in which a federal jury awarded $750,000 to a New York couple who’d lost custody of their retarded daughter. Jurors concluded officials knew or should have known the girl’s facilitated allegations of abuse were bogus.
Zwiebel professed astonishment when I told him that Oakland County prosecutors had relied on FC evidence to bring criminal charges against the West Bloomfield girl’s parents.
“Facilitated communication? My God — I though we stuck a stake through its heart in 1997,” he said.
Earlier post: How to wreck a boy’s life
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