Part One of this case is here. Apparently this case goes beyond just the actions of the officer during interrogation of the boy. Accordingly, the state Attorney Generals office should start an investigation of the entire operations of the police and the prosecutor's office as well. There is definitely something rotten going on and it may well extend to other cases, and it needs to be stopped pronto! eAdvocate
3-17-2008 Michigan:
Last Jan. 29, with her sexual abuse case against a West Bloomfield couple on the verge of collapse, Assistant Oakland County Prosecutor Andrea Dean called a psychologist named Sandra McClennen to the witness stand.
Dean was trying to persuade a judge to allow statements in which the couple's autistic 14-year-old daughter, who communicated by typing on a keyboard with the assistance of a teacher's aide, had seemingly leveled horrifying allegations against her parents.
Dean hoped McClennen, who had treated the girl for five years, could convince the court the typed statements represented her ex-patient's words.
But on the witness stand, the prosecution's star witness voiced grave doubts the girl had authored the allegations herself.
"She has never been very good at accurately conveying information about past events," the Plymouth psychologist testified.
"There's, like I said, a lot of room for" the aide's "influence, and we have to constantly worry about that."
Under cross-examination, McClennen was less circumspect. The parents, she insisted, "aren't guilty of this."
Charges dropped
Last week, more than three months after judges jailed the autistic girl's father, confined her mother to an electronic tether and dispatched the girl and her 13-year-old brother to separate foster homes, Oakland County Prosecutor Dave Gorcyca announced his office was dropping all charges and returning the children.
Gorcyca declined several invitations to discuss the case. Subordinates who filed papers dismissing multiple legal actions against the parents say they were hamstrung when the autistic daughter stopped cooperating with the investigation.
But that is disingenuous. In fact, police and prosecutors never established that the daughter has ever made credible allegations against her parents, nor even that she had authored the statements attributed to her.
The belated decision to drop charges ended a 100-day horror show marked by investigative ineptitude, prosecutorial tunnel-vision and judicial timidity.
It also begs a question of great consequence to other parents suspected of sexual abuse: How did the case get so far on so little evidence?
Facilitated what?
It is understandable that police and prosecutors reacted swiftly in late November when a high school administrator reported that an autistic freshman at her Walled Lake school had accused her father of raping her for eight years.
"My dad gets me up, bangs me and then we eat breakfast," typed messages the school provided to the police said. "He puts his hands on my private parts mom knows and doesn't say anything." Other messages said her father had assaulted her in the shower and that her younger brother had fondled her breasts and genitals.
Prosecutors may also have been perplexed by the spectacle of the teenager typing responses to their questions as her paraprofessional facilitator, Cindi Scarsella, supported her typing arm.
Scarsella, a teacher's aide who had accompanied the autistic student to classes since the beginning of the school year after just two hours of training as a facilitator, told police the girl had spontaneously typed the allegations, while Scarsella supported her forearm, during a Learning Skills class in late November.
Prosecutors said the girl repeated the allegations -- again with Scarsella facilitating her typewritten answers -- in an interview at Care House, a facility that specializes in interviewing suspected victims of abuse.
Care House interviews are confidential, but Dr. James Todd, an Eastern Michigan University psychology expert who reviewed a video record of the girl's interview at the request of her parents' defense attorneys, testified that he detected signs that Scarsella was subtly directing the autistic girl's typing.
Scarsella, who did not respond to voice mails left at her home, has said under oath that she did not consciously or unconsciously influence the girl's responses.
"No one in our office had ever heard of facilitated communication," Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Paul Walton said.
But the girl's parents believed the controversial method, whose proponents called it FC, had unlocked their speechless daughter's inner voice. Ironically, it was the parents' faith in FC that convinced investigators the girl's facilitated accusations were authentic.
But 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.
Too good to be true
Conceived in Australia during the 1980s to help people suffering from cerebral palsy, FC was based on the theory that patients with impaired motor skills could learn to type with the help of facilitators who steadied their arms or slowed down their jerky movements.
The method piqued the interest of researchers at the University of Syracuse, which began training facilitators in FC with autistic children.
By 1990, parents who had never had meaningful exchanges with their autistic children were reporting seemingly miraculous breakthroughs. Overnight, youngsters who had never spoken or written a word were participating in classroom discussions, composing sophisticated poems, and articulating their affection for parents and teachers.
Or so it seemed.
But within a few short years, skeptics were pouring cold water on those anecdotal accounts.
Spurred by a flurry of cases in which autistic children using FC accused seemingly trustworthy adults of sexually molesting them, researchers began conducting double-blind experiments. In trial after trial, experimenters demonstrated that typed messages were actually being directed -- albeit unconsciously -- by the facilitators themselves.
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.
Since his 11-year-old federal case, Zwiebel said, "there's been a bright-line rule that facilitated communication is unreliable, period."
Too scared to proceed?
Barbara Morrison and Paul Walton, the assistant prosecutors who took over the West Bloomfield case from Dean in February, say they quickly became aware most experts had rejected FC.
The prosecutors also knew the case had been damaged badly when their autistic 14-year-old witness and her facilitator were unable to type responsive answers to any of 17 questions posed during a two-day court hearing in January:
Q: What color is your sweater?
A: JIBHJIH
Q: What are you holding in your hand right now?
A: I AM 14
The prosecution's case was further weakened when McClennen, the state's own expert witness, testified West Bloomfield police had rebuffed her when she suggested a way to test the authenticity of her former patients' allegations.
McClennen said she had recommended a new interview using a "naive" facilitator -- one unfamiliar with the allegations -- but police blew her off.
In an interview Tuesday, Morrison and Walton said they had planned to use a new facilitator if their autistic witness was willing to go forward, but admitted they had never interviewed the girl with such a naive substitute present.
The two prosecutors said the girl had indicated through the original facilitator, Scarsella, that she was too scared of her father to go back to court. But the girl's parents and their attorneys say she hugged and kissed her mother, father and brother when she was reunited with them last week.
McClennen, who has not seen the family since they were reunited, said she believes her former patient is relieved to be home, but worries about repercussions.
"Everyone who she has had contact with for the last three months has behaved as if she was a victim of her parents and it wasn't safe for her to be with them," the psychologist noted in an interview last week. "I can't imagine what's in her head after 100 days of that."
A conspiracy of timidity
Legal experts such as David Moran, assistant dean of the Wayne State University School of Law, speculate that the girl's parents may soon return to court as plaintiffs in a civil suit against police and prosecutors who tore their family apart.
Among the lingering questions:
• Why did Gorcyca and his subordinates rely on allegations obtained using a method long rejected by courts, academics, and professional groups?
Gorcyca declined to discuss the case. Walton and Morrison say it took their office months to determine the girl's statements were not going to stand up in court. But that does not explain why prosecutors never interviewed the girl with a naive facilitator, as numerous experts had suggested.
• Why did Bloomfield Hills District Judge Marc Barron refuse to exclude statements obtained through FC even after the girl and her facilitator were unable to answer a single question in court?
Baron said it would have been premature to exclude the girl's statements before she had been given a chance to testify about the allegations. He speculated that the girl would have ultimately failed to pass a competency test, but added: "We never got to that point."
• Why was Abbie Shuman, the lawyer appointed to represent the children's interests, absent from key hearings in the case? Did Shuman do anything to expedite a resolution that could reunite her clients with their parents?
Shuman did not respond to four voicemails left over the course of a week.
• Why did Bloomfield Hills District Judge Diane D'Agostini decline to act last month when prosecutors abruptly reversed themselves and petitioned her to release the girl's father on bond?
D'Agostini said she was reluctant to set bond for the father even after prosecutors requested it because Barron was on vacation. An Oakland County Circuit judge eventually authorized bond for the father.
What seems beyond dispute is that police, prosecutors and judges missed repeated opportunities to confirm the girl's accusations by interviewing her with a naive facilitator, or interviewing her brother in a noncoercive setting.
No one should be surprised if Oakland County foots the bill for their carelessness. ..more.. by BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com.
March 17, 2008
MI- Part two: Sex abuse case against Oakland couple was legal horror show
MI- Part one: How to wreck a boy's life
This dectective should be fired and charged with a crime, notice that he completely ignored the fact that, the court appointed a lawyer for this boy, and that the lawyer was not contacted before this Gestapo-like interrogation. He ought to be required to register as a sex offender since he was clearly not acting within the scope of his duties. At the end the paper has posted video portions of the interrogation. eAdvocate
3-16-2008 Michigan:
Experts say an Oakland County detective ran roughshod over a 13-year-old in a sexual abuse case against his parents
In the fading twilight of a Tuesday in early December, a 13-year-old boy sat alone in a West Bloomfield police interrogation room, sobbing as he cradled his head in his hands and rocked from side to side.
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.
There were no videotapes depicting the boy in sexual situations with his father or sister. There was no new crime lab evidence confirming his sister's allegations, despite Brousseau's repeated assertions to the contrary.
Legal experts who have reviewed the videotaped interrogation, which was obtained by the Free Press, say it reveals multiple violations of the rules Michigan law prescribes for questioning juveniles who may have witnessed sexual abuse.
"I would not hesitate to use the word 'reprehensible,' " David Moran, associate dean of the Wayne State University School of Law, told me after watching the interrogation at the Free Press' request.
Brousseau didn't respond to voice-mail messages I left at his office and home. His supervisor, West Bloomfield Police Lt. Carl Fuhs, said he hadn't seen the videotape but defended Brousseau's motives.
"He didn't mean to harm anyone," Fuhs said. "The bottom line here is that the detective was trying to get to the truth. I don't know whether he went over the line or not."
Case dropped; damage remains
Last week, after a 105-day ordeal that began when a 14-year-old girl with autism, assisted by a teacher's aide at her Walled Lake high school, typed graphic allegations of sexual torture, Oakland County Prosecutor David Gorcyca announced that his office was dismissing criminal charges against the girl's parents and dropping its objections to the family's reunification.
The Free Press is withholding the parents' names to protect their children's anonymity.
The father had spent 80 days in jail without bond on three counts of first-degree sexual assault. His wife, whom prosecutors had charged with abetting her husband's alleged crimes, had been confined by an electronic tether, and their children had been dispatched to separate foster homes.
Prosecutors said the case collapsed when the girl, who cannot speak and communicates only by typing with the physical assistance of a paraprofessional facilitator, indicated that she was afraid of her father and was no longer willing to testify.
But attorneys for the girl's parents rejoined that their daughter's statement had been suspect from the beginning, and reported that she hugged and kissed her father and mother joyfully when the family was reunited last week. "This is a case that should never have been brought," said Jerome Sabbota, the father's lawyer.
In fact, the prosecution's case already had begun to unravel by Dec. 4, when the girl's 13-year-old brother, who has been diagnosed with a mild form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome, was brought in for questioning.
A psychologist who'd treated the girl warned police that the teacher's aide might have unconsciously authored the allegations against the girl's parents. And a nurse's examination revealed that the girl's hymen had three "nonacute" tears but remained intact, casting doubt on her supposed assertion that she had been raped repeatedly from the time she was 6 years old.
In hindsight, the boy's Dec. 4 interrogation can be understood as a desperate attempt to salvage a doomed prosecution -- a charade calculated to conjure credible evidence where none existed.
Former Wayne County Circuit Judge James Lacey, who retired in 2006 after presiding over juvenile cases for more than two decades, said Brousseau got off on the wrong foot by interviewing the 13-year-old without notifying his family or Abbie Shuman, the lawyer a judge had appointed four days earlier to look out for the boy's interests.
"Anything he said in that situation, I would never admit into evidence," Lacey said.
Moran said the boy's youth and what Moran called obvious signs of an autistic disorder made the detective's use of deception and coercion especially difficult to excuse.
"The officer was using tactics that are used to break down adult criminal suspects," Moran said. "It's remarkable those tactics didn't work. But he did succeed in inflicting a lot of damage on an extremely vulnerable young man."
The damage is manifest in the videotaped interrogation when the boy admits that Brousseau's revelations about hard evidence supporting his sister's allegations have undermined his confidence in his father's integrity.
"It's not going to be the same anymore," he tells the detective, "because now I've lost my trust in my dad."
No threats or pressure allowed
Since the early 1990s, when a series of celebrated child abuse prosecutions against workers at the McMartin preschool in southern California ended in acquittals or hung juries, legislators and law enforcement officials across the nation have taken dramatic steps to protect juvenile witnesses from abusive interrogation and to minimize false allegations of sexual abuse.
Michigan's reform efforts culminated in a 1993 Forensic Interrogation Protocol, incorporated in the state's child abuse law, which lays out the ground rules for interviewing children and teenagers about suspected sexual abuse.
The protocol warns interviewers to avoid threats, promises and leading questions. It recommends that they pose open-ended queries without betraying their "surprise, disgust, disbelief or other emotional reactions" to the juvenile witness' answers.
Lt. Fuhs said he didn't know whether Brousseau was familiar with the protocol. In any event, the detective appears to have ignored it throughout the Dec. 4 interrogation.
At one point in the interview, when the boy confesses doubts about his parents' innocence, Brousseau scoffs at his professed confusion:
Boy: I'm starting to believe that my dad might actually have --.
Detective: Let's stop it right there. You know what's been going on. You know it. You know firsthand what's been going on.
Boy: No! That's --
Detective: You're using this excuse, this crutch of "I think I know what's going on, or "I think I've got a feeling" -- Bullshit, man! You know what's going on, because you've experienced it firsthand."
Accusations and warnings
Later in the interview, under continuing pressure to recall anything that might be construed as inappropriate, the boy tells Brousseau that his father has helped shower his disabled sister, sometimes when both were naked, and once joked about seeing a mouse after the boy glimpsed the father's exposed penis.
"But do you know what?" Brousseau interrupts. "That's how it starts. And things gradually progress. They push the envelope a little bit further to see what they can get away with. So after that, how did it progress?"
Sandra McClennen, a psychologist who treated the autistic daughter for five years, said the girl frequently needed assistance with bathing, and that she was not alarmed to learn that the girl's father had sometimes helped her shower.
"She at times gets stuck, and her body kind of freezes," McClennen said. "Would it have been better if her father pulled on a pair of bathing trunks before helping her? Probably. But any parent of autistic children will tell you that some of the typical rules for how a family functions don't apply, because you have to adapt to the needs of the autistic child."
The Forensic Interviewing Protocol warns investigators not to express their own judgments while interviewing juvenile witnesses about suspected abuse.
Yet in his interrogation, Brousseau repeatedly challenges the 13-year-old's truthfulness, suggesting 35 times in the course of two hours that the boy is holding back.
"It's right on the tip of your tongue," he tells the boy at one point, "and you're kind of like teetering -- Should I say it? Should I not say it? ... I can't express to you the relief that you are going to feel when this is no longer a secret. It's an absolute enormous feeling."
On at least a dozen other occasions in the interview, Brousseau challenges the 13-year-old to "be the man" and "speak for your sister."
"You think you feel guilty now?" the detective says. "Wait till later. Wait till later, when that guilt just eats at you because you didn't do the right thing, you didn't help your sister."
Lawsuit is a possibility
Christine Henk, a speech and language pathologist who treated the boy for Asperger's syndrome for more than 10 years, said that no one from police or the prosecutor's office ever called her to ask about his condition, although Michigan's interviewing protocol recommends such a query. Henk, who viewed a video of the boy's interrogation at the Free Press' request, said that some of the behaviors Brousseau interpreted as signs of evasion or nervousness were classic Asperger's symptoms that surfaced under the stress of the confrontational interview.
"The rocking and the crying and the constant nose-wiping were all typical of" the boy "under extreme duress, especially when he was younger," Henk said. She said obvious manifestations of the boy's condition, such as an aversion to eye contact, had all but disappeared in recent years, but that they had clearly reemerged during the interrogation.
"Really, he held himself together very well," she said. "But there was some regression, and I think at some point he began to lose confidence in his own thoughts and memories."
Moran and attorney Alan Zweibel, who won a $750,000 civil judgment against New York's Orange County after suing on behalf of two parents who lost custody of their child in a similar FC prosecution, agreed the boy's interrogation may yet see daylight in a civil action against police and prosecutors.
"There's definitely a potential lawsuit there," Moran said. "People who see it will be horrified."
Sabbota, the attorney who defended the boy's father, wouldn't speculate on the prospect of a civil lawsuit. But he worries that his client's 13-year-old son, who was separated from his parents for more than three months, may have a hard time understanding that he was deliberately deceived by the police.
Near the end of the Dec. 4 video, the weeping boy tells Brousseau: "I've lost the image I've had of my dad -- the image of a trustworthy person."
I'll bet a lot of municipal lawyers are already worrying about the price tag jurors might place on such a loss. ..more.. by BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com.
Police video of 13-year-old boy's interrogation
Last Dec. 4, without notice to a legal guardian appointed to represent the boy, West Bloomfield Police Detective Joseph Brousseau interrogated a 13-year-old witness about allegations of sexual abuse against his father.
Last week prosecutors dropped criminal charges against the parents and agreed to reunite them with their son and daughter, who had been living in separate foster homes for more than three months.
The 13-year-old's interrogation was an attempt to corroborate allegations of abuse his autistic sister had typed with the physical assistance of a paraprofessional facilitator. The accuracy and authorship of the allegations have both been questioned by experts in facilitated communication, who say the accusations may reflect only the facilitator's unconscious suspicions.
Legal experts say the video record of the boy's interrogation reveals numerous violations of rules that are supposed to protect minors who may have witnessed sexual abuse and to minimize false allegations of abuse. One called Brousseau's tactics, which included deception, threats and repeated insinuations that the boy was lying, "reprehensible." A therapist who treated the boy for Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, said the detective may have misinterpreted symptoms of the boy's condition as evidence of evasion or guilt.
A spokesman for the West Bloomfield police said: "The bottom line here is that the detective wanted to get the truth. I don't know whether he went over the line or not."
During the twoñhour interview, Brousseau repeatedly tells the boy that police have uncovered new evidence supporting his autistic sister's allegations against their father. As the interrogation progresses, the detective stuns the boy by suggesting that videotapes recovered from the boy's home depict him in sexually compromising situations.
After steadfastly denying any knowledge of sexual abuse, the boy ultimately concedes that the unseen evidence may prove his involvement, although he can't recall any sexual contact with his father or sister. Weeping, he tells Brousseau that the detective's revelations have shattered his confidence in his father.
In fact, prosecutors now concede, evidence to which Brousseau makes repeated references during the interrogation does not exist. In the video excerpts, which can be viewed below in chronological order, the Free Press has blurred the boy's face to help obscure his identity and that of his sister. The parents of the boy in the video gave the Free Press permission to publish it after discussing the matter with their son.
Early in the two-hour interrogation, Detective Brousseau tells the13-year-old that police have uncovered other evidence supporting his autistic sister's allegations of sexual abuse. The detective never explains what evidence he is referring to.
Now CLICK to hear portions of the actual event posted on the News website.
This is sickening, and for the first time I simply am lost for words to describe how much this shows how our criminal justice system is BROKEN given it allows this person to continue to work every day when at least he should be suspended pending the outcome of a PROPER investigation of his actions. Hopefully there will be a lawsuit started to stop this kind of Gestapo-like action.
