N.Y. woman guilty of manslaughter in son's death - CNN.com

Besides the obvious, here is what is disturbing about this recent trial,,,

While on the stand, Jordan at first appeared calm as she described for a jury the last time she saw her son alive. Jude's vocabulary was limited. He typed on a BlackBerry to communicate with her.
,,,
But the prosecution challenged the idea that Jude was actually communicating via a BlackBerry through the use of a controversial method known as "facilitated communication."

Some witnesses described how Jordan held the device in one hand while supporting and possibly guiding her son's arm with the other as Jude looked away. Bogdanos questioned whether a young autistic boy would even know how to use and spell words like "aggressively" and "sadistic."

The issue, facilitated communication. A "technique" introduced in the United States in 1990 by Dr. Douglas Bicklen, a professor of special education at Syracuse University who believed this was a way for autistic people to express themselves in a way they could not physically achieve normally.

The problem, the American Psychological Association in 2003 issued the following:

Unfortunately there was a problem. Researchers who observed the facilitation process sometimes observed that those who were presumably being facilitated often answered questions when they were not looking at their typewriters or letter boards. Controlled scientific studies also revealed that if one posed a simple question to a child with severe autism, the child could only answer the question when the facilitator knew the answer. For example, if the facilitator could not see a simple object that the child was asked to name, the child could not name it. Highly trained facilitators who had elicited sophisticated answers from their patients in the past could no longer do so when they were prevented from knowing what the patients were being asked.

The short version of this long story is that study after study showed that facilitated communication didn't really work. Apparently, the positive results that had generated so much enthusiasm were the results of a subtle process in which well-intended facilitators were answering questions themselves - without any awareness that they were doing so. Based on the findings of carefully controlled studies of facilitated communication, the American Psychological Association issued a resolution in 1994 that there was "no scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy."

One caveat, FC is not the same type of assistance rendered to Helen Keller or Stephen Hawking. Or to numerous others that with physical or neurological disorders.

Why the interest besides false hope, a noted similarity between FC therapy and repressed memory therapy: "patients" are accusing their parents and others of having sexually abused them.

,,,I was the facilitator in the Wheaton case and, through the guise of FC, brought sexual abuse allegations against the family of the autistic child, Betsy, with whom I worked. Authorship of the messages were challenged through scientific testing. The results of the testing concluded beyond doubt that I, not the child, authored the messages. Despite my reticence to give up my belief in FC, I could no longer ignore the scientific studies that replicated my own personal experiences with the purported technique. What follows is an overview of how I became involved with FC, how the sexual abuse allegations surfaced, and what happened when my belief in FC was challenged through scientific testing.

Steven Novella sum it up the best.

It is sad that FC continues to survive despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is not a legitimate method of communication, but rather an elaborate exercise in self-deception. It is a useful example of how powerful and subtle self-deception can be, and also of the ways in which scientific evidence can be manipulated to generate a desired outcome.

Further, I find it disturbing the extent to which FC proponents have attempted to take the moral high ground. They talk as if the proper and moral thing to do is to just believe – believe that children can be vastly more intelligent than they appear, and that what everyone hopes to be true actually is true. The other side of this coin, of course, is a criticism of scientific skepticism as cold and dismissive.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. Everyone is best served if we know the real truth through the most reliable scientific methods possible. Wishful thinking and self-deception should be weeded out with rigorous methods,,,

N.Y. woman guilty of manslaughter in son's death - CNN.com