UPDATE::No more prison for ex-Rutgers professor who sexually assaulted disabled student | NJ.com

A judge on Friday sentenced a former Rutgers philosophy professor to time served for having criminal sexual contact with a disabled man who was once her student, bringing an end to a long, complex case that almost stretched into a second trial.

Anna Stubblefield, 48, had already served nearly two years behind bars before an appeal's court overturned her conviction in June 2017.

Stubblefield will not have to go back to state prison.

No more prison for ex-Rutgers professor who sexually assaulted disabled student | NJ.com

UPDATE::What Anna Stubblefield Believed She Was Doing - The New York Times

I have been following this case from day one.  Two points have always stuck out, both of which the author notes  I for one am glad this woman will be behind bars for at least 10 yrs.  Although, I am well aware this is not the last we have heard of this case.

That plural “we” runs throughout the letter, as if Anna could not resist the call to speak for D.J., even when she knew that call had cost her everything. “Had we anticipated his family’s reaction, we would have waited,” she wrote. “He would have talked with his family and pursued emancipation from the guardianship, and I would have used the time to obtain a divorce. That would have been a better path all around.”

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Finally, the judge delivered her own appraisal of the facts. The defendant believes she was in love with D.J., she said, and never meant to hurt anyone. Still, Anna knowingly and wantonly overstepped the bounds of lawful behavior. She violated the terms of D.J.’s guardianship because she decided, on her own, that the courts were wrong — and that she knew better than the State of New Jersey.

Judge Teare allowed that Anna was, by most accounts, a well-meaning and empathic person. But the very fact of her respectability seemed to make her more blameworthy, not less so. Several times, the judge cited Anna’s intelligence — her “high intellect” — as a point against her. Anna was smart enough to see through the illusion of D.J.’s facilitated typing. She was smart enough to realize that she didn’t have consent. She was smart enough to know that D.J. wasn’t smart.

What seems to be lost in this morass of a case, DJ was a client; end of story.  Stubblefield, regardless of motivation, overstepped that boundary without consideration of DJ's mental capacity.  As a professional, she was wrong.  It seems pretty simple, if DJ was under guardianship, then he couldn't give informed consent.

What Anna Stubblefield Believed She Was Doing - The New York Times

ADDENDUM::The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield - The New York Times

‘‘It just didn’t fit with anything that I or anybody had ever seen before,’’ Shane says now. ‘‘Either she saw something that nobody saw, or there was something wrong with me, in that I was dismissing people as being retarded when all you had to do was just believe that they could do it.’’ He snorted as he recalled Crossley’s presentation: ‘‘We were sitting in the back of the room, and I turned to my friend and said, ‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’ And then I said, ‘But what harm could it do?’ I actually said that to her. I said, ‘But what harm can it do?’ ’’

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The story behind the story of facilitated communication, its downfall and re-branding.  This comment I believe sums up the ordeal quite well:

A very important cautionary tale. All of us who strive to be helping professionals need to realize that although our work is often personally very rewarding, we must remain self-aware and not be drawn into using our clients to take care of our own needs to feel important, special, skilled, and loved.

For Ms. Stubblefield to be doubling down on her insistence that "facilitated communication" is anything other than her own fantasies being recorded (like on a Ouija board) and that her sexual relationship with an extremely vulnerable client is anything other than abusive and massively unethical is pathetic. If she had been a licensed clinician, she would have almost undoubtedly lost that license even if the relationship *had* been quasi-consensual. As a fellow Jew, I am ashamed to hear that she wrapped this abuse in the notion of tikkun olam. Nothing is healed by abusing a vulnerable client and his family.

Ironically, her attempts to give a voice to the client resulted in her substituting her own voice for his and for the voices of his family.

An odd but fascinating story from Daniel Engber.

The method that Anna used with D.J., and with several other clients at the time, was devised some 40 years ago to help a girl with cerebral palsy named Anne McDonald. Born in 1961 to a family that ran a dry-­cleaning business in a railway town 60 miles north of Melbourne, Australia, she came out feet first, with signs of fetal distress. For the first hour of her life, she could not breathe on her own. At 3, she was given a diagnosis of spastic quadriplegia with severe mental retardation and sent to the St. Nicholas Hospital for children with profound disabilities.

Even as a teenager, McDonald was small enough to fit into a baby stroller and weighed less than 30 pounds. Her eyes were often crossed, and her arms, neck and tongue remained in constant motion. When Rosemary Crossley, then an assistant at the Mental Health Authority, first saw McDonald, she was bone thin and writhing on the floor. Neither McDonald nor any other child had toys or wheelchairs, Crossley has said, and they weren’t getting an education, either. ‘‘Just the floor and a cot,’’ is how she remembered it.

In 1974, Crossley selected McDonald and seven other children for a special play group. She called them ‘‘beanbaggers’’ — most were so physically disabled that they could sit only in beanbag chairs. Three years later, she turned the play group into a communication study. Her plan was to ask the kids to point at objects, photographs and words, and thus find a way for them to voice their basic needs. She started with McDonald: ‘‘ ‘Annie, I think I can teach you to talk,’ ’’ she recalls in ‘‘Annie’s Coming Out,’’ the memoir she wrote with McDonald. ‘‘ ‘Not with your mouth ... but with your hands, by pointing to pictures of things.’ ’’

The problem was that McDonald had a lot of trouble pointing. When she tried to move her arm, Crossley wrote, it would ‘‘shut up like a rabbit trap,’’ sometimes snapping back against her face. Crossley realized that she would have to keep it balanced. ‘‘I was acting as a responsive item of furniture, not moving her arm but simply facilitating her own movement.’’

The supported pointing worked brilliantly. Now, McDonald could pick out word-blocks and form sentences like ‘‘I want a book, please.’’ Just two weeks into this training, Crossley took out a magnetic board with letters on it to see if McDonald could spell things on her own. Less than a week later, McDonald pointed to the letters ‘I’ and ‘H’ and then to 11 more, producing ­‘‘IHATEFATROSIE.’’ ‘‘This is the first sentence Annie ever spelled,’’ Crossley wrote. ‘‘Annie had freed herself.’’

After a month, McDonald demonstrated a familiarity with local politics. In two months, she was doing fractions. It all happened so quickly that some of Crossley’s colleagues wondered if her assisted pointing might be a fraud. Perhaps Crossley had controlled the children’s hands herself, guiding them to shapes and letters in the way that people move the pointer on a Ouija board.

Crossley had the same concern. ‘‘What I did not know was whether I was subconsciously manipulating her,’’ she wrote, ‘‘or imagining her hand movements over the letters and making up sentences to fit what were really random twitchings.’’ But she became convinced that the method worked after McDonald started spelling things with other people — including references to private jokes that no one else could have known. How had she learned so much so fast? She had worked out the rudiments of language by watching television and overhearing nurses’ conversations. She had learned arithmetic by counting slats on the barriers that enclosed her cot.

Soon after McDonald turned 18, she went to court for the right to leave St. Nicholas. In a proceeding, she was shown an arbitrary pair of words — ‘‘string’’ and ‘‘quince’’ — while Crossley was not in the room. Then she had to spell them out with Crossley’s help. ‘‘String’’ and ‘‘quit,’’ she wrote. Not exactly right, but close enough. The judge accepted the method and ruled that McDonald was competent to make her own decisions. Addressing the press right after, she spelled: ‘‘Thank you. Free the still imprisoned!’’ McDonald went on to graduate from college and died at 49.

The philosophy that drove Crossley’s work, one of radical inclusion, was gaining traction in the world of special education. In 1984, the same year that ‘‘Annie’s Coming Out’’ was made into a movie, Anne Donnellan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published a sort of manifesto for disability rights. An academic paper called ‘‘The Criterion of the Least Dangerous Assumption,’’ it advised teachers on how to treat disabled children: When you assume they will never function as adults, when you shunt them into special classes and give them toys meant for younger children, you make them victims of your meager expectations. It’s better to treat every child as if he or she has hidden talents, Donnellan warned, because if you do the opposite, what happens if you’re wrong?

Assuming competence was the founding principle of Crossley’s method. But her work would not become widely known until a Syracuse professor of education named Douglas Biklen visited Crossley’s Melbourne clinic in 1988. He described that trip — along with a second one a few months later — in a bombshell paper for The Harvard Educational Review in August 1990. The implications were enormous, Biklen wrote. Those who had been categorized as having among the ‘‘lowest’’ intellectual capacities could now tell the world they existed; they could say, as he put it, ‘‘We will reveal ourselves, we will show our creativity, when we feel appreciated, when we are supported.’’

With Biklen’s help, facilitated communication spread through the world of disability services with a near-­religious fervor. At Syracuse, he set up an institute that trained teachers, parents and social workers. Among its earliest disciples was Anna’s mother, Sandra. When she heard about the method, she set out for one of Biklen’s workshops on the night train. Back in Michigan, she had Anna serve as the videographer of her early sessions.

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At one point during the conference, Ashby led a session for facilitators called ‘‘Circling the Wagons: How Shifting Definitions of ‘Research’ Keep the Voices of F.C. Users Out.’’ Before she set out on a critical review of the studies from the 1990s, she apologized, half-­joking, for the ableism of that metaphor: double-­blind. Such insensitivity was not surprising from the F.C. skeptics, she said, who are more concerned with scientific method — with cold, quantitative research — than with real, lived experience.

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Meanwhile, because of past scandals, facili­tated communication has been quietly rebranded. In 2010, the Facilitated Communication Institute in Syracuse changed its name to the Institute on Communication and Inclusion. ‘‘We need to do more on F.C., but we can’t call it that,’’ said John Hussman, a major donor to the institute who runs a $6 billion mutual fund and whose son uses the technique. He had just given a talk on the neuroscience of what is now often termed ‘‘supported typing.’’ ‘‘We have to come up with some other name to fly under the radar and maintain credibility,’’ he said.

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield - The New York Times

UPDATED::Anna Stubblefield case: The Rutgers-Newark professor is accused of citing "facilitated communication" as justification for alleged sexual abuse.

UPDATE 10/2/2015::  Professor convicted of sexually assaulting disabled man

A Rutgers University professor accused of sexually assaulting a disabled man she said had consented to the relationship by communicating on a keyboard was convicted on Friday.

A jury returned the guilty verdict on two counts of aggravated sexual assault against Anna Stubblefield.

Stubblefield testified during the trial that she and the man, who has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak, were in love and that he consented to the sexual activity in her office by communicating through assisted typing on a keyboard.

But prosecutors challenged the keyboard method, known as facilitated communication, and presented experts who testified the 34-year-old man was incapable of consenting.

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Not sure how I missed this horrid affair concerning the use of facilitated communication.  Although this mess does not surprise me, it is sickening none-the-less.

The backstory,,,

D.J., a 33-year-old man with cerebral palsy since infancy, became a cause celebre in the faux world of FC around 2009/2010 after becoming a patient of Anna Stubblefield.  The, then, chairwoman of Rutgers-Newark’s philosophy department., is an outspoken proponent of Facilitated Communication, a technique purported to give "the disabled the power to communicate thoughts to the outside world".

Try to make a name for herself, Stubblefield began toting D.J. around to various conferences demonstrating the awesomeness of her deception work, "D.J. would communicate to the audience with Stubblefield acting as his facilitator."  There was one slight problem, "it was a remarkable breakthrough for someone who doctors claimed had the mental capacity of an 18-month old and could not even effectively communicate with his family."

The notoriety Stubblefield enjoyed though came to a screeching halt in January 2013,

Today, Stubblefield, 44, is facing criminal charges of aggravated sexual assault for allegedly molesting D.J. repeatedly in her Newark offices in 2011. She’s been placed on administrative leave without pay, university officials say.

And she’s facing a civil lawsuit filed in federal court by D.J.’s mother and brother, who say she used D.J. as a “guinea pig” to advance her cause. They cast her suggestion that D.J. could communicate through her as “a farce” and are seeking an unspecified amount in damages.

The pending criminal case, should it go to trial as expected in the coming months, promises to be a referendum on facilitated communication, a technique dogged by controversy almost from the moment it was first publicly identified in the 1990s.
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But several months later, in May 2011, the relationship soured when Stubblefield met with D.J.’s mother and brother and, according to the civil lawsuit, admitted that she had sexual relations with D.J. In August 2011, D.J.’s family brought their allegations to university police officers, who contacted Essex County prosecutors. Stubblefield was indicted on aggravated sexual assault charges in January 2013.

Which brings us to today,

A Rutgers-Newark professor is on trial for sexual assault of a disabled man in a bizarre and disturbing criminal case out of New Jersey. Last week, a psychologist testified that the disabled man—who was a patient of Anna Stubblefield when she started having sexual encounters with him—was unable to consent to sexual activity, according to NJ Advance Media.

Stubblefield met the man, who suffers from cerebral palsy and other ailments, in 2009 and soon after began treating him using a controversial technique called "facilitated communication." Stubblefield has argued that the technique allows disabled people to type on a keyboard with the help of a facilitator, but the approach has been compared to using a Ouija board and called invalid by the American Psychological Association and the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. The judge in the case has refused to allow expert testimony on the method because it is "not a recognized science."

Anna Stubblefield case: The Rutgers-Newark professor is accused of citing "facilitated communication" as justification for alleged sexual abuse.

UPDATE::Gigi Jordan Sentenced To 18 Years For Poisoning Son Who Had Autism

A wealthy New York socialite was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Thursday after being convicted of killing her young autistic son at a luxury Manhattan hotel room in 2010.

Gigi Jordan, 54, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in November after admitting that she administered an overdose of prescription pills to 8-year-old Jude Mirra at the posh Peninsula Hotel on Fifth Avenue, using a crusher and syringe.

Jordan's attorneys argued throughout the two-month trial that she had killed the boy in an act of mercy to prevent the boy's biological father from sexually abusing him, a scenario that prosecutors said was based on fiction.

Judge Charles Solomon of the state Supreme Court in Manhattan handed down a sentence that was close to the maximum of 25 years in prison under New York guidelines, saying he was mystified by the mother's lack of remorse.

"It's very difficult for me to understand the defendant," Solomon said. "I certainly would think that I would hear something from the defendant expressing remorse about what she did - something."

In a 30-minute statement read to the court, Jordan appealed for leniency and again said she had been acting in her son's best interests.

[,,,]
Prosecutors argued that Jordan carefully planned the death of her son after traveling the country to find a cure for his autism. They said that Jordan killed her son because she could not accept that he was disabled and she could not fix his medical condition.

Gigi Jordan Sentenced To 18 Years For Poisoning Son Who Had Autism

Facilitated Communication: The Fad that Will Not Die - CSI

Having lost the scientific battle, Biklen and other FC proponents largely sidestepped the academic challenge in favor of an appeal directly to parents and family members—those most hungry for good news.

Hasn't enough damage been done?

That should have been that. If ever a treatment was unequivocally discredited, FC was it. Most scientifically-minded practitioners assumed that FC had been completely vanquished. Nothing could be further from the truth. An important article published in Evidence Based Communication Assessment and Intervention in February makes clear that FC never died. It was simply repackaged to make it easier to promote after the debacle of the 1990s.

The authors of the article, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Julia Marshall, James T. Todd, and Howard C. Shane, give a detailed account of what happened to FC after its rise and (apparent) fall in the 1990s. Summarizing the results of several surveys of parents and professionals they find:

… FC use remains widespread in many quarters, with a range of current use post 2000 ranging from 1.6% to 9.8% of children with autism. The findings of Price (2013) further suggest that many students who specialize in communication disorders believe FC to be effective for autism.

What? How did this happen?

Lilienfeld and his colleagues show that, while those convinced by the data moved on to other therapies, the proponents of FC never gave up. Douglas Biklen of Syracuse University is the most prominent supporter of FC in the United States. His Facilitated Communication Institute at Syracuse has been renamed Institute on Communication and Inclusion, and in 2012 it received a $500,000 John B. Hussman Foundation grant to support FC research, training, and dissemination. The University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability has been a loyal supporter of FC since the 1990s, and regularly sponsors meetings of an FC “skill builders” group.
As suggested by the removal of the phrase facilitated communication from title of the Syracuse institute, FC’s survival was helped by renaming and repackaging an old product. FC is now commonly called “supported typing” or “progressive kinesthetic feedback,” and a new variation on FC called “rapid prompting” or “informative pointing” is gaining in popularity.

[,,,]
If a pill for autism could be found, all of this pseudoscience would disappear. But there is no pill. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), the most validated and effective treatment for autism, is onerous to administer, and, although it benefits all who receive it, ABA is not a cure. Studies show that fewer than half of children who receive ABA achieve typical age-appropriate educational levels. As long as there is no pill for autism, parents longing for a quick and more complete solution to their child’s condition will always find the promise of FC and other pseudoscientific therapies strongly appealing.

The narrative that Lilienfeld and colleagues lay out is extremely troubling. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult enough to fight the tide of pseudoscience and irrationality, but these are not normal circumstances. Here we have the strong pull of parental hopes combined with professional interests and cultural politics. And the stakes are extremely high. Advocates for FC suggest that critics are guilty of discrimination and the suppression of free speech, but without evidence that FC works, its advocates are engaged in a much more pernicious enterprise. In the interest of producing fake college graduates, they have substituted their own speech for that of the person with autism. Rather than honoring these individuals, they have erased them. Worst of all, while chasing a fantasy, the purveyors of FC have wasted years of valuable time that could have been spent on more effective educational and treatment methods. If there is a bright side to all this, it is that Lilienfeld, Marshall, Todd, and Shane have done great service by showing us how much work we have yet to do.

Facilitated Communication: The Fad that Will Not Die - CSI

ADDENDUM::Not Just the Wendrows: Sex Abuse Cases Dismissed After Facilitated Communication - ABC News

"A therapy no better than a Ouija board."

An earlier case (1990s) involving "facilitated communication" that destroyed another unsuspecting family.

Two decades after unfounded sexual abuse allegations and a controversial autism communication tool turned her family's life upside down, Suzette Wheaton is angry to hear that another family has found itself in similar straits.

"It still makes me mad that something like that can happen," Wheaton, now 55, told ABCNews.com. "It has happened to a lot of people and it's just aggravating that something like that can happen to a family and just destroy them."

In the early 1990s, the Wheatons were part of a disturbing trend: families whose autistic children accused them of sexual abuse -- allegations leveled through a technique called facilitated communication.

[,,,]
Speech pathologist Howard Shane, of Children's Hospital Boston, an ardent critic of facilitated communication, was involved in the Wheaton's case as well as several other of the 1990s FC sex abuse cases. When he was brought in to testify in the Wendrow case, Shane remembered a prosecutor questioning his expertise, noting that it had been 15 years since he had researched FC.

Shane said he hadn't continued research on facilitated communication for a reason.

"It'd be like suggesting that we continue to study cold fusion or bloodletting," Shane said. "When it's over, it's over."

[Note::The "facilitator" that Shane refers to in his continuing comments in regards to the Wheaton case is Jaynce Boynton. I make reference to her experience in my write up concerning Gigi Jordan. Boynton subsequently went on to pen Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. An overview of how she "became involved with FC, how the sexual abuse allegations surfaced, and what happened when my belief in FC was challenged through scientific testing."]

At least two families entangled in unfounded sex abuse allegations linked to FC in the 1990s have sued law enforcement authorities as well as Douglas Bilken, the Syracuse University professor who introduced FC to the U.S. The lawsuits were both later dismissed but in 1997, in a separate case, a New York family won $750,000 after a jury found Orange County, N.Y., officials liable for failing to properly train its employees to "use the difficult and unproven technique of facilitated communication," according to The New York Law Journal.

In that case, an 11-year-old girl was removed from her home after she typed out sex abuse allegations with the help of a teacher. After being shown a demonstration of FC, a judge was not convinced the girl was in fact communicating through the technique and the girl was reunited with her parents.

There has been at least one case of an abuse conviction in which initial abuse allegations surfaced through facilitated communication. In 1993, a man was convicted of abusing an 11-year-old facilitated communication user at Heartspring, a special needs center in Witchita, Kan. The man's conviction was upheld by the Kansas Supreme Court, though Heartspring later stopped using facilitated communication.

Sad to say but Bilken is still Dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University.

Not Just the Wendrows: Sex Abuse Cases Dismissed After Facilitated Communication - ABC News

A federal jury awards Wendrows $3M in wrongful prosecution case

Whilst doing some background reading regarding this case, the Wendrows where mentioned quite a few times as being in recent litigation action. Curious, this is what I found as to their experience with "facilitated communication" and the fallout that ensued.

A federal jury today awarded $3 million in damages to a West Bloomfield couple, who were wrongly accused of sexually assaulting their severely autistic and mute daughter.

The verdict brings to a total of $6.75 million awarded to Julian and Thal Wendrow, who were arrested in late 2007 after their then 14-year-old daughter reportedly typed on a key board – with the help of a teacher's aide in Walled Lake District Schools – that her father had raped her over the weekend while her mother looked the other way.

The typing, a controversial method known as "facilitated communication," had been widely debunked in the last two decades. Research always found it was the aide guiding the disabled person's hand, either consciously or unconsciously.

Nevertheless, then Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca, his chief assistant, Deborah Carley, and assistant prosecutor Andrea Dean pressed on with the prosecution, even as news reports showed the method was unreliable.

A federal jury awards Wendrows $3M in wrongful prosecution case

See also:

Family awarded damages in facilitated communication farce - Sharon Hill's breakdown of the pertinent points in the Wendrow case,,,

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.
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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