Today's Detroit Free Press has a real horror story about a family which was torn apart by zealous bureaucrats acting in the name of a cruel superstition called "facilitated communication." According to the educrats who believe in this discredited nonsense, autistic children "communicate" by having their hands placed on computer keyboards, while the "facilitator" types the answers to the facilitator's questions.

No, seriously:

The couple, who had no criminal history, suddenly faced decades in prison. He was charged with repeatedly raping their 15-year-old, severely autistic daughter, and she was charged with child abuse for failure to stop it.

Thus began a four-month ordeal, a prosecution based solely on statements their mute child reportedly made while using a widely discredited method called "facilitated communication," in which messages are typed on a keyboard with the help of an aide called a facilitator.

Thursday, the Wendrows, who saw all charges against them dropped in March, filed a lawsuit in Oakland County Circuit Court, alleging 38 counts of wrongful imprisonment, invasion of privacy, violation of their due-process rights, malicious prosecution and other misdeeds. Lawsuits on behalf of their daughter and her 13-year-old brother, who was repeatedly interrogated by police, are expected to be filed today.

Of course, that's an emotional reaction on my part; the problem is that it's the taxpayers who end up having to pay settlements and judgments in these cases. The problem is that there is no accountability, and it is becoming an all-pervasive disease. The individual wrongdoers are immune -- even though the "facilitor" in this case had only two hours of "training":

"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.

So settled is the evidence (and case law) against it that a New York Civil Rights Lawyer (quoted in an earlier piece) expressed amazement that a school would even use the method:

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."

Where people lack an adequate communication system, they deserve to have others try with them to discover and secure an appropriate system. No person should have this right denied because they have been diagnosed as having a particular disability. Access to effective means of communication is a free speech issue. (TASH, Resolution on the Right to Communicate, November, 1992)

While nothing that the educrats might do would surprise me, this is more of a disgrace to the legal system than anything else, because the legal system is supposed to be based on accountability. When accountability fails there, where are people to go?

What shocked me even more as I dug into this was the appalling nature of the police interrogation of the innocent boy they sent to juvenile detention:

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."

Perhaps even Cotton Mather didn't either. (He was only trying to do his job...)

But if we look at the broader issue (in the spirit of dark humor), imagine what a facilitative communicator could do with Alzheimer's patients. Stroke victims. The legally brain dead.

Hmm...

I better keep them away from Coco, because you never know what she might say.

Especially if she had "help."

MORE: I'm wondering about something. Is there any reason why facilitative communication would not work with dead people? I would think that if used combination with a good medium, the results might be spectacular.

At the very least, it might be a great way to preserve the right of the deceased to vote.