A West Bloomfield Township family will get $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit against the police department, after the father was prosecuted and jailed after being accused of sexually assaulting his severely autistic daughter — a prosecution that eventually imploded.
The charges against Julian Wendrow were dropped for lack of evidence in March 2008, after he had spent 80 days in the Oakland County jail. His wife, Thal Wendrow, was also jailed, and the girl, 14, and her brother, 13, were placed in foster care for months.
The settlement was made public in district court filings today.
The Oakland County prosecutor’s case was based almost solely on statements the daughter reportedly made using facilitated communication, a widely discredited method in which the child typed on a keyboard with the assistance of a school aid. The girl, who does not speak and functions on the level of a two-year-old, reportedly typed that her father had been raping her since age seven. Prosecutors pursued the case, even though a physical exam showed no sign of assault.
The family sued in federal court in 2008, alleging 38 counts of false imprisonment, wrongful prosecution and other misdeeds.
The Wendrows named the police department as a defendant in part because of a two-hour interrogation a detective conducted with the 13-year-old boy, shortly after his parents arrests, wrongly telling him they had videotapes of both the boy and his father sexually assaulting the girl. The boy had no adult representative present for the interview.
Joseph Brusseau, the detective who remains on the police force, later admitted in depositions that was untrue. The boy, who suffers from Asperger's, a milder form of autism, can be seen in a video rocking and crying during the interview and insisting that neither he or his father had assaulted anyone.
The Free Press obtained a copy of the video of the interview and the parents said they had no objections to putting it on Freep.com.
“They pushed this thing in spite of literally having no evidence of any kind of abuse, other than this Faciliated Communication nonsense, which is in effect a Ouija board,” said Bloomfield Hills attorney Deborah Gordon, who represents the Wendrows. “What the police department did was unbelievably horrific.”
William Hampton, the attorney representing the police department, said the settlement was “nothing more than a business decision by the insurance company, with no admission of wrongdoing or of any liability.”
And he said the department would investigate the case the same way again, including the interrogation of the boy and the jailing of the father.
“We’ll assess everything, but really, right off hand, I can’t think of anything they would do differently because we really don’t think they did anything wrong.”
Facilitated communication has been widely dismissed by experts worldwide because studies show it is the aide who is actually doing the typing. Nevertheless, the Wendrows had pushed the school district to use it, hoping their daughter might be able to succeed in school work.
Oakland County prosecutors, who are also named in the suit, admit in depositions that they did not investigate the method prior to charging the Wendrows, and could not find anyone to support the method as reliable, despite calls nationwide after their arrests. They pursued the prosecution nevertheless. The charges were dropped in March when the girl was unable to type a single answer to questions posed to her in district court.
The Wendrows will be in federal court Thursday, where the prosecutors, and two other defendants, Walled Lake Consolidated School District and the Michigan Department of Human Services will argue to have the case dismissed because of governmental immunity.
Link: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110111/NEWS03/110111069/1005/Family-to-get-1.8-million-in-dads-jailing-teens-false-sex-assault-interrogation&template=fullarticle
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18 comments:
" we really don’t think they did anything wrong.”
I've said this before - to threats of not allowing comments anymore - but those who think they are going to get a square deal when dealing with police investigators in these matters can only say that because they have never lived through such an accusation.
This one man slipped the noose.
There are untold others who did not...
Signed, Been There, Done That, Living The Train Wreck.
"Governmental immunity"
They will get it too. Precedent has already been established.
Any further posting would be removed due to advocating violence.
We can only hope that the settlement funds come out of the DV budget
It seems the link to the article doesn't work.
It's cases like these why we need laws requiring corroborating evidence. This wasn't even a "she said", this was a "she couldn't have said".
This was
"Nifong Syndrome" : "I wanna make a case just because I can".
How do they get away with it?
EVERYbody loves to hate a molester. EVERYbody wants to be a Hero.
It's easy.
EVERYbody loves to hate a molester. EVERYbody wants to be a Hero.
a Cultural Addictive Rage.
The prosecutors who did this belong in prison. They're supposed to be working for justice, but judging by their behavior they seem to think they're working for the Mafia.
No offense intended to the Mafia...
Law enforcement needs to be held accountable.
Sounds like Prosecutorial Misconduct to me.
Eric said...
EVERYbody loves to hate a molester. EVERYbody wants to be a Hero.
a Cultural Addictive Rage.
Feb 1, 2011 12:03:00 PM
Nazi Germany deja vu.
Arod99k ”Law enforcement needs to be held accountable. \”
Which is what the $1.8 million is all about. Although, it comes up well short of “justice” that detective Joseph Brusseau, is still on the force after admitting in deposition that he had lied.
Arod99k - ”Sounds like Prosecutorial Misconduct to me. “
I believe a strong case could be made that there was certainly deliberate misconduct here. This isn’t one of those situations they can beg off as “acting in good faith, but on bad evidence (provided to them)”. Even their claim of asking for assistance (nation-wide) in understanding “facilitated communication” ring hollow (I just typed in the term, and Google returned: About 1,270,000 results (0.20 seconds) . Their lack of effort is simply stunning, and probably completely disingenuous.
And, knowing about how evidence is supposed to be prepared in cases of child victims, there’s numerous other places where the prosecutor failed spectacularly in their “due diligence”. For instance, even when a child is not developmentally delayed/challenged, their “statement” needs to be recorded and done by trained professionals who would ask the questions necessary to demonstrate that the child was capable of understanding the concepts that they were to be describing – just to get started. It would seem that if they did do an “interview”, they must have allowed the same “facilitator” to “interpret/direct” the girl – which brings up my real issue with how this case was handled (I’ll get back to that…).
Next, any child advocate should well have known that a child functioning at a two year-old level would not be able to provide a time-line indicating that abuse had been happening for seven years. That should have been a huge “red flag”, both to the advocate as well as any prosecutor who knew anything about functional levels of children (prosecutors take training courses on this stuff in order to be able to handle child victim cases).
Plus, the lack of physical evidence of any abuse should have made police, prosecutors, and child victim advocates stop and take a serious look at what was supposedly “her” statement, looking to see that it was both accurately interpreted and reliable (as a matter of law).
The fact that they failed to catch on to what the school aid had been doing – making a deliberate false rape claim – until the time came for the girl to “testify” without her regular “facilitator” is simply, in my mind, inexcusable. The link to the article seems to be dead, but from what I can recall, the case collapsed when, working with a different facilitator, the girl was entirely unable to type out anything meaningful at. As I understand it, she could even express simple ideas, let alone a narrative of long-term sexual abuse.
SO, my question becomes, why was the school aid allowed to “skate” on this. She isn’t named (I’m assuming it was a young woman with a strong ant-male, anti-father gender-feminist bent, who believed she was doing the mother and daughter a great serviced in seeking to remove the loving father and brother from their lives) either for the criminal act (it was clearly her who fabricated the entire claim), nor as a party in the civil actions. The school district, in seeking immunity, will no doubt use that immunity to further shield that school aide from any further consequence for her evil act, and will no doubt continue to employ and financially reward her (treating her as some sort of “hero” for trying to prevent the systemic abuse of a severely handicapped child, also willfully ignoring the obvious fact that she fabricated the entire claim).
Prosecutorial misconduct, police misconduct, child victim advocate misconduct – their certainly all their in spades. What’s unfortunately overlooked is that a school aid abused a severely handicapped girl for her evil purpose of make a false rape claim. That’s the really sick part of this story, IMHO.
Found another source in place of the now dead(?) article:
”The case dissolved in front of a judge when the girl couldn’t communicate answers to even simple questions, such as the color of her sweater. The aide helped the girl type in court, but hadn’t heard the judge’s questions. The girl’s responses were mostly gibberish. Other courts have long refused to accept testimony provided through facilitated communication.”
Okay, it was the girl's normal facilitator, but that facilitator wasn’t allowed to hear the questions (a very rudimentary way to ensure that she wasn’t biasing the answers) and only the girl heard the questions, which she could not then answer. Definitely “clear-cut” that said “facilitator” had made the whole damned story up.
Apparently, the link I pated in included a "redirect". The correct URL is http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/false-incestuous-rape-accusations-the-absolutely-horrific-ordeal-of-julian-wendrow/
"Plus, the lack of physical evidence of any abuse should have made police, prosecutors, and child victim advocates stop and take a serious look at what was supposedly “her” statement, looking to see that it was both accurately interpreted and reliable (as a matter of law)."
Beg to differ, SLW,but lack of physical evidence means NOTHING in the wild wacky world of child abuse accusations.
In this brave new medical miracle day it's now possible the hymen can grow back, such as a salamander can regrow a lopped off tail.
Every examining doctor of nurse will add the words "THIS IS CONSISTANT WITH ABUSE". It's CYA and "lights out" for the accused.
I will refer any arguments to the contrary to Paul Stuckle's defense attorney site, titled The Elimination Of Constitutional Rights.
I don't know why they even bother conducting a physical examination -either way the results are always the same : GUILTY.
Countless "rapists" are in prison or on sex offender registries because of regrown hymens.
"Lack of physical evidence" only indicates the bastard is probably going to be "in denial" and causing problems for his defense attorney and prosecutor.
The LAST thing it means is he "might" be innocent.
Anonymous - "Beg to differ, SLW,but lack of physical evidence means NOTHING in the wild wacky world of child abuse accusations.
In this brave new medical miracle day it's now possible the hymen can grow back, such as a salamander can regrow a lopped off tail."
In this particular case, the claim was of continued systematic abuse over the course of seen years.
Even if one buys into the idea that a hymen can regenerate, it would need to be explained how it could either do so repeatedly, or do so while continued penetrative rapes were still occurring.
So, yes, the lack of damage (given that the assaults were still occurring, and would have occurred quite recently) should definitely have been a red flag.
I looked at a number of related stories, and it seems that the insurance guarantor covering the police department had it's lawyers take a look at the facts of the case against them, and unhesitantly concluded that there was no way to "fight" it, and offered a settlement almost immediately.
It would seem that they too saw that "reg flags" had been summarily ignored.
$1.8 million is a lot to offer if they thought they could have made a case that the PD took appropriate measures. I'd suggest they quickly recognized that the PD had taken obviously inappropriate measures. I've little doubt that they feared that a civil jury would learn that no physical injuries had been found, and such knowledge would have doomed their case in court, as all their other actions had arisen out of an allegation they should have had ample reason to doubt even occurred, based on that lack of physical evidence.
Shoulda woulda coulda - lack of physical evidence = NO PROBLEM for prosecuting these cases.
Red flag? No such thing.
Not even a little speed bump.
http://www.victimsofthestate.org/CC/CH.htm
The horror. The horror. The horror.
Its par for the course any more. Prosecutors are for all intents and purposes immune because they are only an agent of justice while wearing their work "hat". Sadly, i guess that means never feeling a guilty conscience on any level ever. People will put a defense attorney defending a criminal in the same stew of evil as the accused if it looks in any way his client is guilty. Yet a public outcry over police/prosecutors who ignore obvious signs of innocense are unheard of. Sure a few posters will get on places such as this and let their anger be known, but it might as well not exist. Its so overshadowed by the next sensational story the victims of this abuse fade away. Its beyond sad. And i wish more people would be furious over cases like this. I also wish i was twenty years younger. Better chance of that happening. And the detective with the 13 yr old boy. I dont want this blocked so i better leave my feelings at that. Know what i mean?? That boy was never a victim until he met the cop who was sooooo needing to "help" him. I hate it Ll, but its the way it is for now. But what i wont accept is prosecutors or police who simply feel no remorse. Ever. Its not too much to ask of the people who are essentially in godlike positions to have the most basic of human qualities. At least it shouldnt be.
Wow just saw Det. Brusseau interview or torture of a young boy who had no one with him to tell the det. He's going way over the line. Calling the boy a liar. I cant believe the police department would let him keep his job. If the kid had really been a victim im sure he lost all faith in the police for the way he has been treated by the police. That is an outrage.
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