Disability News

Supreme Court to review execution of mentally disabled inmates

Mark Sherman, Associated Press - October 21, 2013

Florida uses a strict IQ measurement to determine whether a person is "mentally disabled" for the purposes of prohibiting or allowing the death penalty. The court will look at whether such as simple and definitive cutoff, which doesn't take into account any other factors, is Constitutional.

Ga. to Review Tough Death Penalty Provision

Kate Brumback, Time Magazine - October 20, 2013

Georgia uses the standard of "beyond reasonable doubt". It sounds like they do consider more than just an IQ score, but that their overall bar for proving "mental disability" is very high. I guess it means that they wouldn't execute someone if a jury said, "He's definitely mentally disabled", but they would if they said, "He's probably mentally disabled."

Death penalty cases involving disabled people are confusing to me. I oppose the death penalty, and I hate to see disabled people punished when they might not really process what it's all about. On the other hand, I worry about messing with or perhaps expanding legal mechanisms for "proving" people are incompetent, in whatever context. Are there any lawyers out there who know whether widening the group considered "mentally disabled" in terms of the death penalty might also expand the group cognitively impaired people people not allowed to make their own life choices? If the Supreme Court decides that while the dividing line is a 70 IQ, 72 is "close enough", will more adults end up under guardianship of their parents or of agencies?

Suit filed in disabled Md. man's death in custody

CBS / AP - October 18, 2013

It sounds like the lawsuit may be based a lot on technicalities and specific medical evidence, not so much on the broader issues. That's probably okay. In terms of deterrence, the main thing is that Regal Cinemas and the mall company might re-evaluate their policies on how to handle unruly customers ... including maybe training staff and security on how to recognize and deal with people who have cognitive impairments.

Another way this could go is that movie theater companies might start requiring disabled people to have supervision, or order their staffs to not interact with them at all. If someone with Down Syndrome decides to go to a movie unaccompanied, after this incident and after a winning lawsuit, will managers just say, "Shit, I don't want them in there alone. Who knows what they'll do?!" Never underestimate a municipality or a conglomerate's ability to learn the wrong lessons from a tragedy.

==========

I set my Google News page to find disability-related stories using keywords, "disabled" and "disability", and I pick a few that interest me.

Photo Of The Day

From the Disability Curious Tumblr blog.

Bummer

NBC sets 'Community' return, cancels 'Ironside' and 'Welcome to the Family'

Alan Sepinwall, HitFix.com - October 18, 2013

I'll have more to say about this later in the week. Right now I'll just note two things:

I'm disappointed that the new Ironside didn't make it, but also that nobody in the TV critic community seems to care.

I still haven't watched last week's episode of the show, which I suppose means it really wasn't very good.

Air Travel Tips

AmputeeOT's video this week is about traveling by air as an amputee. As usual, she has a very optimistic outlook on things. Travel for people with physical disabilities doesn't always go smoothly, even when you do plan ahead. At the same time, she's pretty realistic, and everything she says makes good sense. And anyway, this blog sometimes gets a bit bleak, so I like to balance it out with some lighter stuff once in awhile.

Quote

Just read this. Had to share it:

"I have heard a thousand times over, 'I’d rather be dead than in a wheelchair.' Oh. OK. Then could I have a taster on hand before I eat dinner at your place?"

 -- Disabilityaware.tumblr.com

Photo Of The Day

From the Disability Curious Tumblr blog.

A Simple Rule ...

How about this for a "rule" to help people avoid saying things that annoy people with disabilities? …

Whenever you think you've hit on a very clever turn of phrase that you think will make a unique and positive statement about people with disabilities … forget it. Puns, creative spellings and syntax, reversals of meaning … they all sound great and wise and original in our heads, but they usually fall flat when spoken or written, and when the subject is disability-related, they are almost never original. As a person with disabilities, I guarantee you, whatever brilliant bon mot you thing you've come up with about disability, or some "new" way to be politically correct about it, we've heard it before, and we we are underwhelmed.

If you're going to say something about how you think about us or about disabilities, just say it normally. Don't try to be clever or super-insightful.

Thank you.

Followup: From An Old Familiar Place

I thought of a couple of things late last night, after I reblogged and commented on that account of how a young woman with Cerebral Palsy was treated by an ER nurse.

The story made me instantly angry in a way that very few things do. I shared it because of that, and because I think it's important to remember that sometimes, things really are as bad as we say they are … that while being a chronic misanthrope isn't healthy, it isn't always entirely wrong.

What I only thought of later is that this was a somewhat rare case when a person's fundamental ableism was in the raw, explicitly stated. In a way, that's a good thing. Usually, we don't actually hear people say we're not a "real person". Instead it's a tone of voice, a look, a reticence. In medical situations, it often manifests in a subtle disconnect. They ask us questions and we answer, and their responses and followups suggest that our answers were not accepted at face value. From there, it progresses to where every conversation with a doctor or nurse has a subtext … like they think something about us that they're not saying out loud. And of course, we feel paranoid for thinking that. It can be a real mess.

One other thought. What the nurse said seems very extreme, something probably very, very few people believe. It's one thing to be uncomfortable around people with disabilities, or have no patience for our "special needs", but it's quite another to assert that we are not "real" human beings in some fundamental way. But we can't forget that not so very long ago, the idea that people with certain types and degrees of disability didn't deserve the same basic rights as other humans was a mostly accepted and acceptable point of view. And it turned out to be a horribly short walk from abstract philosophical theorizing about genetic "contamination" and "humane" ways of "reliving suffering" to the Nazi T4 program, carried out mainly by medical professionals in what was at the time one of the Western World's most highly educated and "cultured" countries.

It's quite possible that nurse has problems and crises in her life that led to her outburst. But the nature of her outburst was pretty specific, and came from a familiar pool of ideology. The horror isn't that she said those words on a particular day to a particular person, it's that the ideas behind those words still have currency for who knows how many people.

It Can Be This Bad

One of the people I "follow" on Tumblr just reblogged this story, and I reblogged it myself. Now I'm including it here because it needs to be everywhere. For clarity, I'm going to actually quote the whole thing below, then add my comments. Original post by Feminist Rocker, reblogged by Andrea Shettle's Tumblr.

(One of my best friends on campus has cerebral palsy, and is confined to a wheelchair. Between the CP and a strong accent, she sometimes has trouble making herself clearly understood to strangers. She is having a strong allergic skin reaction to something; her aid has gone for the night, so I go with her to the hospital. The nurse is crouched down in the waiting room beside my friend’s chair.) 

Nurse:   “And how old is she?” 

My Friend:   “20.” 

(Instead of responding to my friend, the nurse looks at me.) 

Nurse:   “Is that correct?” 

Me:   “I would assume. She can speak for herself. I’m only here as a friend.” 

Nurse. “And for how long have you had these symptoms?” 

My Friend:   “I noticed them this morning, but they’ve gotten very bad.” 

(Again, the nurse looks at me instead of my friend; I say nothing. She continues doing this for several moments, asking questions and then looking at me, until my friend finally snaps.) 

My Friend:   “You talk to me, not her! She’s my friend; she doesn’t know anything about my medical stuff.” 

(The nurse stands up and storms away. I follow, more than a little angry on my friend’s behalf.) 

Nurse:   *to me* “You may think it’s nice to let her pretend to be a real person, but some of us are trying to run a hospital.” 

Me:   “Excuse me?! She’s in a wheelchair; she’s not stupid! She IS a real person.” 

Nurse:   “Well if you want to pretend that’s true, that’s on you.” 

(I am struck completely silent in rage and shock. A doctor, who I haven’t seen until he SLAMS paperwork down on the desk, interjects.) 

Doctor:   “Nurse. Supervisor. Now.” 

(The three of them go back into an office where the nurse comes out in tears; she was suspended for her behavior.)

Stories like this need to be circulated. They need to be read by people who claim that ableism isn't such a big deal, that it's "annoying but benevolent", that it's "harmless". People need to read these stories, including people with disabilities who have been lucky enough in life to experience only minor insults and bureaucratic hiccups. People like me, most of my life.

Shit like this happens. People like this do exist. I still believe that people this poisonous about disabled people are few and far between, but they make up for their low numbers by doing massive damage wherever they go.

And to me, the most galling thing is that people like this nurse probably do believe they are being brave and bold to stick up for their twisted concept of reality. That nurse may have been crying when she left, but I bet by bedtime she was telling herself she was another martyr of "political correctness" or somesuch. Sensitivity training can't help someone like this.

Photo Of The Day

From the bunnika's blog Tumblr.

An Experiment ...

I'm not completely sure what I expect to find out, but I'm going to try an experiment.

I will copy and paste into a text document, the full text of every news story my Google News page gives me on the keywords "disability" and "disabled". I'll do this every day for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, I'll paste the entire accumulated text into Wordle.net, which produces color and size-scaled word clouds. Basically this should produce a graphical representation of what words come up most frequently in disability-related news stories.

After reading about and discussing as fact what we assume to be language habits and cliches about disability, I want to see what words actually come up most.

Photo Of The Day

From the Just Rollin On Tumblr blog.

Autism, Advocacy, and the Choices of "Parenthood"

I've been watching the NBC series "Parenthood" over the last few days. I wasn't even aware of it when it premiered in 2010, and it has sat in my Neflix queue for about a year. What finally prompted me to watch it was hearing that one of the main characters was a kid with Asberger's, though that's all I heard … I've neither heard nor read anything about whether it's a good, accurate, or helpful portrayal of someone on the autism spectrum. I finally caught the season premier a couple of weeks ago, and one of the first scenes I saw was with that character, Max Braverman (played by Max Burkholder). I was impressed enough to go back and finally watch the whole series from the beginning. It's a great show and I'll probably write more about it later this week.

One of the first season episodes featured the huge Braverman family participating in a fundraising walk for Autism Speaks. This to me was all at once not surprising, surprising, and disappointing. It was not surprising because I think that if you asked the average person to name an autism organization they'd name Autism Speaks, maybe especially if the people you are asking are entertainment industry professionals out to "do some good" … people that Autism Speaks has carefully and successfully cultivated.

It was disappointing because while the show, I think, treats autism / Asberger's with sensitivity and sophistication, those qualities aren't Autism Speaks' long suit. I don't claim to be an expert, but both my gut instinct and a fair amount of reading and inquiring lead me to view Autism Speaks as one of those most vexing of advocacy organizations … one which in the most general sense has good intentions, but whose unexamined prejudices and motivations lead them to arguably do more harm than good. Basically, Autism Speaks adamantly views autism as a "disease", it's primary goal is to cure it and / or prevent it

What could be wrong with that?

First let me say that I don't entirely buy the polar opposite argument, which is that autism is simply a matter of neurological difference, of diversity, and that "neurotypical" people view it as a disease because they refuse to understand it, and are angry because it annoys them and disrupts their lives. By this view, Autism Speaks is just one step shy of being a genocidal organization, and at best a group which claims to be "for" autistic people, which is really mainly interested in milking the frustrations and anguish of parents who can't believe the injustice of having a problematic child. As I say, I don't fully buy this, because I suspect that autism can be quite painful for people who have it as well, and not just because of other peoples' prejudices. But, in case you couldn't tell by my writing, I think this "pro autistics" view has some merit. At the very least, I think that Autism Speaks displays a rather shocking lack of self-reflection. It still hasn't corrected one of the most simple criticisms aimed at it ... that it doesn't have a single person on its Board of Directors or senior staff who has any form of autism.

Anyway, what would I have preferred to see "Parenthood" do rather than make a direct, after-show pitch for Autism Speaks? How about paring it with a pitch for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, an organization with a different type of mission, founded by and for people who actually have autism spectrum conditions? So far, "Parenthood" appears to be at least acknowledging that autism isn't just a tragedy that happens to families, and that people with autism are full human beings, not noisy, out of control little machines that need to be fixed. Yet, they made the rather lazy, obvious choice not only to show the family promoting Autism Speaks … that would be believable given the organizations ubiquity … but encouraging support for it out of the show itself in real life so to speak, and equating support of Autism Speaks as support for people with autism.

I don't have it all figured out, but it would help to at least acknowledge that there's a difference of opinion on the subject.