Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 18, 2009
WEST PALM BEACH – Milagro Cunningham’s lawyer described him as autistic and argued before a jury last week that he was insane at the time he beat and raped an 8-year-old girl, then left her to die buried under concrete blocks in a Lake Worth trash bin.
The case may be among the first in Florida in which autism was termed a mental illness that formed the basis of an insanity defense.
Elsewhere, attorneys for diapered NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was charged with attacking a romantic rival in February 2007, have said she suffers from a high-functioning form of autism called Asperger syndrome. They have preserved Nowak’s right to argue that she was insane at the time of the encounter because of Asperger syndrome and a host of mental afflictions.
Other autistic defendants claiming insanity or asking for relief based on their disability include a Massachusetts teenager who fatally stabbed a classmate, a Minnesota man who killed a young woman whom he had lured to his home via craigslist, and a New Jersey man convicted of sexually assaulting a child.
With autism’s rising profile and its skyrocketing rates of diagnosis comes the question: Is autism-made-me-do-it a new defense du jour?
Bruce Winick, a University of Miami professor of law, psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said it’s an extremely rare claim in an insanity case. And it is far less likely than other afflictions, such as schizophrenia, to be a successful defense under Florida law, he said.
Florida’s insanity law requires that a person have a mental infirmity, disease or defect and, because of that condition, not know what he was doing or its consequences, or not know what he was doing was wrong.
Most often, Winick said, insanity defenses involve some kind of psychosis or cognitive impairment.
“For example, ‘I thought I was squeezing a lemon, and it really was a throat,’ ” Winick said.
Autism could prevent a person from being able to distinguish right from wrong, “but in most cases it won’t,” Winick said.
Autism is a developmental disability and a neurological disorder that affects normal brain functioning, according to the Autism Society of America. It cripples social development and communication.
Dr. Jon Shaw, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Miami’s medical school, said autism rates have soared in part because of better diagnostic tools. Twenty years ago, the rate was three or four per 10,000 people; today, some estimate it at one in 150, he said.
There is no scientific correlation between violence and autism. To equate autism with legal insanity is completely “fallacious,” Shaw said.
In Cunningham’s case, five doctors differed on whether he is autistic. Two said yes; three said no.
Cunningham, now 21, confessed to police that he was angry at not being invited to the movies by other teens in the house where he was staying when he attacked the girl in May 2005.
“Something in my mind told me to do something bad,” he told police. “I’m so sorry. I can’t control myself.”
Dr. Abbey Strauss, a psychiatrist, testified that Cunningham was autistic and, separately, insane at the time of the crime. He said many people with autism have brain abnormalities, documented in sophisticated medical imaging called PET scans, as in Cunningham’s case.
“You have to remember … people who have autism and bad PET scans are known to be impulsive, known to be aggressive and can’t control themselves,” Strauss testified.
Jurors rejected Cunningham’s autism-and-insanity claim and convicted him of attempted second-degree murder and other charges. He could face up to life in prison when sentenced next month.
For the girl’s mother, Machele Humose, the defense’s claims seemed invented.
She knew Cunningham before the attack and called it “crazy” and “ludicrous” that he was autistic.
“He’s a pedophile. That’s his problem,” Humose said.
