Getting proper closure

It was called the "Monster Study" -- an ethically questionable research project conducted by Mary Tudor, a graduate student under renowned speech pathologist Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa in 1939. The sensational news story concerning the study and Mary Nixon, one of the 256 orphans screened for the experiment, was covered two years ago by San Jose's Mercury News. Today somebody's going to court. \nTudor began to unveil the project to the Mercury News on June 10, 2001. Hoping to prove that stuttering was not an inborn trait, but rather was "taught," Tudor told the newspaper that Johnson designed a project to be conducted as her thesis. Never informed of the project, two groups of children were studied: children who were labeled normal and given positive therapy and children labeled stutterers and given negative therapy (Nixon belonged to the second). Tudor claimed to the Mercury News that her experiments seemed to have increased Nixon's speech interruptions. \nApparently, Nixon became a stutterer, and it was all Mary Tudor's fault. Today Nixon wants compensation, so she is taking the state of Iowa to court. \nTo the readers of the emotional Mercury News story, the case is pretty cut and dry. It seems to be just another blemish on psychology's history of experiments that today we would deem unethical. To a human: case closed. But what about to a court?\nA couple of interesting snags have risen for Nixon in her pursuit of closure. The first of which is a statute of limitations, the time period assigned by state law after which one cannot sue. But as IU Law Professor J. Alexander Tanford noted, within a reasonable amount of time of which event?\n"Some statutes start the clock when the injury occurs. Others start it when the plaintiff knew or 'should have known' about the injury," he said.\nSince Nixon is claiming she recently found out about the experiments, maybe she has a case. Maybe.\nThe events happened in 1939, and according to the Associated Press, three of the five defendants are dead. Also, the laws governing both ethical practices and the specifics of Iowa's "sovereign immunity" (meaning a state cannot be sued without agreeing to it) may have been very different in 1939 than today. Should we use today's standards or the past's?\nYet it doesn't end there. It seems that Nixon may have not been "taught" to stutter at all.\nDespite Tudor's hopes that her data was accurate, Nicoline Ambrose and Ehud Yairi of the University of Illinois disagree. In 2002, they conducted a study published by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association investigating the scientific and ethical issues involved with the case. They found that Tudor's results were inconclusive. In fact, Assistant Professor Julie Anderson of IU's Speech and Hearing Sciences department said the idea that stuttering is "taught" through negative feedback is completely false.\n"It was a part of a phase in stuttering research which centered around psychology as a possible cause," Anderson said. \nWrong or right? It seems Nixon deserves retribution, but for what, and from whom? Tudor certainly seems repentant, her guilt driving her to release the information to the press. Everyone else is dead. The University of Iowa today has little to do with the university 64 years ago. And Nixon may not have learned to stutter from them at all! \nWhile I sympathize with her issues, and certainly don't claim she shouldn't feel abused, Nixon's case just shows how emotional closure should not be sought through the courts. It's hard to face people, to have been hurt and continue living, but blaming our problems in the hopes of getting money simply won't bring us peace of mind. Sounds clear to me.