intellectually disabled

On a cold winter’s day in June 2002, an intellectually disabled teenage girl disappeared from the New South Wales Riverina without a trace.

In the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, 10 of the 12 Spanish competitors from the country’s intellectually disabled basketball team — who won gold — were found to have feigned their disabilities, in a deeply shocking scandal that reverberated through the disabled community.

Cisneros, whose lawyer described him as intellectually disabled, said, “I just want to say I’m sorry to the victim’s family, and I’m sorry to my family for putting them through so much pain, that’s it.”

He delves into the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments on Black men in the 20th century, the abuses against intellectually disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in the early 1970s, and four other shocking cases that reveal not just a stunning failure of ethics but a coordinated determination to silence and discredit the individuals challenging them.

The suspect charged in her shooting had faced three charges of assault with a deadly weapon from 2021, but a judge dismissed the charges when three doctors testified that he was incompetent to stand trial because he is severely intellectually disabled.