What the Courts Refuse to See: an Autistic Reading of A.J.T. v. Osseo

Disability, Discretion, and the Legal Logic of Neglect.

An autistic forensic scientist turned educator traces legal and systemic patterns in A.J.T. v. Osseo, exposing how “professional discretion” renders harm invisible—and imagines what a truly free public school could be.

Introduction - A Friday Email and an Autistic Thread-Pull

The news arrives like it always does—Friday inbox, Disability Scoop, quietly apocalyptic. Buried between headlines on Medicaid policy and diagnostic criteria reform is one that stops me cold: Supreme Court to Rule in Case That Could Upend Rights of Students With Disabilities. It’s about a student in Minnesota—Ava Tharpe—whose epilepsy led her family to request a later school start time, a simple adjustment to support her health and learning. The district said no. And now, the courts are deciding whether she has the right to challenge that denial under the ADA and Section 504—whether, in fact, any student does—unless they can prove the school acted in “bad faith or gross misjudgment.”

My autistic spidey sense fires immediately. The words shift on the page, and somewhere in the folds of my brain, threads start pulling tight. This isn’t just a question about education. It’s about harm and discretion, about who gets protected and who gets proceduralised. My mind doesn’t move in straight lines. I process relationally, associatively. And what lights up for me—what won’t let go—is the shape of something I’ve seen before. Two old cases come rushing back: Youngblood, and Daubert. The first was about evidence—what happens when police fail to preserve something that might have proven a man’s innocence. The second, about expert testimony—who gets to speak, and whose knowledge counts. Both were landmarks in my forensic science career. Both taught me the law’s quiet tolerance for institutional failure, so long as it’s wrapped in the cloak of professionalism.

That’s the shape I see here, too. What others might file away as unrelated legal decisions—Youngblood, Daubert, A.J.T.—appear to me as overlapping iterations of the same logic: the institutional exoneration of harm under the guise of professional discretion. Whether it’s police, scientists, or educators, the system doesn’t ask if someone was hurt. It asks if the institution meant well. And if the answer is yes, then the harm is not only excused—it is rendered invisible.

Crime Scenes and Courtrooms: Youngblood and Daubert Revisited

In Youngblood v. Arizona (1988), the Supreme Court held that police are not constitutionally required to preserve potentially exculpatory evidence unless the defence can prove bad faith. The facts of the case are chilling enough—a child victim, a wrongful conviction, and lost biological samples that could have spared years of suffering. But it’s the ruling that lingers. The Court decided that negligence alone wasn’t enough. Harm, it seems, only matters when someone meant to cause it. That precedent took root during the years I worked in forensic science, crawling through crime scenes and hard drives, cataloguing digital traces that might become evidence. We were trained—compelled, really—to preserve everything. The mantra was always: you don’t know what will matter until it does. But in the legal system, that principle doesn’t hold. If a piece of evidence is ignored, mishandled, or destroyed without malicious intent, the courts will often let it slide. It’s an ethics of consequence deferred—until the consequences fall on someone too powerless to contest them.

That’s the ethical dissonance I carried through hundreds of cases. On the one hand, a professional code built on rigour and documentation. On the other, a legal structure that permitted loss, error, and silence—as long as those failings came dressed in institutional credibility. There is no obligation, under Youngblood, to look for the truth—only not to be provably corrupt in ignoring it.

Then came Daubert v. Merrell Dow (1993), which reshaped the standards for expert testimony in American courts. The ruling tasked judges with acting as “gatekeepers” of scientific evidence, weighing its testability, error rate, peer review status, and general acceptance. In theory, it was about preventing junk science. In practice, it often became a filter for epistemic conservatism. During my time testifying in court—sometimes in high-profile or politically fraught cases—I saw firsthand how this standard could be weaponised. Knowledge drawn from established labs, federal agencies, or Ivy-covered institutions sailed through. But community-derived insights, emerging technologies, or methodological innovations were suspect—unless vouched for by the right kind of expert. I remember cases where video evidence analysis I’d conducted, grounded in sound science and digital forensics, was questioned more rigorously than the testimony of someone who hadn’t updated their methods in a decade but held ‘the right’ certification. Daubert didn’t ensure rigour—it ensured alignment. It told us who gets to speak, and whose knowledge counts.

In both cases, the same structure repeats: harm becomes invisible when mediated through bureaucracy. The failure to preserve evidence is excused by lack of ill intent. The rejection of expertise is sanitised by appeals to procedural “neutrality.” These rulings taught me early on that the law is less concerned with what happened than with whether the institution involved followed protocol. And if it did, even devastating outcomes can be rationalised as unfortunate, but legally tolerable.

I’ve lived this logic before. In United States v. Wells, a federal homicide case where I was called to review the government’s video evidence, the prosecution filed a motion to exclude me from testifying at the evidence hearing. They worked exceptionally hard to challenge not only my findings, but my very presence in the courtroom. I was ultimately permitted to testify—but not without resistance and a few limitations. In that hearing, three of my former students testified as experts: two for the prosecution, one for the defence. It became surreal—a stage where my own legacy was weaponised to discredit me.

The Daubert hearing itself revolved around video evidence so degraded it reduced a moving vehicle to a blur—33 by 11 pixels—captured from over a thousand feet away. From that smear of data, the government built an identification so precise it defied both physics and forensic logic. They brought in experts on automotive paint, manufacturing standards, and spectral colour analysis to argue that not only was the vehicle a Honda CR-V, but that it was the CR-V, to the exclusion of all others. The cost of defending this visual fiction exceeded millions of dollars in expert fees.

What struck me wasn’t just the evidentiary overreach—it was the procedural obedience that allowed it. Demonstrative comparisons stood in for scientific measurement. Visual assumptions were presented as empirical fact. And the system nodded along, so long as the experts wore the right credentials. I remember thinking at the time: this isn’t about what the evidence shows. It’s about who gets to say what it means.

So when I read A.J.T. v. Osseo, it felt familiar. Not in the details, but in the shape. Once again, the law seems poised to elevate intent and institutional professionalism over outcome and harm. Once again, expertise is less about truth than about trust in the right uniforms. The question isn't “Was harm done?”—it’s “Did the institution mean well?”

AJT v. Osseo: When Educational Harm is Rendered Legal

Ava Tharpe was fourteen years old when she began experiencing seizures linked to a rare neurological condition. Her parents requested a modest accommodation: a later start time at school, aligned with medical advice that early mornings increased her risk of seizure. The Osseo Area School District in Minnesota declined. Her health deteriorated. Her family sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, arguing that the district’s refusal amounted to discrimination. But the lower courts dismissed the case, not because harm hadn’t occurred—Ava’s seizures were well-documented—but because the family couldn’t prove the school had acted in bad faith or with gross misjudgment.

That’s the question now before the U.S. Supreme Court: must disabled students prove malicious or reckless intent to claim their rights were violated under federal disability law? Or is it enough to show that the institution knew of the harm, could have acted to prevent it, and chose not to? The outcome of this case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, has implications far beyond one student or one district. It will determine whether the law protects disabled students from negligence—or only from overt malice.

And once again, I find myself watching a system where intent trumps outcome, and procedure shields power. Just as Youngblood let police off the hook for failing to preserve evidence so long as they weren’t acting in bad faith, and Daubert narrowed the definition of valid expert knowledge to what courts already trust, A.J.T. threatens to enshrine a standard where institutional actors can harm children with impunity, as long as they appear reasonable doing so.

What’s more, the imbalance of resources is stark. School districts, backed by state insurance and legal funds, can spend millions defending decisions that might have cost almost nothing to make. Ava needed a later school start time. Instead, she and her family are now entangled in a years-long legal process, facing down the full weight of the government’s litigation apparatus. It mirrors the dynamic I saw so often in forensic cases: the state can afford to be wrong for a very long time. Individuals can’t.

This isn’t about whether one child was wronged. It’s about whether any child’s suffering matters when a public institution says it meant well. And if the Court affirms that only bad intentions count, then systemic failure becomes legally invisible. Again.

Why My Autistic Spidey Sense Expects the Worst

It’s not just a hunch. It’s a patterned recognition—one my autistic brain can’t help but follow. I’ve seen this shape before, too many times. And everything in me says the Court is going to side with Osseo. Not because it’s just. Not because the reasoning holds up under ethical scrutiny. But because the ideological alignment of the current U.S. Supreme Court leans toward institutional preservation over individual protection.

This is a Court dominated by originalists and institutionalists—justices who profess fidelity to the text and history of the Constitution but in practice defer to the authority of state actors when it suits the interests of order, control, and continuity. They’ve shown a steady reluctance to interfere with how institutions exercise “professional judgment,” whether in policing, education, or healthcare. And in case after case, they’ve made it harder for ordinary people to sue those institutions—even when there’s clear evidence of harm. The logic is tidy: if we trust the experts, there’s nothing to fix. If harm occurs, it’s unfortunate—but not actionable unless someone can prove malice.

That’s the trap: unless you can show that a public body meant to hurt you, you have no claim. And since institutions rarely document their indifference as cruelty, the law offers no remedy. This isn’t oversight—it’s legalised negligence. And I’ve watched the Court entrench it.

There’s also the judiciary’s allergy to opening the so-called floodgates. If they lower the evidentiary bar in A.J.T., the reasoning goes, schools across the country might be sued by disabled students who were denied services or accommodations. And that would be chaos, or so the narrative insists. But from where I stand—as a special educator, an autistic person, and someone who’s spent a lifetime navigating systems designed without us—that is the justice we’ve been asking for all along. Not special treatment. Just redress. Just fairness.

And even if this Court surprises me, the machinery behind the case continues to grind. Trump’s systematic dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education during his first term, and his pledges to eliminate it altogether, have already hollowed out the oversight mechanisms that might have prevented cases like this from escalating. Cuts to civil rights enforcement, to IDEA compliance monitoring, to Office for Civil Rights staffing—these aren’t incidental. They’re part of a slow bureaucratic erosion of the very pathways through which families once sought support.

So yes, my autistic spidey sense expects the worst. Because I know how the story goes when institutions are asked to police themselves. And because I know how often the law confuses order for justice—and professional judgement for moral authority.

The Consistency of Injustice: A Broader Pattern of Neo-Liberal Harm

There’s a bleak consistency to it all. The ruling in A.J.T.—whether it lands as I expect or surprises us—doesn’t exist in isolation. It fits within a broader, grinding pattern: the slow-motion dismantling of public institutions under neo-liberalism. Education, healthcare, social welfare—each has been strategically hollowed out, not all at once, but piece by piece. Services are reduced, oversight mechanisms are starved, and what remains is repackaged as innovation or reform, even as it collapses under the weight of neglect.

In education, we’ve watched this happen for decades. The language of choice and accountability masks an unrelenting extraction process. The state abdicates responsibility whilst opening the door to private contractors, ed-tech platforms, behaviourist curricula, and corporate publishers—none of whom are meaningfully accountable to the communities they serve. Meanwhile, those of us inside the system are told to do more with less, to implement standardised frameworks with children who need relational care, not compliance metrics. And when harm happens, it’s proceduralised: we followed the IEP, we conducted the assessment, we documented the behaviour. Case closed.

That’s the trap. Once harm becomes an issue of documentation rather than impact, it ceases to be legible as harm. A child seizing in class because her start time couldn’t be adjusted isn’t seen as evidence of systemic failure. She becomes an anecdote, a data point, a footnote to someone else’s procedural fidelity. The school “did everything right,” we’re told—except listen. Except care. Except protect her.

This is how neo-colonial logic survives: through discretion framed as professionalism, through gatekeeping disguised as neutrality. The same logics that once governed empires now operate through public institutions that claim to serve, but in reality, filter and exclude. It’s no accident that the most marginalised students—disabled, racialised, poor, queer—are the ones most frequently caught in these procedural snares. Their humanity is subordinated to the smooth running of the machine.

And then there’s the “enshitification” of schooling—the tech-bro term that’s almost too apt. At first, public education was meaningful, if imperfect. Then it became profitable. Now it is degraded, standardised, and surveilled in ways that serve vendors more than children. Professional judgement has become a shield for systemic decay. We’re told the system is neutral, even as it reproduces exclusion.

So when the courts tell us that only bad intentions matter—that harm without malice is no harm at all—they’re not breaking with precedent. They’re codifying the rules of a system that was never built for equity. They’re not failing the public school. They’re finishing what has already been set in motion.

Imagining Otherwise: What Could a Free Public School Be?

There’s a kind of mourning that comes with seeing systems clearly. Public education—as it exists—is not broken. It is functioning exactly as a neo-liberal, settler-colonial system was designed to: to stratify, to sort, to extract. I don’t believe it can be reformed. Not under capitalism. Not under a regime where value is measured in test scores, compliance, and return on investment. And yet, I still teach. I still imagine. Because autistic minds don’t just analyse systems—we dream alternatives. We feel the cracks, trace the patterns, and loop our way toward visions others haven’t yet allowed themselves to see.

I’ve been imagining what a truly free public school could be—not a marketised product, but a collective endeavour. Not a site of compulsory assimilation, but one of relational belonging. I picture it as a place of sensory dignity, where no child is forced to endure fluorescent lights, screeching bells, or active shooter lockdown drills just to receive an education. Where regulation means co-regulation—grounded in nervous system literacy, not control. Where noise-cancelling headphones, stimming spaces, and soft corners are the default, not the accommodation.

I see a curriculum that spirals outwards from curiosity, not downward from state standards. One built on stories, metaphors, experiments, and reciprocal knowledge-making. A narrative-rich environment where language is expansive, multilingual, gestural, symbolic. Where the boundaries between subjects are porous—math as poetry, science as ancestry, history as lived memory.

In this school, accountability is not compliance. It’s community care. Students and teachers hold each other in circles of feedback, not hierarchies of surveillance. Policies are co-created, not imposed. Justice is restorative, not punitive. And professional judgment isn’t weaponised—it is relational. It is slow, attuned, and situated in trust. The role of the adult is not to control, but to steward.

Strangely, my imagination keeps drifting toward the old Soviet housing blocks—those modest architectural designs that placed schools within walking distance of every apartment, often without the need to cross a street. There was care in that design, even if it’s unfashionable to say so in America, where we’re taught to recoil at anything Soviet. We forget, or we’re never taught, that the USSR was encircled, embargoed, and still managed to prioritise education, healthcare, housing. That in the brutal aftermath of WWII, with entire cities levelled, they rebuilt with collective intent. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, miraculous.

And so I wonder—what might a collective accomplish here, in a country as resource-rich as the United States, if we stopped spending our genius on sabotage? If our institutions weren’t built to gatekeep, but to gather? If intelligence wasn’t about surveillance, but about sense-making? If schools were not designed to serve the economy, but to serve life?

It’s not utopian to imagine otherwise. It’s survival. And for those of us who have survived systems not built for us, imagining is not escape. It is resistance. It is repair.

Final thoughts …

The email still sits unopened in most inboxes, just another link in a long chain of headlines signalling slow-motion collapse. But for me, that Friday bulletin became a spark. A.J.T. v. Osseo wasn’t just another education case. It was a trigger, a flare, a signal in a language only some of us can read. The connections lit up in my mind before I could name them: Youngblood, Daubert, budget cuts, bureaucratic violence, the glint of a blue blur at a thousand feet. Not separate events, but echoes—recurring patterns stitched through time.

That’s the gift and the burden of being an autistic gestalt processor. We don’t parse line by line—we feel the structure. We don’t just follow rules—we map their implications. Where others see isolated cases, we sense alignment. We notice the rhythm of injustice as much as its content. We trace the shape of harm even when the system calls it something else: professionalism, policy, precedent. And we speak to it, even when no one is listening.

It hurts, sometimes, to see so much. To feel it all and still be told that if no one meant to hurt you, then no harm was done. But we know better. We’ve lived too many versions of this story to pretend otherwise. Still, we speak. Still, we write. Still, we name what is made invisible. Not because we expect the courts to thank us, but because naming is a form of resistance. Because pattern recognition is not only a cognitive style—it is a political act.

The law may not yet recognise the harms we see. It may not be built to. But that doesn’t mean those harms aren’t real. And it doesn’t mean they go unmarked. If we trace them—honestly, precisely, in language that holds complexity—then maybe, just maybe, others will begin to see the outline, too. And maybe, when enough of us see it, the shape will no longer hold.

Until then, we map the patterns. We scatter the stones. We write in loops. We remember what others forget. Because even when the world refuses to witness, autistic minds do.

—June 2025 Update—

And then—unexpectedly—the shape cracked. On 12 June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favour of Ava. In doing so, they overturned the 8th Circuit’s requirement that students like her prove “bad faith or gross misjudgment” to access protections under the ADA and Section 504. The Court reaffirmed that “deliberate indifference” is the appropriate standard—bringing educational settings back in line with the broader landscape of disability law. No longer must harm be cloaked in malice to count. No longer must students prove cruelty to be recognised as wronged.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, called the decision “narrow.” But as anyone who has spent time in the procedural labyrinth of disability law knows, “narrow” in rhetoric can be seismic in practice. For students and families caught in systems that fail them with a smile, this ruling pries open a door long held shut by deference to institutional discretion.

And yet, the logic I traced throughout this essay still holds. Because even with this rare legal correction, the conditions that birthed the case remain unchanged. Ava’s family still spent years fighting for what should have been a simple scheduling accommodation. The district still deployed its full legal arsenal to defend an indefensible decision. And the broader system—scarred by decades of austerity, privatisation, and bureaucratic neglect—continues to function as intended: orderly, extractive, and resistant to care.

This ruling is not a reversal of that trajectory. It is a momentary blink in a system calibrated for professional absolution. A pause. A breath. A crack of light. But it does not erase the pattern. And my autistic spidey sense doesn’t retract—it recalibrates.

Because even when we win, we’re made to fight for it. Even when the Court gets it right, it is framed as exceptional. The expectation remains: that the burden of proof is ours, that we must name our pain in legal syntax, and that justice—if it arrives—comes late, incomplete, and always at cost.

Still, it matters. Still, we mark it.

Because sometimes the shape flickers. And in that flicker, we glimpse what else might be possible.