Aspergers, ASD and Social and Criminal Sanctioning

Post Reply New Topic

I am currently working on a presentation on societal reaction to criminality and sub-criminal rule breaking in society. This covers all classes of people whether neurotypical, mentally disordered, Aspergers, ASD, culturally differentiated etc.

I am particularly interested in borderline cases. Society tends to treat people-with-difference-states in two conflicting manners- excusatory and extra-blaming. It may treat such people more or less harsly than those people seen as 'normal'.

Aspergers and ASD are now sometimes offered as a defence against societal rule breaking in criminal and non-criminal people, yet at the same time Aspergers and ASD may arouse the same reactions as with people who are morally disorded (school exclusion policies).

I am interested in people's reaction to the above situations.

How do you feel about Aspergers, ASD being used as an excuse for the individual?
How do you feel about Aspergers, ASD being used as an excuse for additional sanctioning of an individual?

Autism maybe, but Asperger's doesn't make people stupid. We have I.Q.'s in the normal range which means we know right from wrong and legal from illegal. Being unable to read body language and not having empathy will give us a lifetime of awkward moments, but awkward isn't criminal. If people are using Asperger's for a defense against a criminal charge, they're grasping at whatever they think might work in their favor. I hope the juries can see through them. Grrrr

I guess that betrays my feelings about excusing or giving extra punishment. But as we all know, feelings can be wrong about 50% of the time even on a good day. So the fact that someone tries to use his disability as an excuse probably shouldn't be held against him. People are entitled to defend themselves in court any way they can. I just hope it doesn't work.

While it is labelled to hundreds of us, making us looking like fools or something like that. Sigh.

I think there are certain cases in which autism and Asperger's are very important to consider in court.

That is, when the disorder impairs the individual's understanding of right and wrong and/or of social regulations.

There are autistic people who'll consequently try to take items from a store - who steal no matter where they are and who's looking because they don't realise that they steal.

There are also people with Asperger's who absolutely don't comprehend that talking about sex or your genitals is a problem that might just get you arrested. Or that are obsessively driven to steal (just like in the above example) from anyone and anything because they don't get the rules of property straight.

There are also those with who might just strip down right there in a crowd of people because the clothes are bothering them too much. That's a big one, somehow. And many have violent meltdowns - telling them to not hit people anymore and lock them away for a bit or make them pay a bit won't positively influence their problematic meltdowns at all.

Yet there are also individuals with all these 3 conditions that would do no such things. No matter their IQ. High IQ doesn't mean you understand everything or know right from wrong.

That's what psychologists and psychiatrists are for - deciding whether the person in question understands that they committed a crime and understood so right when they committed the crime. And how their condition plays into that.

Oh yeah, where I live it's innocent until proven guilty.

I think the problem is that the courts are still obsessed with finding out whether a person did a thing "knowingly and with malice aforethought" or not. That's fine for clear-cut cases, but much of the time it's not possible to know quite what was going on in the head of the accused. Even the accused might not know.

I wish the criminal justice system would stick to measuring the harm done and the potential for a repeat offense, regardless of brain wiring issues, and use custody (and other restraining measures such as disqualification from driving and exclusion orders) more as a tool to ensure that harmful people are not at large in society, rather than as a tool for the Pavlovian conditioning of offenders or as a message for anybody else contemplating the same crime. Of course mitigating circumstances that suggest the offense was only committed because of an unusual situation need to be looked at, because that has a bearing on whether or not the offender is likely to reoffend.

So if an Aspie harms somebody, the courts would do whatever it took to ensure they didn't repeat the offense, just like for any other offender. The brain wiring issue is more of a key for rehabilitation, the hope being that if the reasons behind the crime are understood, rehabilitation techniques should follow, and then (if successful) there will be no need to keep the offender restrained any longer.

I think the stereotypical criminal who makes a clear decision to "do wrong" isn't all that common. I think that most offenders have some valid excuse or other for their behaviour.

While it doesn't excuse criminal behaviour, it shuld be taken into account. Those who spent their early years feeling excluded from society and it's benefits may well be less inclined to see a reason to follow it's rules, particularly comcerning "victimless crimes".

There's a zillion cases involving people with Asperger's "stealing" busses and trains, and playing conductor; since they see that they aren't going to hurt anyone, they don't see that they're doing anything wrong, because they can't see the perspective of another, no matter how high their IQ is. The punishment is usually far below that of someone who has criminal intent and a guilty mind; stuff like having to be a certain distance from bus stops and being unable to catch a bus, for example.

I recently read of a case where a high school student with Asperger's stabbed and almost killed his tormentor/bully in school. The judge agreed that the tormentor/bully had it coming due to the persistent bullying which no one would stop [because no one cared about the social ret*d], so the plaintiff was found not guilty of attempted murder. He had to attend therapy for a set period of time, however.

I agree with the judge, and I also agree that it wouldn't have mattered if he had Asperger's or not (however, said Asperger's did affect many things in the case, i.e., the inability to release emotions in a normal way, the inability of talking of the bullying in an emotional way, etcetera).

Going back to your thesis: