Autistic 18yo Facing Charges

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Here is a Change.org petition I came across regarding an 18-year-old autistic lad who is being charged with assault for hitting a woman during a panic attack.

Sign if you will.

https://www.change.org/p/our-autistic-son-s-symptoms-are-not-a-crime?source_location=trending_petitions_home_page&algorithm=curated_trending
I believe this is the link?

The claim is the autistic young man pushed a disabled women. Hard to imagine a prosecution for a push. There are three Mongomery Counties. One is in Pennsylvania I can imagine something like this happening in parts of that state. Have read a bunch of stories where the goverment, school districts, and the population supported bullies over autistics there.

Total waste of time. If the District Attorney has made up his mind to prosecute, no way in hell is he going to change his mind, just because of some dumb online petition.

The parents seem very worried about it going to trial. They don't seem to have a lot of confidence that their son will be acquitted. So I guess they are just grasping at straws.

"In law, a reasonable person is a composite of a relevant community's judgment as to how a typical member of said community should behave in situations that might pose a threat of harm (through action or inaction) to the public.

The term is used to explain the law to a jury. As a legal fiction, the "reasonable person" is not an average person or a typical person, leading to great difficulties in applying the concept in some criminal cases, especially in regards to the partial defence of provocation.

The standard also holds that each person owes a duty to behave as a reasonable person would under the same or similar circumstances. While the specific circumstances of each case will require varying kinds of conduct and degrees of care, the reasonable person standard undergoes no variation itself."

From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person


If the 18 year old man behaved in a way that was contrary to the reasonable person he is certainly fair game for prosecution. I believe the decision to prosecute should rest with the victim, however, and not the agent of the state. If the victim knew the circumstances around the man who assaulted her, she might be willing to not press charges. A lot also depends on how the jury is instructed to take the circumstances into account. However, the jury does also have the power to disregard those instructions if they can come to a consensus about it.

I realize ASD is not a mental illness, but it would be treated similarly by the courts:

"The reasonable person standard makes no allowance for the mentally ill. Such a refusal goes back to the standard set in Menlove, where Menlove's attorney argued for the subjective standard. In the 170 years since, the law has kept to the legal judgment of having only the single, objective standard. Such judicial adherence sends a message that the mentally ill would do better to refrain from taking risk-creating actions, unless they exercise a heightened degree of self-restraint and precaution, if they intend to avoid liability.

Generally, the courts have rationed that by not accepting mental illness as a bar to recovery, a liable third party, in the form of a care giver, will be more likely to protect the public because of the potential for liability. The courts have also stated that the reasoning behind the harsh treatment is because, unlike children or the physically disabled, members of the public are unable to identify a person with a mental illness."

I am not comfortable signing a petition if the man tends to be aggressive and I don't feel comfortable with public abuse and I feel if someone cannot help it, they really should be in some care facility so they can't harm anyone or he should be kept at home than out in public. I would also like to know more to the story. Was she hitting him or harassing him? Was she making fun of him? Did she provoke him or was she just minding her own business when he just pushed her? How hard did he push her? Was it a light push and she exaggerated to get him arrested? Wouldn't the cameras have shown it? Did she touch him from behind and he reacted to unexpected touch?

As my therapist has told me in high school, we are all held responsible for our actions, if we cannot be responsible for them, then we can't be in the real world assuming that means we would need a legal guardian or a group home or some sort of institution.


No autistic symptoms are not a crime but assault is.

^ I agree with League_Girl's points.

More details from the local newspaper

He was offered a plea deal and the family is refusing it

So he was waiting to be put in a placement home. The man stopped when he saw he had hurt someone. He might have ran into her or something and she fell off her feet.

Earlier this year my 10yr old deliberately jumped on a boy at school with cerebral palsy pushing him off his walking frames to the ground and scratching him. He was hurt and needed to get checked by a local doctor. A few weeks before she tried to handle a lady with dwarfism but I was fortunate to intervene before anything happened.

I rushed to school to meet with the parents and headmaster. I explained to the mother about my daughter's ASD and how she would not have had malicious intent in assaulting her son. The mother (remarkably) did not pursue the matter and asked the school not to take action. Of course my daughter had a restraining order placed by the teacher to not go within a certain distance from the boy. 12 months later they are not exactly friends but she learn't her lesson and is aware that people who "are different" need to be treated with respect.

Why did she jump on him?

I don't think I would have pressed charges either because that can ruin the child's life in the future so I would leave it to the parents to do their job and have them take care of it through a therapist by bringing it to their attention so they can work on that issue. The whole point of being a kid. They don't need to be treated as criminals and hold that record.

My daughter gets compulsions to do silly things including laughing at people who get hurt. She has difficulty understanding/empathy with people's predicaments including those who have physical disabilities.

The boy in question had cerebral palsy and in my daughter's mind she thought (when she recounted the event) he had an accident and was using crutches (which in her cartoon world is slapstick comedy). Nobody understood why she jumped on him (I wasn't there) and she never offered an explanation other than promising she would never do it again.

I've been lucky that parents at her school are very accommodating as she frequently pushes kids and pulls hair. It probably helps that she looks very innocent. We got through this year relatively free of trips to the headmaster's office.