Can people with Aspergers recieve the death penalty?

Post Reply New Topic

Yeah they can't be happy either way. People really do suck sometimes.

Then again what he did wasn't right either... It's just a no win situation. A kid killed a bunch of kids and now the state wants to kill the kid who did this.

It's just so sad in my opinion.

We don't have the death penalty in Canada, but when someone has murdered other people, they need to be dealt with in a way that will prevent them from harming others in the future, whether they are mentally ill or not.

Sentencing isn't just a punishment. It's to keep more innocent lives from being ruined or lost.

I honestly won't be surprised if soon the US does away with the death penalty just like Canada, the UK, and Australia did.

I just hope that doesn't mean we start releasing sadistic serial killers back out on the streets after only serving as little as 7 years.

Maybe if we had harsher and more humiliating punishments for commiting crimes people would be less inclined to break the law and our prisons wouldn't be so overcrowded.

I think that no-one should ever get a death penalty for any crime. Asperger's or not.

In the Netherlands the death penalty doesn't exist. People with mental disorders (autism is sometimes considered as a mental disorder, sometimes not) may get a milder or no sentence.

Washington State got rid of their death penalty back in October. It made world news. My online friend in Sweden knew about it and I saw it on the BBC website too.

Im not sure how I really feel about the Death Penalty to be honest. My aunt was brutally murdered when I was a baby. Her abusive husband dismembered her, stuffed her in a trash bag, and set her trailer on fire trying to get rid of the evidence. He destroyed my whole family and I don't think it's fair that he's still alive after what he did. At least he's still in prison.

But at the same time the more I read about it the more I realize how seriously flawed the death penalty in the US is. DNA testing has proven that over 100 inmates sentenced to death were actually innocent and that's a shockingly high number! Plus every state with the death penalty uses lethal injection which has been proven to be a very torturous way of dying when it is botched and it actually has a higher fail rate than any other form of execution.

I think the best option is maybe a life sentence. Letting a killer out after only serving 10 years seems very absurd to me and very unfair to the family of the victims. Then again if all I was going to get was 7 or 10 years for killing somebody who murdered someone I loved I think nothing would stop me from getting revenge on that person. Just saying.

Depends on the severity of the crime they committed and if that particular crime has a death penalty

You did not use the word "autistic", you used the word "aspergers" in the question. So apparently you are only asking about high functioning members of the autism spectrum.

If its aspergers that you're asking about I am pretty sure that aspergers would make zero difference in saving you from the gas chamber.

The US is in state of flux in its attitude about the death penalty. So all perpetrators of capital crimes are less likely to be executed today than in decades past. And its trending toward even less likely in the future.

So aspies are less likely to executed today than fifty years ago, but that's only because everyone is less likely to get the death penalty than fifty years ago. I don't see why having aspergers would make any kind of difference to a judge or jury.

By definition an aspie is above 70 in IQ and knows right from wrong, so if an NT gets the juice on the chair, so would an aspie for the same crime in the same situation. At least I cant imagine why it would make a difference.

However maybe its possible that if you had an aspie meltdown and somehow it caused someone else to die then you might well be classified as temporarily insane at that moment, and avoid the gallows.

State has one more witness in Godwin capital murder trial

This might interest you
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 8916301550

Brevik may have had something like aspergers. But he still knew right from wrong. He still would've gotten the chair in Texas, and would have in Norway itself fifty years ago. I don't see how anything in the article would make a difference.

Aspergers might nudge some individuals towards violence, but it might nudge others away. Bloods and Crips who do drive by shootings in the US ghettos rarely, if ever, include aspies as gang members.

Aspergers is such a recent "thing" in the world outside of Germany and Austria, that (my guess is) no country has any body of legal precedent in dealing with aspies as a category of people, or even thinking about it. Its not like alcohol, adultery, mental retardation, or outright insanity, each of which has existed (and been recognized as existing) for centuries and millenia, so every society on earth has bodies of legal precedent in dealing with those issues. Am not a lawyer, but I would guess that probably no country has a specific rule against giving aspies the death penalty yet. Its still not obvious to me, even from that article, how it would be likely that any country in the future would do that either.

The question itself "can ppl with aspergers get the death penalty?" just strikes me as such an odd question, and also (frankly) as kind of an offensive question. The reason that I, a diagnosed aspie, find it insulting should be too obvious to have to innumerate.

Suffice it to say: I hope that the OP is not suggesting that aspies should be placed on a "do not execute" list by the law, because to place aspies on such a list would be against the interests of most aspies, and would not favor the interests of most aspies. Doing that would imply that aspies cant help being violent. And officially implying that falsehood would stigmatize aspies even more than we already are.

Don't know why the OP is so seemingly eager to defame himself.

I only skimmed some of the posts in this thread, but I think the standard in the US for "not guilty by reason of insanity" is whether or not the person comprehends that their actions will have legal consequences. Like one time I heard of a guy who was walking down the street showing everyone someone's severed head like, "I DID IT!" like they'd be proud of him, not understanding there'd be consequences.

I don't think the threat of punishment or, more generally, negative consequences always works so rationally. For example, I think sometimes people like to do dangerous stuff because it raises their social status if they survive, meaning people sometimes intentionally seek out situations where there's a high risk of significant negative consequences. Also, I think sometimes people do it just as a "**** you" to the people telling them they can't, again meaning sometimes people will seek out the behaviors you're trying to diminish, specifically because you're trying to diminish them.

I have heard that they've actually done studies, and interviewed criminals about how awareness of capital punishment effected their decisions to do the crime, and most replied that they "just never thought about it" because criminals tend to be optimists who assume that they wont get caught.

So you could pile on as much harshness as you want: not just the death penalty - but have them be tortured to death, etc. And it wouldn't make any difference.

I'm very fortunate never to have developed a taste for criminal behavior, but I'd say whatever missteps I may have made in life fall under this category. I went through a pretty bad patch from maybe 2010-2015, but especially 2012-2013, and I actually did try to rationally think things through a lot--I just didn't consider all the factors involved. I thought I did, but I ignored a lot of the things other people were trying to tell me.

I would imagine organized crime is more like I talked about, though--more calculated risk-taking instead of impulsively acting out. I'm guessing that's why they get treated better in prison from what I've heard.