An autistic man was surfing the internet on his dad’s sofa, then the FBI arrived
economist.com
economist.com
For those who didn't have time to read the whole thing, according to other articles online the guy would pretend to be the Parkland shooter and send messages to the victim's families.
> As examples of the messages, Fleury wrote, “I’m your abductor I’m kidnapping you fool;” “With the power of my AR-15 I take your loved ones away from you;” and “I’m the monster that killed your family,” according to the opinion.
What a horrible thing to do. His autism shouldn't give him a pass.
> It was the same with “Shark Tale”. It made sense to Fleury that Brandon would mimic the language and behaviour of internet trolls without really understanding them. An expert on autism hired by the defence gave a similar assessment to the court.
> The prosecution pointed out that Brandon’s messages didn’t simply copy Lynn Ann’s phrases, but were crafted with specific information about the victims and made ongoing threats. Brandon maintained that he didn’t intend to hurt or scare people but to “annoy” them. When a psychiatrist hired by the prosecution asked if he was trying to cause the victims anguish, Brandon responded, “What’s anguish? It’s not something I know what it is.”
No one is denying that what he did is awful. The idea being discussed here is how to properly judge someone when they don't necessarily understand the wrong in what they are doing. You might want to believe or not that Brandon did it knowing the pain that it cause. But I have been around neurodiverse people in my life, and I saw how they where sometimes unable to understand that their behaviour could cause pain to other. The opposite was also true, where they could be deeply pained by what neurotypical people would consider a fairly normal behaviour. Therefor, is it fair, is it just, to judge someone who doesn't understand the consequences of their action (or at least in the same proportion) in the same way that someone who does ? We already answered this a long time ago it seems, since the law for minor is usually different than for adult based on this exact principle. So how to we handle neurodiverse people has a modern society, it is an important question that bears asking.
We handle them so they can't have the possibility to hurt others again until we can be confident enough that they understand what they did and/or won't do it again. IMO protection of society is more important than punishments.
At the very least that person's internet usage should be restricted and monitored for a while.
Judging and handling are two different things.
FWIW, I have been victim of a mentally unstable person years ago, with employment consequences I still suffer from. Basically that guy's medication were not adequate anymore and he went to the police to report me and others for computer related crimes (things like hacking his family's emails). Me and others still have that info somewhere in my country's police system. I wish he went to the police with his usual bullshit of Noriega still being alive and manipulating him through the electrical outlets or that South Africans replaced his heart with a bomb while he was sleeping or threats of crashing our skulls through brick walls instead of the mild fantasy he had that day.
I don't think he should be punished. But he's still at large and that's not okay. Hope his prescriptions are better handled now, for others first and then for himself.
Yes, there's also the fact that those prescriptions have to/must/should be regularly reevaluated. Either to increase or decrease the dosage or switch to another approach to manage a change in side-effects and/or the evolution of the condition itself. It really is a delicate matter.
> Like yeah you're not having paranoid delusions anymore but you really have to sit down all day and you can't stop shaking your legs because your legs just have to be moving all the time and you're having problems controlling your muscles when you try to grip things and your mouth is always dry and your eyes hurt... But hey at least you're not delusional right you're totally thinking about how you're not harming anyone else right now and not how you really would just not like to be on these medications anymore so you could feel not uncomfortable anymore.
There's also the advantage of not getting shot because you went on a rampage in a 24/7 or ruin someone else's live (or your own) or health because of your unchecked behaviour. If that person can't make that choice anymore (or don't want to), I hope society can shield us from the consequences without unnecessarily hurting that person.
Life isn't fair. It's not fair for those people and it's not fair for those suffering the consequences of their conditions.
As it was kind of explained that, 'trolls' are seen as cool in the online world and so he emulated that behavior. In fact one could say he went to the extreme. But his understanding of the context and emotional impact is nothing compared to us on the outside.
This isn't a case of him falsifying a condition to get off, this guy has his whole life documented with diagnoses. It's not a 'pass' but it's simply not the same situation and so it doesn't seem sincear to charge him as such.
Similarly, as bilekas suggests, the fact that "'trolls' are seen as cool in the online world" gave this man an active feedback loop for reinforcing this behavior.
Well, even from that perspective, "society" is giving him some strong feedback that this is not acceptable.
> Well, even from that perspective, "society" is giving him some strong feedback that this is not acceptable.
With the same reasoning, you can argue that people in this kind of internet forums gave him a strong feedback that the "society" is wrong here.
Well, similar defense could be used for psychopaths as well, they too have a condition that prevents them from seeing or understanding the context and the emotional impact of their actions - but some lines have to be drawn somewhere. Society has to protect itself and innocent people who get hurt by these antisocial actions.
In case of Brandon here no one got physically hurt, and the court should certainly see his condition as a mitigating factor - but you can't just completely dismiss the damage that was done and seriousness of his actions. Emotional traumas are serious deal too, and he, knowingly or not, psychologically tortured those families, causing them a great deal of pain. And he probably got some pleasure from it too, whether from the feeling of power or from the peer support and cheering, as he wouldn't be inclined to repeat it so many times otherwise...
I could be wrong though, but in case I'm not - these are entirely different situations.
Defending the word can be misconstrued as defending the act. It’s not a fight worth having.
Most assassins are psychopaths in one way or another. It might be interesting to study them but it doesn't mean they get a free pass for their actions.
Autism can be an experience of having all your senses, empathy and emotions turned up to 11 while everyone around you is behaving in seemingly irrational ways you have no way of understanding except through the vicious pain other people steadily inflict on you.
Imagine growing up like that. Not just occasionally but every day for decades. It dulls something.
People with autism are not psychopath and it's honestly insane to bring psychopathy into a conversation about autism as some kind of comparison
Your lack of empathy and understanding for people on the autism spectrum is honestly scary
They do understand that they hurt people, but the fascination of finding something adhering to rules, is stronger.
@Scandinavian: Relatives of mine. One in particular, enjoys trolling me, and i sincerley hope its limited to me. Others might not understand the sense of humor, and it particular, the endless "reproduce" joke and reaction sequence.
I don't think it's insane to bring the comparison into this conversation, because the behavior of this autistic person is clearly a psychopathic one, regardless of the intention.
Psychopaths understand emotions but don't feel them.
They might seem similar but really are polar opposites.
Excluding intention as a part of judgement is also excluding a desire to rehabilitate the offender, which makes the goal of punishment revenge
What ends up happening is that people with autism are sent to prison, where they will be the victim of psychical and mental violence almost every day, in an environment that's torturous to them, with no ability to understand why they are there or how to change their situation. All this simply because of a desire to hurt someone who's perceived as "bad".
I'm not sure we agree who's displaying psychopathic traits in that situation
I'm aware that the concept of a disabled person also being 'bad' in some way is not an intersection box that modern world has the tools to discuss at the moment. Outside the Overton window so to speak.
I think that's a number so low, that it's not worth discussing, given that a psychopath with full mental capacity would undoubtedly be more dangerous
And psychopaths are not autistic.
Yet it does not make the two things mutually exclusive. They can be both present and exhibit in individuals at the same time.
You'd be surprised:
But what's been lost in that discourse are the victims of autistic people's unintentional cruelty. Autistic people can be punitive, capricious, and neglectful toward their children (who did not enter into the relationship voluntarily), friends, and partners.
When these autistic people are confronted and asked to improve or make amends, the response is increasingly a demand that the victims adjust themselves to the autistic way and forget their own injuries, on the grounds that they were inflicted unintentionally.
I do see both sides here, but the fact remains that injuries cannot simply be waved away because they were inflicted unintentionally, by people whose psychology makes them prone to unintentionally hurt others.
That’s mentioned in this article as well, and with some of the exact quotes you reported.
The article doesn’t say that what he did is not horrible, nor that autism should grant him a pass (in the sense of freedom from any consequence).
However, I don't think this article was suggesting we give people a pass, more that we need to think about how we handle some people's actions in light of what we know about neurodiversity. If we are locking people up partly to punish them and partly to prevent both them and others repeating that behaviour, then the people concerned have to understand what they've done wrong.
Does Brandon understand that he's done the wrong thing here? Would other neurodivergent people understand? If not, what should we do differently?
What should happen is his caretakers should ensure he can't do the things he does. But punishing him doesn't make much sense.
Ought we now simply drop all consequences for crime or asocial behavior in general, because the people engaging in such literally cannot stop themselves? I'm certain you don't agree with that. So the question then becomes where do we start, where do we stop, and why?
And yes, I preemptively agree that the ideal goal in a society would be to rehabilitate and not punish. But getting back to the thought experiment it may ultimately even be the case that widespread rehabilitation is impossible. It'd certainly be many orders of magnitude more difficult than simply getting society to agree to not kill each other, yet that's something we're still nowhere near achieving.
I am not sure why you consider this a logical extreme; I'd say the existence of free will is in fact an extreme (although not very logical) position.
> Ought we now simply drop all consequences for crime or asocial behavior in general, because the people engaging in such literally cannot stop themselves? I'm certain you don't agree with that. So the question then becomes where do we start, where do we stop, and why?
... which indeed renders the idea of 'punishment' obsolete - it is nothing more than a rudiment of our barbaric past. Punishment for the sake of punishment (as in inflicting suffering as retribution for a deed after the deed is done) is simply unethical, and punishment as deterrence is even more so. It doesn't mean a criminal should, in every case, go free - the objective here should be to maximize the outcome for the society, but equally as important, to minimise the suffering for the criminal. In the OP case, psychiatric supervision and prohibiting access to digital technology for the accused is more than enough.
Prison is known to fail at changing people who commit crimes anyway, free will or not, autistic or not: half of people who go there get arrested again in the 5 years. I'll actually follow you in taking the argument to the extreme: prison are pointless in almost every case and we should replace it with something different.
If rehabilitation is their only goal. If their primary reason of existence is to keep criminals from committing further crimes against citizens, they work well. You'd just need to extend the time to make them work even better. Can't reoffend if you're behind bars (well, you can, but only against your fellow prisoners, and that might earn you solitary confinement, aka prison in prison).
I do think in general that it's very hard to compare countries on these metrics unless the countries are very similar in culture and demographics. I.e. comparing Norway to the US feels like comparing a dog to a cow. You can extract some fundamental information ("tend to have four legs", "food goes in at one end and comes out the other") but there's little value in explaining the cow's digestive system to dog breeders who asked about nutrition.
Point being, citizens of such a country might not be in the best position for arguing in favor of prison as means to reduce crime by locking away the baddies (as opposed to rehabilitation), as said country has both the greatest incarceration rate and far worst crime statistics.
Especially considering - speaking of culture and demographics - that they're not some narco-banana republic, or some developing world backwater, but a rich western country.
Or perhaps the Old-Testament ideas regarding punishment and incanceration are part of the problematic difference in culture that leads to more crime - as opposed to a response to it...
> Or perhaps the Old-Testament ideas regarding punishment and incanceration are part of the problematic difference in culture that leads to more crime - as opposed to a response to it...
Hey, maybe cancer causes cigarettes instead of the other way around, you never really know.
Well, let's not necessarily assume you're "in a great position". But, yeah, you sure are in a much greater position to argue about that, than someone from a country that enforcings this "means of protection" but still has horrific crime stats...
>Hey, maybe cancer causes cigarettes instead of the other way around, you never really know.
I wouldn't exactly call "culture" a single-direction causual factor like cigarette smoking.
But what do I know, perhaps a strawman can be correct once in a while!
In a world without free will "care and education" don't matter. People are gonna do what they are gonna do, and education or care aren't gonna change it. No free will means determinism, not just in choice of action, but in everything else too.
The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior has nothing to do with any "freedom" as in "free will"
If you don't have free will there's no change in behavior. You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.
No free will == deterministic universe. Everything that is to happen can't change, and is already "schedulled" in a causuality cascade from billions of years ago.
If you don't have free will, you can't also decide to have "care and education" or not. Whether you will have them or not have them is already a done deal.
This is correct, but this does not mean that, say, education is useless. It is just predetermined whether we give education or not.
> widespread rehabilitation is impossible
Ah come on, that assumption is easily disproved by looking a bit around and elsewhere.
Imagine just sitting there thinking each time you hear those footsteps. In the regular prison system at large Amnesty International has repeatedly singled out Japan for various abuses that verge on torture. A quick search for "keiheikin" can send you on a web crawl about such. Yet of course the criminality rate in Japan (and many places in Asia for that matter) is near zero, in spite of a vigorously punishment/revenge based system.
The point I make with this is that different places have different populations with different proclivities. It's not like if the Norwegian system was adopted in America we ought expect to suddenly see a relatively crimeless population with negligible recidivism rates, anymore than if Norway adopted the American system would they suddenly expect to see sharp increases in violent crime and skyrocketing recidivism rates.
Not all consequences but rather all punishments. Like you said, widespread full rehabilitation may be impossible (partial sure but fully for 100% of individuals is unlikely) but outside of even attempting rehabilitation, some of the major mechanisms by which crime can be prevented are by reducing the individual's exposure to opportunities that put them at risk of committing a crime and by providing off-ramps for de-escalation before something actually happens.
In the case discussed by the article, this likely could have all been prevented had authorities contacted the individual's legal guardian and caretaker. The FBI should have easily been able to tell that this individual had a caretaker and was not fully independent. They could have worked with the caretaker to direct the individual away from these behaviors and towards safer/healthier outlets. Had things not gotten better, they could have escalated the situation to the point they eventually did but that should not have been a first response.
While non-neurotypical individuals certainly don't deserve immunity from consequence, we as a society should at the very least try to limit the opportunities for unnecessary escalation that may occur. This should be the case for all individuals but doubly so for non-neurotypical individuals who may not fit the standard mold despite being able to live a safe non-disruptive life when given some amount of accommodation and assistance.
The FBI should have easily been able to tell that this individual had a caretaker and was not fully independent. They could have worked with the caretaker to direct the individual away from these behaviors and towards safer/healthier outlets. Had things not gotten better, they could have escalated the situation to the point they eventually did but that should not have been a first response.
You could be investigated right now for something that might be illegal but it never went anywhere so you just have a file someplace with the FBI that just sits there in a filing cabinet.
Everything is punish first. Guilty until proven innocent or until proven not worth the time or effort to pursue. There is no rehabilitation, or in the case of internet crime, actually communicating when you've crossed the line, which is a humongous problem.
And it happens all over the place not just from the FBI or law enforcement but moderation policies where people get shadowbanned. That really actually doesn't help! Especially in cases where the individual might not know what they've done wrong or that what they've done was wrong. You see it in video games where you could just be a really curious person who downloads a hack for a video game and you're really just not using it to get a tactical advantage in the game you're actually using it because oh this is neat what does this do and then you get banned and the staff of the video game won't tell you a single thing about why you got banned. Take that to the next degree with this case and other cases like it where it doesn't seem like he was ever moderated at all and the first step at all was the FBI showing up at his door. That's so messed up.
I almost feel like what these cases need is basically... There's going to start to have to need to be some sort of organization or advocacy group of people who are on the spectrum and extremely high functioning but still disabled who are able to empathize and talk with the more autistic to try to get these concepts across to them in a way that they could understand. And I'm talking from personal experience a little bit with this idea because I went to a high school for kids on the spectrum and I was one of the ones on the higher end of the spectrum who still had issues but I was able to talk to the lower functioning kids a lot of the time and get them to calm down to listen better to level with them that "hey there's someone else here who understands that what you're being told is bullshit but listen just trust me just go along with it it's fine yes there's a logical fallacy going on here but it's okay." Because sometimes they just need to know that there's someone else out there who has that same kind of line of thinking that they have. But also to know that someone else out there can think the same way they do but also switch on a different mode that they might not be aware of that they could develop that is more compatible with the way the world works.
But the only way an advocacy group like this would work is if it was part of the government if it was part of some sort of law enforcement branch because otherwise it would just be another advocacy group that already exists that actually can't make any changes happen in situations like this. They would need to be able to have some sort of official pull otherwise it would just be pointless to put it bluntly.
Worth noting is that there is definitely a way this type of thing can go the wrong way when taken too far. When taken too far these types of helpful advocacy and assistance policies can end up having the opposite effect. I don't bring this up to say "too much is a bad thing" but rather that pushes for these reforms need to be careful and precise lest we end up accidentally undermining our own goals.
If we had prove that "there was literally no such thing as free will" then the question would be moot - as it didn't matter whether we "ought" or "ought not" "drop all consequences for crime or asocial behavior in general".
We'd do it or not do it, without any say or free will on the matter. Even our meta discussion about it (e.g. its moral significance) wouldn't be made due to free will, and would be irrelevant to us doing what we end up doing.
You can't disprove free will and still be concerned of what you should do morally or strategically etc, as if its your own mind to make about it.
Or rather you can (still be concerned) but not your concern will in any way matter: it would be an automatic concern.
Note also that, in regards to crime statistics, without free will, it doensn't matter whether we drop "all consequences" or not. People will going to do or not do crime anyway, as they would have had anyway, as there's no free will to deter them.
The same as for free will can be said about God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
In a universe without free will, you do what you're already set (by a causuality chain) to do. This is simply physics and basic axiomatic logic, no God or 9gag Spaghetti Monster memes need apply.
And yet Norway manages a recidivism rate of 20% [1], by starting from the premise that rehabilitation is the point of incarceration; I'd certainly call it "widespread" to rehabilitate 80% of prisoners!
Also, I disagree strongly that the logical extreme of "some people are incapable of exercising full agency" is "free will doesn't exist at all, because biochemical determinism". This is a textbook example of the slippery slope fallacy. The law already recognizes and accommodates the possibility of the former, both in cases of permanent disability and of temporary incapability. One of its main tools for doing so is consultation with experts in psychology, which also means that we can refine legal application here as our understanding of psychology improves.
Moreover, "all behaviours are driven entirely and completely by chemical and electrical processes..." does not imply that free will doesn't exist! After all, it's pretty well demonstrated (through transcranial stimulation studies, cognitive behavioural therapy, more recent psychedelic studies on MDMA, etc.) that we can profoundly alter those chemical and electrical processes ourselves. Perhaps the better conclusion is that "free will" is merely our ability to alter our own biochemical state (where "merely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here!)
But isn't our ability to alter our own biochemical state dependent on our current biochemical state?
Not sure about punishment, but corrective institutionalization for sure.
Why someone's well being is more important because he has an illness? What if he hurts other vulnerable people? E.g. psycho attacking kids. Should we care about psycho's well being more than about kids safety? What if we take it the other way and kids attack mentally ill? Should we care about their well-being more, because they're kids?
Because it's grossly unfair to the people he hurt, that's why!
There are many crimes that take peoples future and damage families for generations with only a slap on the wrist enabling them to repeat the crime. I don't think there is a good solution to keep everyone happy, the best solution is just to not be involved in crimes as either the perpetrator or victim, sadly perpetrators look like regular people.
But it is a morally and functionally bankrupt theory of justice, which is why I will always point out that our legal system was also built on other more productive and more moral theories of justice.
I know right? What scumbags! Maybe those are the people who should be locked up instead of the people going out causing the pain and suffering.
/s
There are places who agree with your sentiment and believe that there's nothing wrong with these acts... "because they deserved it"
Some say we have a "weak" justice system because we disallow these punishments. I suggest instead: two wrongs don't make a right.
A well functioning justice system is not an outlet for anyone's anger, it's a means of protecting people's rights.
Yes, one aspect of the judicial system is the protection of rights but more-over it's also to protect the larger community from bad actors and to give victims a sense of closure. To do justice to those who have been wronged by those who lash out for any reason.
For the Judicial system to do its' legally appointed duty and punish those who cause deliberate and measurable harm is not a "wrong", though I'll grant that far too many people appear to feel that it is.
Nor is it equivalent to honor killings, lynching nor torture -to say it is is misguided at best.
I am not arguing that.
If you scroll back up and reread, I said that retribution that violates people’s human rights is not a legitimate form of retribution. Like my original argument, which was that it is wrong to throw autistic people in prison who do not have the mental capacity to have mens rea for their crimes, particularly when alternatives solutions are a better balance.
> Nor is it equivalent to honor killings, lynching nor torture -to say it is is misguided at best.
People argue for awful and inhumane forms of retribution all the time which are comparable to (or literally are) these, and is what I am referring to.
For example: the not uncommon sentiment that it’s okay or desirable for those convicted of certain crimes to be subjected to violence while in prison.
Well, autism as it's used today. It used to be reserved for rather severe cases, but the meaning has been watered down a bit.
That just shows the extent of how well it's understood. Both are a diagnosis without known cause and cure.
> series of scales of symptoms
So, radically altered. The label is attached to people that just register on one or two of those scales, instead of to the institutionalized that term originally referred to. If you take offense to me calling that "watered down," why don't you correct everybody who's calling it autism/autistic instead of "ASD".
Anyway, the point was: autism in a modern, colloquial sense is nowhere near as invasive as in its original sense. There's no reason to assume people labeled "autistic" in the press is severely mentally handicapped to the point where they can't take responsibility for their own actions.
Nowhere in the ADHD definition difficulty to understand social norms or to empathise appear. They present very differently to society. I do believe that an ADHD diagnosis should not carry a reduced sentence because we are completely able to understand and see the world like neurotypical people.
There is no overlap, just ignorance and misdiagnosis.
Sincerely, a non-autistic ADHD person.
Sincerely, a non-ADHD autistic person with an ADHD + autistic girlfriend.
since autism is a spectrum it is really hard to know if it should give him a pass or not without a full read up.
although that he is able to do these things puts him on a much higher level than say my own son who will probably never be able to talk much less write messages of any sort.
If the guilty person is unable to learn or understand, an involuntary crime is the same as a voluntary one: the perpetrator might do it again. So a sane sociopathic murderer and an autistic person (that is unable to understand) that thinks killing will make them popular carry the exact same risk to society.
Should an AI intelligent enough to hurt a person because it thought it might be a good idea but not "human" enough to understand the implications of it earn a free pass?
You do understand that he doesn't understand that this is a horrible thing to do?
I read that autistic people might have trouble reading the moods of others, not that they don't actually give a fuck.
There are feelings and mechanics I wish I'd learned earlier.
And how now he repeatedly writes letters to the judge and warden asking to be let out, and in calls with family he doesn’t understand why he’s still there.
I'm guessing most of the people you've met are high functioning, so there's a bias in what your understanding of autism is
In more severe forms of autism a combination of learning disabilities and the inability to read facial expressions can make it hard to parse what is considered "horrible" for the people suffering from the condition
That does not mean they lack empathy or desires harm in others. The issue is that they need help and support parsing the environment around them
Of cause some might need to be denied access to certain things like knives or social media because their inability to understand could be a danger to their surroundings, but that's a situation for a minority of people with autism
He seems to be able to follow rules very good.
He wasn't asking people why their nose was so big or calling people doody-heads. He successfully figured out who the most vulnerable victims were, sought them out, and proficiently concocted threats and insults that would hurt them greatly.
If he wasn't so effective at maximizing horror, barely anybody would have noticed his remarks.
> The prosecution pointed out that Brandon’s messages didn’t simply copy Lynn Ann’s phrases, but were crafted with specific information about the victims and made ongoing threats. Brandon maintained that he didn’t intend to hurt or scare people but to “annoy” them. When a psychiatrist hired by the prosecution asked if he was trying to cause the victims anguish, Brandon responded, “What’s anguish? It’s not something I know what it is.”
There's this thing you'll see with people who really struggle to understand social cues and how to act "normally" in a social environment when dealing with teasing jokes (like back and forth jokes in a friend group). Someone will say some harmless thing about their clothes or their hair and they'll accidentally overstep a line while looking for a response joke that would do a lot of "damage" to get even. Instead of responding with an equivalently harmless "roast" they'll respond with legitimately hurtful things like "well maybe that's why your mom killed herself" or "XYZ is why your girlfriend left you".
Obviously they overstepped a line and went straight for the most hurtful thing they could find but it's partially because they never learned where the line was and why it was there. Even with "trolling" it's conceptually similar to "roasts" between friends with the exception that one side is often not a particularly willing participant(not that trolling is OK but you can view them in a somewhat similar light). They both have a degree where the troll/individual is harmless and it's all in good fun. There's also a degree where it's annoying or frustrating but has limited consequence on the recipient past that. Then there's legitimately hurtful and unacceptable stuff past that point.
The root of the problem here is that if the troll can't distinguish the line between annoying and hurtful, they'll try to deliver the most horrible and "damaging" blows they can all the while thinking something along the lines of "haha they are so mad, I must be annoying them really badly". Unless the person actually understands the social weight of what they are saying, there's a very real chance that in their eyes, harassing a person about tragedies personally suffered/making threats is equivalent to "I'm not touching you" dialed up to 11.
Prison is only a deterrent because people know they did something wrong and know they shouldn’t do it again. Putting someone in prison who doesn’t know why they are in prison makes no practical sense. It’s only going to make his condition worse.
Some people just need to be removed from society. Not as a deterrent, punishment, vengeance, or anything like that, but just a recognition that this human is incompatible with freedom among other humans.
A person like this man probably deserves the chance to have someone, if willing, to take on legal and criminal liability for his actions (i.e. the other person takes on the legal consequences themselves), but if that fails and there isn't reasonable confidence that this or other things won't continue to happen... then removal is the only option. There are several levels of removal, but ultimately that's what you have to do.
I have heard and been close to too many situations were a mentally incompetent person who didn't necessarily know what they were doing hurt people who didn't deserve it. The rest of us shouldn't really have to be on our guard against folks who "don't know what they're doing" when they hurt people, sad as the stories of the incompetent person might be.
I understand prison can serve more purposes than deterrence, I said it only serves that purpose when people understand why they’re there.
This guy doesn’t seem like a violent danger to anyone that needs to be separated from society physically. He needs to be separated from a computer, which is perfectly doable outside of a prison.
Let's assume culpability is a spectrum, not a binary. How do you assess someone's culpability?
No but it should be considered when prosecuting and sentencing - 5 years in a prison for someone with severe autism is a much harsher sentence than for someone without.
The article makes the comparison with Navinder Sarao - another autistic person they thought was behind a $1trn market-manipulation scheme. Luckily he worked with the FBI, and the prosecutors recommended no prison time (he was sentenced to one year home confinement)
And the same goes for every other criminal.
But I literally don't understand bullying. If people say something mean to me it doesn't seem to mean anything, I just hear words? There's no emotional impact there. In fact I was bullied pretty badly in school, but I used to encourage it because I saw how happy it made people and it never really bothered me.
But obviously we largely treat others how we want to be treated ourselves so when I was younger it was common for me to say nasty things to people for "laughs". I didn't really understand I was hurting them because what I was saying wouldn't have hurt me. I wasn't trying to be mean (not that that should excuse me) I just thought it was funny saying stuff that was inappropriate I guess?
The messed up thing is that I still feel like this... I find places like 4chan hilarious and I think it's a good example of "autistic humour" in the sense that I don't think most people there are trying to be mean they just have a perspective and sense of humour that neurotypical people don't really get.
I know some people might think this has nothing to do with autism and maybe I'm just a mean person, and struggle with that because I think most people who know me well would say the opposite. I really care about people's feelings I just don't always understand why they feel the way they do about things which means I unintentionally hurt people a lot.
Perspective like yours have been hard for me. I'm aware of a lot of stories like this where autistic people have been locked in cages for saying things neurotypicals don't find pleasant. And when I argue they're just words and someone shouldn't be locked in a cage for saying words I get attacked for being insensitive. I struggle with whether I'm the one with the problem here or if it's actually everyone else. Logically I don't understand why neurotypicals care about words as much as they do and wish I didn't have to self-censor to appease neurotypical sensitivities, but I also accept I'm not normal and therefore should try accommodate neurotypical behaviours and norms as best I can.
But I'm not going to lie, my immediate thought here was "who cares what he said, that doesn't mean you get to lock someone in a cage?!". Intuitively I honestly feel like you're the one being mean here, but I know that's because I don't understand your perspective. I just have to assume those words hurt as much as being locked in a cage for 5 and half years to someone who's neurotypical, otherwise it seems extremely cruel.
Still, as out of touch as I am I can't imagine myself saying these things to victims families. It seems so pointless and cruel. But if I had to guess I assume he just didn't understand how hurtful what he was saying was, but saw humour in the inappropriateness of it. Again, not saying he doesn't deserve to be locked in a cage for 5 and a half years for being mean, but I can see how he might not have understood how what he was saying was hurting people.
And even professional comedians make death threats as "jokes" sometimes. The nuance involved in determining whether a death threat is a joke or crime is something I've never really understood.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49508231 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40102229 https://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/the-londoner...
Well, would you be scared if a known comedian pretended to threaten you as part of an act? If not, that means you actually understand the nuances involved.
I see the comments about what the kid did being abhorrent and that autism should not excuse it. I understand where these commenters are coming from. But allow me to tell you what you're missing.
I'm the parent of an autistic pre-teen. He's "high functioning" because he can talk, read, write, do math and goes to a regular school. But I can totally see him doing something stupid and insensitive like this. The problem is there are several things he just doesn't understand no matter how many times you explain it to him. There are echoes of this problem in the article:
> He [Brandon] just doesn’t understand why he’s still in prison.
> Brandon recently started writing letters to the prison warden and to Judge Ruiz, asking to be let out. “Brandon, that’s just not going to work,” Fleury tells him. But he has to keep explaining it. These days they have the same conversations, over and over, round and round, and get nowhere: Brandon just doesn’t understand.
It's obvious to us that sending such hateful, hurtful messages is wrong. But some autistic brains simply do not understand this. Here are some things my kid does not understand no matter how many times we explain it to him: * If someone doesn't want to include you (e.g. in their Minecraft server, or party), there is no point in crashing in uninvited. * You don't say to someone every day that they stink (have BO). * You can go to the bathroom when you're at your piano teacher's house. * Just because one Chinese girl bullied you does not mean all people of Chinese origin are evil.
If you haven't experienced interactions with such an autistic person, you would not believe there exists anyone who doesn't get something so basic. Even if you've met several autistic people, it's possible you haven't met someone with this specific blindspot.
So yes, if I were the judge in Brandon's case, I'd be more lenient.
Would you say your kid is otherwise very caring and sensitive though?
Your comment makes your kid sound mean, but I'm guessing that's not the case at all. For example I'm sure it's common for him to say means things to people he deeply loves simply because he doesn't understand the weight of what he's saying? "You look fat in that", etc.
I just think this is an important point to stress because autistic people aren't monsters. They're usually very loving people who just see things differently.
But I digress I could go on about this miscommunication stuff for a long time because I seem to have a very unique ability to see both sides..
As a HN commentator do you have ideas for how society should work with regards to this issue? Especially regarding preventing harmful situations where parents of autistic children aren't able to provide enough support.
I believe it was one of the outcomes of universal basic income trials, people would engage more with the arts and creativity.
Off topic but this result is one of many reasons why UBI will not be established any time soon. People in general are not ready for the challenging “creativity” that would come from otherwise “idle” individuals.
Ah but it's worse than that
> In October 2018, a Judge ruled that Darius was dangerously mentally ill. In New York State, after a “mentally unfit” plea, a judge decides how dangerous a defendant is. There are three options. “Track 1” - the most dangerous, to “Track 3” - for non violent offenders. Darius’ attorney fought for him to be designated as a “Track 3” offender, meaning he could receive services while retaining some freedom. The judge, however, ruled that Darius was “Track 1,” the most dangerous assignation available. This was against the recommendation of the state’s psychiatrists, who all testified that Darius is not dangerous and should be “Track 3.”
Would've expected the Hannibal Lecter treatment to be dependent on a prior record of violence.
The cycle could have been broken if he was allowed to get help allowed to actually work this job that he very much was obsessed with wanting to do good except he wasn't employed to do.
Wow such a danger to society... Caused by the fucking legal system!
Can't let them get away with it!
He was arrested so many times though and wouldn't hire him for those reasons but always felt a bit cruel.
I once knew a homeless guy who desperately wanted to become a metro driver. He got into a training program, then someone else revealed that he was homeless, and he got kicked out. That sort of thing is just tragic and destructive.
Of course in the case of an autistic person, it's not a given that he will be able to carry the responsibility for driving such a vehicle, but I say it's worth at least trying, and finding some spot for him.
They just couldn't hire him because he had been charged with it. And it's public transport in NYC IIRC doesn't allow.
There are some videos on his story - its wild. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=762j14Qm9gM
Reminds me of a former Microsoft manager I met who said he fired people for not owning shoes. Real compassionate, that one.
Either the article is overblowing his autism, or else the parent should have understood his autism required a lot more observation of his behavior. I'm not a parent so I don't know how modern parents handle dealing with the internet with their teenagers, but I certainly know that it is a Thing that you have to worry about. It would seem very obvious to me that if you have an autistic kid who is getting on the internet that you'd need to be worrying about everything that they're doing.
I'm sure he was getting groomed by trolls in internet chat rooms, that he thought were "cool", and this is a good case of where the parent really needs to be more concerned about what friends their kid is hanging out with, and they need to not just plug the kid into the internet as a babysitter.
No. Society is responsible for caring for children, not just the parents. And society failed everybody here.
How do you know that? His word? His parents' word? All we know is he's never before harassed someone to the point they went to the police and the police followed it up with the relevant platform, got his information, and filed it.
Being the parent of a neurodiverse child is difficult.
What's this have to do with the price of tea in China? I'm not saying the police should have showed up and shot him if he didn't cooperate like a neurotypical person would. I'm saying being autistic doesn't make the consequences and liability for your actions just evaporate.
The trouble is I suspect this man did have the capacity to understand what he was doing and what it was doing to the victims. And so he appears legally culpable.
Oftentimes people will have a genuinely good, well-informed and reasoned opinion but can’t put it into the right words - or it gets misinterpreted thanks to ambiguity of intonation-less text - and ends-up getting ratioed.
It helps to attach a pepper emoji so people know you’re at least being self-aware.
> The concept of criminal justice rests on the fundamental principle that we are responsible for our own behavior.
Human behavior is the result of lots of factors, none of which they have control over. evolution, culture, prenatal environment, uprising and more shape human behavior and what they want and need. This is true for good as well as bad behavior.
Responsibility is really a kind of duty. When we say that you are responsible for your own behavior, we are not saying that “you are the sole cause for your own behavior”, we are saying that you have a duty to control your behavior. Duty is a moral concept, not a factual concept. So if you think that this assumption at the very core of criminal justice is “false”, you have misinterpreted it as some kind of statement of fact (which would be refutable).
It is not a statement of fact, you can’t refute it.
Theologists have been talking for æons about the essence of God and what the role of Jesus in the holy trinity is. Try to convince atheists that this æons-talking should turn their thoughts on religion on their head.
Yes, but now neuroscientists show light on how our brain works.
> we are saying that you have a duty to control your behavior.
My point is that humans are not "in control" of their behavior.
It doesn't matter if the man is autistic for his behavior to have a negative impact. The impact would not have been any better or worse if he wasn't autistic.
The question thus should be how to prevent this kind of behavior, or in his case, how to make it less likely that he'll do it again. His autism may factor in to the answer for that, but either way throwing the book at him is likely not the best solution.
Of course this assumes the purpose of the legal system is crime prevention, not punishment as an end in itself, which seems to contradict reality.
You’re playing catch-up with discussions that philosophers started centuries ago. Whether humans are “in control” of their behavior is… well, it’s a concept that needs to be clarified in the first place, because it’s extremely vague… but various philosophers have tried to come up with their own ideas of what “free will” means and what is necessary in order to think about moral responsibility.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
If you argue “humans are not in control of our actions and therefore we do not have moral responsibility” (I’m not sure if you do argue that), then you must be using definitions of “in control” and “moral responsibility” which support that argument. Coming up with good definitions is not easy. Philosophers were laying the groundwork for this discussion long before neuroscientists came into view.
Not at all or not completely?
You can't be against institutional oppression while supporting the punishment of the differently abled.
There seems to be a lot of people in this comment section that have had bad experiences with autistic trolls. That's really unfortunate, but the answer isn't to use the law and try to make them an example - that's almost certainly punching down.
That's case closed in my book.
Should he get bespoke support to avoid recidivism and encourage rehabilitation? Yes, absolutely everyone should in prison.
...and receive effective therapy instead of punishment?
Yes, I can imagine it and that would be a much better world.
But perhaps if you expect to find for a virus you are not asking a question in good faith.
Reducing criminals to psychological and developmental issues relies on the implicit assumption that it's not in human nature to do crime, but there's not much reason to think so - children frequently do things that are "criminal" in spirit, and then are punished for it by parents who want to teach them the rules of the household (and by extension, society).
Yeah, it would be really cool if the human nature was actually good and all we needed to make people good is to reach into their hearts and provide them with love and understanding... But the world simply doesn't work like that. Especially since the definition of good in this context is necessarily a sociological one.