You can learn about feelings, but that means you misunderstand or is completely ignorant of the mechanics of the feeling until you are taught about it, once you're taught about it you can try to interpret the signs, but it's still hard and error-prone work, even though it's probably work worth doing, for the benefit of other's perception of your actions.

There are feelings and mechanics I wish I'd learned earlier.

The article describes that he liked to recite the lines of movie super villains, and was fascinated with internet trolls because they were popular. And he wanted to be popular.

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.

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There are many who can live high functioning lives, there are also those who never learn to speak and require assistance there entire life.

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

And the guy being in jail, not knowing why he's there, helps them how exactly?

Honestly I'm not so sure. To quote the article:

> 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.

I think that gets to the crux of the issue. If Brandon is culpable for his actions, it's right he is punished. If he is not, then should he have the freedoms that allowed him to do this?

Let's assume culpability is a spectrum, not a binary. How do you assess someone's culpability?

Just ban him from using the internet. That was what happened during his bail and the article seems to indicate he was happy to follow the rules he was given.

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.