Do people feel autism is an explanation for shitty behavior like posting sexually explicit images on internal company slack channels?
Teenagers are also biologically predisposed to occasionally making bad decisions. The kid in this article had a brain whose prefrontal cortex wouldn't finish developing for nearly another decade. I suspect that had a lot more to do with posting links to a penis in Uber's internal chats than autism did.
humans are
Not that I'm saying that teenagers can never do those things or that adults always will, but because their brains are still developing teenagers are, on average, going to make mistakes and take risks much more often than adults past their mid 20s, and that's without even taking into account the flood of hormones and the additional stress of adolescence. Making mistakes and taking risks is just a normal part of growing up, and some people feel that it's even advantageous for young adults to be prone to recklessness.
Just a reminder: the autism spectrum is wide, and two autistic people are likely to be more different from each other than a neurotypical person.
That being said I don't like infantilizing people who have autism without more profound disabilities in cognition (I am speaking as someone who has "mild" schizophrenia). Kurtaj seems to have normal intelligence and is not so disconnected from society as to be unaware what he allegedly did was wrong. In particular his alleged motivations and mental state during all this are not that different from a angry teenager with few friends and terrible judgment.
There are other factors that are important for sentencing. Unlike the angry teen, it sounds like Kurtaj might have trouble holding down a job even if he gave his best effort at emotional and occupational therapy. But when people with autism seem perfectly capable of making moral choices, their diagnosis should inform your empathy. Turning that into an exoneration not only excuses certain bad people, but also denies that certain good people actually understand they're doing the right thing. It's totally dehumanizing.