Society’s rules still apply, whether you understand WHY they apply or not.

The analogy I was just given, is handing a blind person a blackmail letter that they couldn’t see, and telling them to give it to some particular person, while they were unaware of the content.

The two things should not be equated, and when autistic people do something wrong because of exploitation, it’s the exploiters who should get sentenced, just the same as they ought to in any other context.

There are terrorists who use cognitively disabled people as suicide bombers without telling them what’s going to happen, after all. If by some chance someone actually survived that, I hope someone wouldn’t put them in an institution for the rest of their life on the off-chance that another terrorist would snatch them up and do the same thing.

I don’t like to see conversations about people like this guy — who is obviously guilty of a premeditated act — getting diverted into “Whenever autistic people do something wrong, they ought to be locked up, no matter what the context is, because we don’t want to give the impression that autistic people ever get into situations where someone cons them into doing something awful, because that would somehow mean none of us are ever responsible.”

That’s just black and white thinking and not useful at all.

Not a fair comparison for the platypus, I guess.

1) Does the defendant’s mental condition render him not responsible for any crimes he committed? That’s the insanity defense, which is rarely used and even more rarely successful. It’s not an issue in this case.

2) Is the defendant mentally capable of properly defending himself (which includes sentencing negotiations) in his trial? Here the issue is not whether or not the defendant is responsible for his acts, but whether he can get a fair trial. Normally in a murder case, an incompetent defendant would be held in a secure hospital until such time as he became competent, at which point he’d be tried. That’s the issue at hand.

The issue here seems to be whether Reiser can argue that behavior that most people would think indicated, say, lack of remorse may be due to his neurology rather than his actual state of mind. Nobody’s arguing that he isn’t responsible for the killing.

Was it established that Mr. Reiser was diagnosed or was that more speculative and ad hoc for the purposes of the trial?

I would hate to see Asperger’s Syndrome hijacked as a disingenuous “Twinkie Defense” of this century, not only because it potentially creates a false impression of the great majority of the group as sociopaths or not to be trusted, but runs the risk of making a joke of a legitimate defense when that might be relevant.