"The events unfolding in Joseph’s home—the SWAT team, the stunned parents, the vast collection of child pornography on a hard drive—have become increasingly familiar to autism clinicians and advocates. They are part of a troubling and complex collision between the justice system and a developmental disability that, despite its prevalence, remains largely misunderstood in courts across the country
The result for defendants can be the crushing impact of a system that clinicians say confuses autistic behavior with criminal intent and assumes, without hard evidence, that looking at images could be the precursor to illicit and dangerous contact with kids...
The line between legal and illegal in the world of online pornography may be especially blurry for someone without an inherent understanding of social mores and taboos. Some pursue their curiosity well beyond that line, viewing and downloading thousands of images of children—many of them prepubescent, some much younger. Until it is clearly explained to them, clinicians say, many cannot fathom what most people intuit: that the children in the pictures and videos are the victims of horrific abuse...
“There’s always a part of me that feels I should have known better, but the fact is, I didn’t,” he said. “After the fact, once it’s explained to you, it becomes obvious. How could I have not known that? But that’s wherea lot of shame comes from.”
When Larry Dubin first began to research his son’s charges, he was shocked to find that autism clinicians were already aware of the issue. “It never filtered down,” he said. “Everyone kind of knows about it, at some level, but it’s like a snowball that needs to roll down that hill.”...
For all child pornography defendants, outcomes depend largely on geography. Some judges stick close to the federally-recommended sentences, while others have spoken out against the increased punishments. But for autistic defendants, the outcomes seem also to depend on how autism is explained to the court."
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