There is an ongoing court case in which a British teenager recently diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome hacked into United States Military Computers and allegedly disabled several national security measures. In his fight for extradition it seems as though the fact he has Aspergers Syndrome was used as an attempt to lessen his consequences.
My question is how does having Aspergers Syndrome make it so that a person can not tell that hacking military computers is illegal? If I get pulled over for speeding can I fight the speeding ticket because I have Aspergers Syndrome?
I can see there are going to be several people that are going to want my head for saying this, but using Aspergers Syndrome as a legal defense for lessening what you did wrong in criminal court is sickening. You do the crime, you pay the time.
21 Comments until now
I agree. Using Asperger’s as a defense for a crime is comparing it to mental illness or the state of being drunk or high. It implies that aspies and autistics can’t be responsible for any decision they make and it doesn’t help our cause at all. You’re right, Zach. It is sickening.
Hypocrisy methinks. Was there not an outcry about Darius McCollum? I think this guy is getting the short end of justice because he is a Brit and the US autism advocacy machine seems not to care.
The point at stake is not guilt or innocence it is whether there are mitigating circumstances, and I believe in this case AS is material to the case.
I suggest you read up on your jurisprudence.
And to go back to the speeding analogy, if you are caught speeding you may plead to the courts that you were late for a very important appointment.
That would not get you off the charge but it would be a mitigating circumstance, an explanation of why you did it.
Another important feature of jurisprudence, is mens rea, a guilty mind, if you were imperfectly aware of the nature and severity of an offence, then that diminishes your responsibility for it, Again it does not establish innocence, it is a mitigating plea.
If I took a train because I was fascinated by them as did Darius McCollum, I might not be fully aware of all the complicated issues surrounding public safety and insurance even though I were a competent driver.
I personally think extradition to the USA is a cruel and unusual punishment for something that could be accomplished through the UK criminal justice system, never mind the expence of it all to the public purses of both countries.
Mr McKinnon could be tried in the UK and serve his time as a deterent. What purpose is served by putting him thousands of miles away from any support or hope of post sentence rehabilitation.
I haven’t seen a single post supporting the idea that AS lessens this guy’s culpability. He had the chance of a plea-bargin of 6-12 months in a low-security prison, which he declined, so now maybe he’s off to a federal super-max for 10 years…
It’s a blurry line between competent and incompetent; and I don’t have an answer as to when somebody should or should not be held accountable.
However, if he should not be held responsible for his own actions then he should not have been allowed the opportunity to do damage if indeed he was incapable of fully appreciating the situation.
Same thing with driving: if a person is not capable of understanding that speeding is illegal and therefore not acceptable behavior, then they should not be driving.
As a hacker, I doubt he’d ever want to give up his beloved computer and he knows full well– being a hacker– what hacking involves and the illegality of misusing it. So I would have a VERY hard time believing he was a hacker and didn’t understand the repercussions and the illegality of his actions.
If anything, AS probably gave him:
1) the talent in hacking, and
2) poor inhibitions so that, while he had the ability to hack into government systems, he would’ve stopped himself from going as far as he did.
Having difficulty in inhibiting one’s behavior (something many of us have difficulties with) is not the same as not knowing what you’re doing.
WEll I ask did Nelson Mandela plea bargain?
That is another story. I have information BTW that Cary McKinnon,s AS diagnosis is legit.
No it is not an excuse it is an explanation, and the facts remain that this is highly politically charged just like the Rodney King case.
Were I Gary Mckinnon I would not be into playing these mind games and speculating the odds I would just kill myself to get out of it all.
I have to say that would be a very lame thing to do.
I agree that while you may have poor inhibitions as an Aspie, that’s no excuse for breaking the law. Before hacking, he should have checked to see if it was legal or not. So I still don’t have sympathy for this guy.
BTW CS you really are a Gas, but never a Lewis, nothing of the perfect ashlar about you
I’m not unsympathetic to his plight Larry; but I’ve just read the inditement [sp?], He wasn’t just looking around, he was installing remote control software, deleting logs and accounts, and leaving “F-ck the Yanks” graffiti as well as direct threats to continue disrupting the networks. And this happened over months and months.
I have Asperger syndrome and I’m sick of the bigoted nonsense coming out of neurotypical people and social conformists to try to stop my people getting any defence from the pervasive prejudice, wrongful convictions, abusive prison conditions and general injustice we receive from a neurotypical-dominated “justice” system operating on standards very far from any we would formulate ourselves (aside from the normalist indoctrination too many of us have received).
The standards of the dominant system are those of non-autistic, neurotypical people. Autistic people “know right from wrong” in relation to our own ethics, not those of the dominant group. Hence we are often unfairly judged and targeted based on prejudices about certain things being “crimes” because they breach some kind of taboo of the neurotypical, offend people, etc. “Right and wrong” are socially and culturally relative, and the judicial system. Certainly autistic people can tell harmful from harmless actions, and hence “know” not to physically hurt people. But frankly, I don’t see why there was anything so “wrong” with what this person is accused of doing. What he did was a very minor “crime” at worst, equivalent to the dozens of phishing emails I receive, or to reading someone’s diary. What’s more, there is a strong case that it was a justified action in order to bring out knowledge which is in the public interest, and/or to negatively sanction war crimes by the American state. Why does it seem more “serious” to neurotypical bigots in America? Because the “victim” is the government; because of neurotic hysterical reactions after 911; and because he made a fool of the state, which is meant (in the dominant group’s little fantasy-world) to look all-powerful.
Law doesn’t have anything to do with “knowing right from wrong”. Often it is necessary and justified to break the law – hiding Jews from the Nazis, and the freedom railroad for example. In cases of political resistance, honour and justice are what DRIVE one to break the law. And, yes, it is part of Asperger syndrome to act on one’s feelings and not simply grumble and ask the state to do something the way neurotypical people do.
It is also very clear that autistic people do not get fair trials, as we are judged on assumptions based on normality; that prison regimes are often unsuitable for autistic people; that neurotypical people are often unable to assess what is plausible and what is not, in accounts of autistic people’s motives and actions; and that we get labelled with prejudices (arrogant, petulant, defiant, etc) on the basis of stereotypes of normality. Kafka was autistic, and his novel “The Trial” is an account of what dominant legal and bureaucratic processes are like for autistic people.
Feminists have always fought against gender-biased legal processes, such as sentences for women who kill abusive husbands; gay men have fought against criminalisation, not simply asserted their ability to “obey the law” even if it bans gay sex; and black people have fought racism in the “justice” system. The position of autistic people is no different, we are victims of a neurotypical-dominated world. A real autistic rights movement would react angrily against every prosecution such as this, demanding that we not be subject to the arbitrary judgements
At the very least we should demand to be tried only by our peers, i.e., other autistic people (the same as the Panthers demanded for black people), and only by our own ethical standards, not neurotypical standards (let’s face it, how many neurotypical people would think it fair to be tried by a court full of autistics, and perhaps be told that their story of eating dinner an hour late is implausible?). At most we should demand not mens rea exemption – laws are made by neurotypical people, for neurotypical people, and do not logically apply to us (as a different type of being), any more than they apply to apes, dolphins, robots or stones.
“Responsibility for actions” is a neurotypical construct. The key question is responsibility OF whom, TO whom. Today it is always responsibility OF the different, TO the “normal”. Hence it is simply a sideways way of saying: domination of the different, by the normal.
It is also based on a certain construct of the individual person as a calculating, rational, instrumental, egoistic being – “possessive individualism” as MacPherson calls it. Hence logically, it can ONLY consistently be applied to those people who approximate the model of possessive individualism – otherwise its assumptions, penalties, etc, are arbitrary (comparable to punishing a stone or a plant). Autistic people do NOT approximate at all closely to the model and therefore MUST logically be considered as immune to it, or else the result is that we are treated as something we’re not, which is necessarily oppressive and violent.
The argument that autism does not negate “responsibility” is an Uncle Tom type of argument, similar to the argument that black people don’t need to be freed from racism, but “civilised” so they don’t get locked up so often. It is an argument that if autistic people don’t conform to normalist dominance, there is nothing wrong with resulting normalist violence against us.
Well Socrates do you really think our American cousins were not deserving of such comments?
You haven’t heard the half of what I have said over a lifetime about what I think about American Justice, remembering that I come from a generation before the Vietnam war was history.
I don’t support hacking, I want to make that clear if I have not already, but I don’t think the USA has ever lived up to the ideals of the constitution at all, I mean you only have to consider that the Judge Rotenburg centre still exists unhindered to see that.
I watched the movie about Albert Pierepoint the other night. It may be a movie but here is a truth, the Americans hung the war criminals by cowboy methods, the kind you have seen in the movies, slow strangulation, the British were concerned that for those whom they were responsible there deaths were humane.
UK justice is of course not perfect, the Birmingham six, Barry George, Stefan Kizco but at least this has come out eventually, but the USA ….
A society that wilfully executes children and intellectually challenged citizens is not one that can be trusted to try the specifics of a case like this
Larry, a large number of American’s would agree with you, the problem as I see it is a general sweeping statement about a country you really don’t know much about other than what you have read or seen on television. Do you know there are large groups of Americans, myself included who do march, demonstrate and organize to put an end to what you pointed out? Where you cross the line is when you make blanket, obviously bigoted statements about an entire group of people, as if all of us, even those of us who speak up for justice are somehow implicit in the injustice. Your attitude is exactly what gets right wingers elected in this country and make our job harder. It is hard to defend our position when people get their backs against the wall because of ignorant statements coming out of the mouths of people such as yourself.
If some American would come to your country and start spouting ignorant, ill informed opinions about the entire culture of England because of a few things they do not like, such as your terrible liable laws, then I suspect that they might recoil and become unnecessarily defensive.
I was unaware that the US executes children (though they do kill people in Iraq, a war I have protested against). Could you provide a source for that? I’ll make sure to speak up to my congressman about it.
Stop attacking people because of their nationality, stick to the arguments which could be valid. Really this group blame thing of yours is really beneath an educated man’s capabilities. It just looks as though your an anti-American and American’s won’t listen when they feel they are being attacked in such a hysterical way. I don’t blame individual Iranians for what happens in their government. I don’t blame individual Saudi’s either for what occurs in their country. We can all argue for better government, and mine certainly needs better government. At times I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Large portions of the American public feels just like I do. Don’t make our jobs harder by blind hatred.
How did we get from the illegality of hacking/competence of an AS hacker to the political face of the US? (Am American and am also another who abhores the state of this country, but can’t we stay a wee more on topic?)
“Well Socrates do you really think our American cousins were not deserving of such comments?”
“WEll I ask did Nelson Mandela plea bargain?”
Larry, I have noticed that you have a tendency to use the plight of black people to support your contention that you understand oppression and use them as an example. However, your failure to extend this “empathy” to groups that are not black tells me that you are not really interested in the oppression of anyone. You use the black man as a prop, a ruse. You don’t see them as equal, but as always oppressed, always the victim because god help themselves, they can’t be anything but a victim by your reasoning. This is the height of racism. Its also quite reflective of your soul I think. I showed a black american some of your posts and they are of the same thinking that I am. That you don’t know black people, that you only see them as victims and this is the pennacle of racism that they despise.
A true progressive views and makes judgements based on individuality, not group identification. Its a rather immature and juvenile progressiveness that you embrace. It is in and of itself racism to view people as only groups.
You showed one black american, well you go guilty of the crime you accuse me of, taking the opinions of one to stand for a whole group.
No Larry, it just doesn’t work that way. Stop using “group blame” and argue your points, which as I said earlier, could be valid.
The so called Plea Bargain was three years per count. He was charged with seven counts = at least 21 years if three years were imposed.
Gary was going to accept this excuse for a Plea Bargain until he realised it would not be guaranteed and the Judge could escalate the charges once he was in the USA.
The prosecutors also wrote a letter reserving the right to charge Gary McKinnon as a cyber Terrorist and he was threatened by one prosecutor of “Being Fried” and the trial is in Virginia.
They now want to sentence Gary to Ten years per count = seventy years but 60 years is the maximum sentence.
Aspergers doesn’t stop you being prosecuted but it should stop you being extradited to a country that uses Torture (waterboarding) and runs a concentration camp called Guantanamo.
The U.S has lost all Moral authority in the World, with its concentration camp and scant regard for Human Rights.
This computer mis-use was done on a Dial up machine six and a half years ago and Gary is being extradited on the strength of a so called Treaty that the UK has yet to sign and never will sign.
One law for Americans and one law for the Brits that’s the truth of it.
We want Independence from the USA Bush Regime and are fed up with our citizens being Bushwhacked.
Free Gary and Free UK citizens.
Continued: The so called treaty has yet to be signed by the American administration and never will be.
It was also made retrospective in order to secure Gary McKinnons prosecution without having to provide any proof.
How can it be a treaty when it’s one sided and how can a treaty be made retrospective. It’s a nonsense.
The Military computers had no Passwords and no Firewalls and Gary saw people from all over the world China etc wandering around in cyberspace on US Military Machines.
The People responsible for the security of US military computers are the one’s that should be prosecuted as they left the US nation totally unprotected.
Thank God it was Gary who wandered in and not a Real Terrorist.
He should be thanked.
Gary hasn’t raped or murdered anyone, he’s logged on to an unsecured network.
Violent criminals and Paedophiles who download child pornography get six months sentences but you want to lock Gary up for the rest of his life.
Free Gary!!!
Arrest Real Terrorists and crack down on online child pornography.
Leave our Gary alone!
And this is to be my last comment on the matter, I am not universally condemning the United states as an entity, I am criticising the criminal justice system there, it seems people take an attack on any US institution all too personally which is why I see there is so little sympathy for the case, the Pentagon is an institution too.
But I am also criticising the UK government for this treaty and it’s misuse, and for abnegating all responsibility for what could be settled in this country, one thing is for sure, Gary McKinnon is not a clear and present danger to the US state in the same way that the real terrorists are. already the UK government has used the draconian reaction to terrorism as an excuse for shutting up anyone who is awkward, be that a pensioner and veteran labour supporter hecking at a party conference, or anyone who demonstrates against these injustices, who can be subjected to arbitrary stop and search. It is not just the anti terrorism laws either.
The reason I cannot be at the demonstration to be held tommorrow is because I am already booked somewhere else at that time. I will be revisiting George Fox house at Lancaster University. I was last there for the same conference two years ago, when the Lancaster Six were still recent memory, a group of students who had been prosecuted under new trespass laws for disrupting a meeting they had legitimate reason to be in. Even student protest is being criminalised, Before I started my presentation I reminded all present of the history of that.
I have made my feeling on this treaty clear to the Government, and that is as much the point of issue as Gary McKinnon, because under this treaty no UK citizen is safe from malicious or vexatious prosecution from any of the other states where this treaty applies, without the need for that state to bring any proper evidence, if you do something that upsets any foreign government you could be in trouble. There are at least 151 Mp’s who have signed an early day motion (the equivalent of an MP’s petition) against this piece of legislation.
And as for CS to call me a racist that is really a straw man argument, there is a lot more I could say about that but don’t have time, do you really think the Criminal Justice system in the US is treating African Americans equally, no not if you are also economically disadvantaged the existance of a prosperous black middle class is no more evidence of a lack of racism and oppresion in the US than the existance of working class home owners is of there being no class discrimination in this country, if you want to call me anything call me a die hard old school leftist.
Look closely at the articles about the case and one will find that
1) McKinnon does not claim that Asperger is the CAUSE of his actions and
2) he does not claim he should not be punished.
He says he should not be deported to America as it would be too traumatic, he should be kept in Britain for “medical reasons” (to prevent trauma).
The fact that he has been INTERPRETED as saying this is proof of the FANATICISM of the supposed autistic rights activists who support the principle of autistic people being judged and “punished” (violated) by normalist institutions.
I have already said: we are not the type of “object” which the legal system posits (normal rational instrumental individuals), therefore we cannot legitimately be judged by it. Even if we could, whatever right it had to judge would be overridden by human rights concerns over whether it could give us a fair trial (given that it doesn’t understand us) and whether it could punish us without violating human rights (given that it is designed with neurotypical people in mind).
Emily - you’re totally wrong. The effects of someone being incompetent is not that they be prevented by other means, i.e. punished through the back door. The logical effect is that they be left alone. Driving is a special case because it requires a license. Using a computer does not require a license and should be considered a protected basic right as it is a means of free expression. If it occasionally gets misused then so be it, it’s time people learned to live with a bit of risk instead of waging war on difference.
On the wider issues - yes of course the case is absolutely abusive. It is disproportionate, violates British sovereignty, involves double jeopardy (it was already dealt with here and then is raised again), violates legal principles because he couldn’t know about the extradition risk at the time of the “crime”, violates international law because US human rights abuses are not taken into account.
One must consider however, all the other kinds of cases where people with Asperger can be victims of state oppression:
1) people who are assumed to know not to do something but don’t,
2) people who involuntarily raise their voices when angry,
3) people who fight back when grabbed or assaulted,
4) people who are traumatised and react angrily in situations such as police shutdowns and stop and search (violation of routine, communication problems),
5) issues around “touching” and personal boundaries (in both directions),
6) issues in which typical autistic actions are taken to be “harassing” or “offensive” to non-autistic people (because of their intolerance and ignorance),
7) difficulties filling in forms, which may result in “failing to meet legal duties” (such as returning census, responding to official letters, etc)
9) increasing criminalisation of controversial views,
10) increasing criminalisation of “disruptiveness” at school (and increasingly, replacement of special needs education with punitive responses to difference),
11) increasing criminalisation of technicalities (taking prescription medications certain places for instance, or various issues around when bins are taken out and in),
12) criminalisation of arguing with people in authority (at airports for instance),
13) criminalisation of self-medication to deal with stimulus overload,
14) criminalisation of aggressive actions when aggressively confronted by others,
15) the whole ASBO/injuction nightmare world of kangaroo trials for walking the wrong way up a road - one even finds cases where someone who can’t tell the time is put on a curfew (see the BIBIC report on ASBOs and psychological difference),
16) criminalisation of actions which may be linked to obsessive collecting, e.g. American laws prohibiting Megatron toys,
17) criminalising people for defying, or getting angry about, sudden and usually unexplained closures of normally public or open space,
18) legalising of violent “restraint” by teachers, police etc, and criminalising of the inevitable resistance this causes,
19) inadvertent noise or loudness (of music played on headphones for example),
20) criminalising people who make “disruptive” demands on local authority services,
21) bans on forms of dress (wearing a scarf or hood in certain places),
22) laws on failure to inform (apparently without regard for communication difficulties, fear of those in authority, failing to notice something, etc),
23) laws which make it impossible to respond legally when violated in some way by another, which a response is required but no legal channel for response accessible to an autistic person is provided,
24) criminalisation of resistance to home invasion by officials,
25) issues of nonpayment arising from failure to request in an accessible way,
All of which are clearly criminalisation of things which are either incapacities, necessary/involuntary responses, or inherent results of the condition for at least some autistic/Asperger people.
All of which therefore, criminalise having Asperger syndrome as such (morally equivalent to criminalising, say, Jews as such).
All of which logically require the admission of Asperger as a legal defence (also a formal/disciplinary defence, so a boss or service provider who discriminates against an autistic person because of these things should be liable for disability discrimination).
Granted this is different from McKinnon’s case, where the concerns are more human rights concerns rather than causal concerns. But these examples should serve to silence the people who persist in denying us defence from state persecution.
PS: Without going into details, I have had cause to use my condition as a defence at levels below that of the state (educational and work contexts for example), always in cases where someone who was already being insensitive to my condition and usually bullying me was compounding it with passive-aggression through administrative channels. Had this not been possible then I would have been driven out a long time ago.
PPS: The risk of being criminalised for being autistic is so great that it impinges in extreme ways on my ability to exercise basic liberties and to carry on daily life.
PPPS: The situation in Britain has got worse and worse in the time I’ve been alive, to the point where the risk I’m at is far greater and the rights I have far less. It is at the point where I am preparing to leave the country for somewhere with a more liberal climate, despite the obvious difficulties this poses. I do not think that any autistic person would feel safe here if they were aware of the enormity of the risks and the kind of institutional hatred for difference which is now in place. I think that many deal with this by pretending it doesn’t affect them, imagining it’s only acts they feel “responsible” for that can get them into trouble, imagining they will never engage in involuntary acts or be criminalised for harmless actions or just for being who they are, or simply by not knowing about what’s really going on, by assuming it’s the mythological “criminals” and not people like us whose lives the system is ruining.
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