Judge Kim Taylor

Well, the situation in our country right now, to me, is pretty scary. Because it seems to me that compassion, people are not doing anything based on compassion or attempting to help other people. And I don't know what you do other than try to elect somebody that does have those qualities.

Because right now it seems that a lot of the folks that we're putting into government are just concerned about promoting themselves or some monetary issue.

Yeah, I'm not seeing much of it.

Judges are elected here. They're elected, you know, partisan elections. We used to have nonpartisan, but partisan elections. What you've got to do is make it part of their platform and part of the way you get elected is to show people that you have the ability to understand what's the difference between right and wrong. You know, what's going to make your society safer?

What's going to save your society resources? You know, what's going to keep people from coming back to the courthouse and courtroom over and over? Because I can tell you, I have sentenced people. I've done it for so long. I've sentenced people and then sentenced their grandparents and their grandchildren. It's sad. that you see this.

I guess a lot of it depends on where you are geographically also. Because if you grew up in a metropolitan area, like, for example, I grew up in the Triangle, which is Raleigh, Durham, Capitol Hill. And, you know, there are a lot of different folks there. You know, it's a lot of university people, educated people, people of all different walks of society.

And I grew up with that kind of environment. But somebody that grows up, say, in rural North Carolina or maybe rural Tennessee, it doesn't see anybody except the people that are like them. You know, they only see the people that look like them, talk like they do. And they don't expand their beliefs and they don't expand their horizons to understand why other people do things the way they do.

Yeah, we do. We do, and I'm not lost hope because, as I say, even when we did this thing back in 2005 with the legislature, I had district attorneys and law enforcement, all these folks that were wanting to help and wanting to be a part of our educational efforts. So it wasn't as bad as you might think.

It seems to me once you get people on an individual basis to care versus a large group of people that, I don't care, I'm wrong, you know.

That's true. That's true. And judges and VAs, you know, we focus so much on consequences, but let's focus some on preventative measures. You know, what can we do to divert this from the court system?

I think probably the most important thing is to open your mind to differences among people. And if you're going to be working with the public, and especially in the court system where you're making life-changing decisions for people and for families, you need to understand what these terms mean. If you hear the word, you know, autism, you need to know that it's a developmental disability.

People don't get cured of it. They can do better and function better, but they're not going to be cured. And if they actually have the diagnosis, there are certain things similar among folks on this spectrum. And in your mind, too, a possibility. I think that this was true back five or six years ago, maybe still true.

We had the University of North Carolina have a program to diagnose and try to train classroom teachers, for example, about how to deal with my own spectrum. And so the military started sending people with families with someone on spectrum to North Carolina. And we just had a large influx of people coming here, you know, that needed these resources.

I've been told, and I'm not sure it's true, but I've been told that other states now are advanced over North Carolina. How do you make people have incentive to care? I don't know how you do that.

going to be as he grew older. We did the hearing test, neurological test and such, and eventually an organization called TEACH, it's T-E-A-C-C-H, which is part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, did testing and told us that he had autism. And of course, this is around age three. So at that point, we tried to get some school resources in place.

Exactly.

I'll give you an example of that because I've seen it personally. Somebody, you know, you talk to people out driving while impaired. Oh, put them in jail, shoot them, blah, blah, blah. And then it's their son or their uncle or somebody in their family. Oh, but he's a nice guy. And you're exactly right. Nobody cares until it affects their family and their life.

And autism can happen in anybody's family.

That's fine.

Well, I went to undergrad at Duke and I wanted to go to medical school. My mom was a registered nurse and my dad was a scientist. Didn't really like the chemistry and when I got out of school, I went and worked for Social Security Disability. That was the worst job ever.

I did that for a year in a cubicle where you have to tell people they can't get this ability and they try to convince you to turn them down. So then I decided I'm going to go to law school. I loved law school. A lot of people didn't like it, but I loved it. I was there with the people that understood me and how I thought. I really loved it. And still I associate with most attorneys.

They're not bad people.

When I got out of law school, I married a guy from up here in Alexander County. And we studied law practice together. And I did just about everything in a solid law practice or small practice like that. You can't really specialize. So I was doing criminal defense, family law. I would do title searches and thieves and such. Learned a lot. That was when I was 25. And then when I was 30...

I ran for district court judge position that was open up here. And no woman had ever run for it before up here. The guy that was running against me, he came to me and said, well, is this really not your turn? You're only 30 years old. You know, it's really, you know, you need to wait. And I said, no, I'm going to do it. And I won by 75 votes with four counties.

And the night of the election, the newspaper published that my opponent had won. I went to bed thinking that he won. And then the next morning, one precinct in Arnold County, she had broken, and they came through with her, and I won. Yeah, so.

Yeah, it was. It's all the first female jobs up here in either district or peer court. There are a lot of them now, and I'm glad about it because I think sometimes, you know, it helps that women have had to experience discrimination and such.

Yeah, and I don't know how you really educate people about what's going to be happening. I probably didn't say that very well, but if you live in a large city, you might have a place where you're adult son can go to some sort of a work job and some sort of, you know, place where they're safe, but they're with other people. There's nothing much up here in West North Carolina.

There weren't any resources in Alexander County, North Carolina at the time. But I have a sister-in-law who was director of exceptional children's programs, and she was able to get some things in place. Now, of course, we have a lot more people on the spectrum, and they have classrooms for people with autism. As he grew older, he became eventually self-injurious.

And it seems like there's less now than there was.

Yeah, I enjoy it. Thank you for asking me, and thank you for doing what you're doing. I think it's going to be wonderful, and maybe you can write a book or a series of books about it.

Around the age of 11, he started hitting himself, hurting himself a lot. I would be called from the bench, and you got to come get him from school. He'd hit himself, and, you know, it was just pretty terrible. I continued on the bench. I can't recall if I was in Superior District. I think I was a Superior Court judge at the time.

My husband was working as a deputy sheriff in Iredell County and told me after his work shift that he believed someone with autism had died in police custody.

We were very concerned, upset about it, and we got the details of what happened. His name was Sidney Templeton. He was in his early 20s and had a caregiver in Statesville, North Carolina. And apparently he had a meltdown with the caregiver because They thought because his medication had been changed or something had happened in his environment that caused him to have a meltdown. She called 911.

Officers went out, didn't understand. She told them, we believe at the scene, she told them that he was autistic and couldn't speak, but they didn't know what autism was. They thought, in fact, somebody told us that they thought she said autistic.

We thought then, well, we've got to do something to educate our responders, law enforcement, people that might run into our kids and not know what's going on with them. So we were able to get a task force together involving law enforcement. We had people from the Autism Society. We had district attorneys. We had a broad range of people, really.

that were willing to work with us, and we were able to get a joint task force with the North Carolina legislature, who we met periodically, you know, and had presentations from various interested parties, and were able to develop some plans and some changes that we could make.

We were able to get basic law enforcement training to make it mandatory that people going into law enforcement would get training about autism. And it's my understanding that they still have to have annual training classes I'm not sure that they're as good as we would like them to be, but they do have some training at least to recognize what the word is and how somebody might act.

We were able to do a video. It's called Autism in the Criminal Justice System, available through Dennis DeBalt, which his company is Legacy Productions. And the video is available through him. Although the state of North Carolina paid the production video, but he sells the DVD.

uh yeah and it's about an autistic we had a real autistic person who was charged with some sort of online pornography or distributing pornography which is kind of a typical offense as autistic males generally get older and they think that something that's on tv or comes on the internet is okay to watch and so they don't really understand that it's illegal to be to be watching that stuff or sending it or anything

So we did the video and basically went through some explanation how someone on spectrum might act and that they have difficulty with eye contact, some difficulty with understanding instructions and can even get, you know, defensive or aggressive at times, you know, when they feel they're under threat.

We've continued to try to educate law enforcement and still have some pretty bad incidents happening. Hopefully we've made some difference. But one of the things that we did, and we expanded this group to the Autism Society of America, and it became a committee called Safe and Sound through the Autism Society of America.

And we had representatives from all over the country working with us on Safe and Sound. going around doing trainings and developing training materials and such. And a lot of those people are still out there. My understanding is still out there working.

Yeah. A lot of these folks are first responders, law enforcement, who have kids on the spectrum and who... kind of made it their life's purpose, you know, to try to help.

Yeah, it is great. But I wish we had more resources, and I wish we had a more national legislation, if that makes sense, because it's spotty. It's here and there, and Virginia is trying to do stuff, and, you know, everybody's trying to do their own thing, and I wish we had something more uniform.

Yeah, good.

Right, right. The thing about it is, say there's a bad incident and somebody with autism is hurt or killed in a law enforcement custody or, you know, with any first responder. It hurts the family of that person, the law enforcement officer or whoever the individual is that, you know, is involved with the scenario is usually damaged by it.

So we're not trying to punish anybody. We're just trying to educate you so that you don't run into a situation, don't know what to do.

Right, right. And that's a wonderful thing. And one of the first things I think I would tell anybody... Your 911 system, emergency communication, if they have information that tells you, oh, there's someone in that household that may have autism, whoever goes needs to know that right up front. So that when they go, they know what to expect.

And, you know, the person they have women to eye contact and verbal ability and such. I think we've got that in place pretty much around most of North Carolina.

Right, right.

Well, here's what happened. I've become, I guess it's probably happened to a lot of parents. As your child gets older and they don't go to school, somebody has to be with them, at least with my son.

And so I've had to back off a lot of the outside things I do. because I'm taking care of him a lot. But I do still try to stay involved, and Zach has helped a lot with that because he's making me do things. And I think he's doing a whole lot, at least in North Carolina and nationally.

So I'm working some with him, and then I have taken emails and calls from parents trying to help them with resources and such. I'm not traveling around like I used to to do training. Although if the internet was dead or maybe I could.

Well, yeah, if you got to communicate, you know, with someone in, say, England.

You don't necessarily have to go there. You could actually join some sort of a website or a Zoom meeting or something. So that does help with that. And the funny thing is, I don't know if you've seen this, but everybody's got the same problem. If you talk to a parent, say in Australia, their problems are the same as ours. Kind of a universal thing that's happening in Australia.

larger and larger numbers.

I think that's wonderful that you're getting ideas from other parts of the world because sometimes we feel out here in North Carolina, we don't feel that we're getting all that information. So it's great that you're doing it.

Well, you have the crisis intervention teams, which is great. And some of the larger towns and cities have it very well. Trying to divert someone with special needs into help rather than jail or prison. I was a member of the board of the Disability Rights of North Carolina, which is a federal organization.

And one of the primary goals of that group is to see how many people with disabilities are being incarcerated and released. wrongfully being incarcerated because whatever they did was related to their disability, not due to any mental intention to hurt anybody. So I worked with them for a large number of years.

Also seeing that people with autism are getting a whole lot better resources at an early age, and I think that really helps, you know, for them to become verbal and, you know, going to school. And I had one client who I represented them all. That young man graduated from college recently and is doing great. He's going to be a beneficial person for everybody.

Well, and that's a great question. It's very difficult, at least I was also head of the education committee for district court judges. And people are fighting for a little bit of time to come to the judges and make presentations. We only have conferences every, well, twice a year.

So the best thing we could do, I think, as far as education would be to develop something that goes out that people will watch. That's on point with their job that they think is relevant. And, well, sometimes you've got to make people watch stuff, sadly. But I think these professionals, for the most part, the judges that I know, I guess you can become really mean and angry, but...

A lot of people go to law school and into judicial system because they want to help people. And if you could show them that this is helping and this is not, you know, somebody just made up this diagnosis so they can get out of something. I think that's what, there are a lot of steps to suit them out there. Yeah, you've got autism, right?

Right. And that's true of a lot of different diagnosis and even, you know, people with addiction problems. So, yeah, I certainly agree with that. And, you know, if you stick somebody in prison here in North Carolina, they might not get any kind of help. for years and then they come out and they're nothing has caused them not to do what it was they did before.

I have seen more open-mindedness about it because a lot of people have somebody or know somebody that has autism. It's so prevalent now. And, you know, I can go and speak to a room full of lawyers and judges, and usually I can ask them, you know, raise your hand if you know somebody on the autism spectrum or have a relative, you know, and three-fourths of the room will raise their hand.

So I think in that sense, people are open. more understanding when it hits them at home. Judges are just like any other people.

Lawyers and judges are just like any other group of people. And you've got to show them, I think, that this is going to help not only your profession, but also the people who are affected by autism and their families. And as you say, if you're concerned about resources, it certainly helps to divert people from the jails and prisons.

Well, I was elected district court judge in Alexander, Davia, Davidson counties in 1986. At that time, I had one child who did not have autism. In 1987, my second child was born. His name is Garrett and he was born in April of 87. We hadn't heard much about what autism was at that point. So we're just trying to find resources and try to figure out what help he needed and how he was