Mark Mahoney
Appearances
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They train them on how to accommodate them. They don't train them in the fact, wait a minute, this person, be ready for the fact this person may have absolutely no clue that what they did was wrong. And these cases ought to be diverted if possible. There's very little organized.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
The ARC of New Jersey has been very active in direct involvement in cases, trying to get local chapters of the ARC or Autism Society is hit and miss. Years ago, I put together, assisted in some of the best known experts in the country to write a policy paper talking about principles for prosecutors who are considering bringing charges in these cases.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And basically saying, look, on the first arrest for somebody that's something like this, they shouldn't be prosecuted. They just need to have somebody tell them what the rules are. The normal sex offender we think of is somebody who's learned behaviors. They've learned to justify treating children sexually and excusing it in their own minds and rationalizing it. And they may be antisocial.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Virtually all of my clients that I've had, the problem is not that they've tried to get around these rules or rationalized violating them. They just weren't aware of them. So these organizations that were afraid to come out openly and vigorously against these prosecution policies.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
because they're afraid that people will stigmatize people with autism, saying, oh, you're saying that people with autism are criminals. They're worried about that, worried about how their donations might be affected by this. But prosecutors on the politics, they need to believe that part of their constituency is the disability community.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And when you look at the level of people with disability in prisons, which is way out of proportion in presence of the population, There's every reason for these disability organizations to be on board with saying, look, we're totally out of whack here with what is going on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Not only are we criminalizing people with disabilities, we're putting them in institutions that are very deleterious to them. And of course, it's torture for these individuals in prison. All my clients, virtually all my clients were bullied throughout their childhood and school years because they are different. Children, little children, even in preschool are great diagnosticians.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They know the ones that aren't, that don't get it socially. I've had cases of real bullying in the preschool level of kids with autism. So they're driven out of the social world, which makes it even harder for them to develop these social skills and intuitions.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And a lot of them end up being homeschooled because the schools aren't protecting their children or don't provide services that they should. A lot, of course, are delayed in their diagnosis since the parents really have no clue why this is happening. It's always being
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Or it's hard to find people doing more than one case. And there's some who say that they have a practice involving this, but I've reached out to some of these people and they're not really telling me anything about what they do, actually. Because I'd like to liaison with people. I'd like to know I could refer cases to people because I am just overwhelmed with this.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Getting the autism community on board with setting out policies which clearly alert these prosecutors and train the police, there are exceptions. There's a district attorney in Pennsylvania who has a committee to screen cases where the individual may have disabilities and screen them out of the criminal justice system.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
There's a statute in Virginia that was adopted to allow judges, even without the consent of the prosecutor, to divert cases. It hasn't worked out perfectly, but there are things like that, but they're piecemeal. We really need top-level down understanding.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Another thing that is really, I think, a big problem is there is no certification, board certification, within the APA, American Psychological Association, for psychologists dealing with people with disabilities. I've encountered a very low understanding that the little talk I gave earlier about the relationship between eye gaze and learning social norms and so on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I would say that 99% of clinicians are not familiar with that research. They understand looking at somebody now in a snapshot way, the diagnostic criteria, but understanding exactly, and so they could say, this is how people with autism are, and that this client is acting consistent with people who have autism. But you ask them, why are they that way? They're really not able to explain that.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
What I have found is when you explain to prosecutors and judges why somebody with autism, despite appearing normal and intelligent and so on, why they don't get these things that everybody thinks everybody knows.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
When you explain why that happens, that's been the key to my ability to get prosecutors to recognize this is true and understanding that the intuitions that they bring to this as law enforcement people are really not very useful in understanding autism. Dr. Tommy Kland, who did some seminal research at Yale, he now runs the Marcus Autism Center at Emory University, he made this comment.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
If you really want to do this work with people with autism, you have to leave your common sense at home because the way these individuals behave does not go along with common sense. If you want to understand them and do right by them, you have to leave your common sense at home and try to look at the world from their point of view.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
The other big issue is prevention. Many of my cases, we learn sexuality through prevention. social interaction. We learn these rules that way. So the clinics and programs that are in the school or autism service organizations are not doing the sexuality teaching. Sometimes they think these kids aren't interested in sex, but they very much are.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And they're not going into the nuts and bolts of sexuality and teaching these rules. What we know about autism is that because of lack of intuitive sense of how the world works, they will grasp at rules and be rule bound. They're not being told these rules. And that's the big tragedy.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
So the first thing for parents are, do not think that you don't need to talk to your children about sex and all the rules that you have learned automatically about sex and sexual boundaries, age difference, age of consent, that sort of thing. But going forward with parents, it's a very difficult thing. They are in a nightmare that they never could have imagined.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They've worked for decades maybe to give their son or in several cases I've had daughters a normal life, but usually it's academic success. It might be occupational, but they've missed this social piece and they're told or they think because he's smart, he'll grow out of it. He'll learn the social thing. He'll learn how to make friends. No, it's not going to happen. So that's the preventive side.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I'm doing my best to try to train lawyers. I just gave a lecture in New York City last week. I gave a lecture in Toronto. I gave a lecture in Fort Worth. This will last two months to hundreds of lawyers. And I publish stuff. I give away material free to lawyers and families.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They need to have a lawyer who, number one, says if you sit down with a lawyer and they don't, within 30 minutes, and hearing about your son's history and your view of your son, if they aren't horrified and feel that this whole thing is totally unjust and just say, the system is the way it is and we'll see what the DA will give us, then you've got to leave that lawyer.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I had a basic criminal, somewhat normal criminal practice. I had some very large cases. Starting out early in my career, I did a lot of homicides and I got involved in a serial killer case when I was only like four years out of law school. I've had cases where trial lasts six months.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Or if they say, look, here's this paper you can find online that Mark Mahoney gave to lawyers in Texas a couple of years ago. Read it. What do you think? If the lawyer's initial reaction is, that's very interesting, but we don't do things that way here. Or our judges won't do this. Our prosecutors won't do this.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
If they don't immediately say, look, we've got to get a thorough evaluation and find an expert that can explain the connection between autism and this, walk away. And they've got to be very careful, too, because there are a lot of lawyers who will look at this and they'll have two things going on in their head. Number one, the parents are scared to death for their child.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Number two, they really don't know anything about autism. They will tell the family, set a flat fee. Very often, flat fees are very common for criminal lawyers in parts of the country. Not so much in New York, where they're very much in disfavor. They'll say, okay, give me $75,000. But they know this is a big problem case.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
If they work hard, they can do things that, to them, are the kind of things that lawyers need to do to... be, quote, aggressive in defending somebody. Maybe they'll make a motion to suppress some statement made to the police or hire forensic people to look at the computers and cell phones.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I should say, not all my cases are sex offenses because I got a lot of other cases that don't involve sex at all. So families can go to a lawyer who takes basically all their money. And I've had families who sold their house or gotten another mortgage or something to pay these retainers.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And then later on, they realized the lawyer, first of all, was not telling them what was going on with the case. So I can't tell you about, I can't share this discovery with you because you're the parent, you're not the client. He's my client. When he may have, let me, this, I'll give you a scary data here. The average age of my client is 25. The average IQ is 106.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And now we're talking about well over a hundred people. Okay. Their average age level in terms of their interpersonal social skills empirically measured with the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, a very common, very widely used measure of social adaptation ability.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Their age equivalent in the interpersonal social skills, which again, those skills are the ones that relate to social competence, is three years and three months. So this is an unbelievable figure. Even experienced clinical psychologists, when I've talked to them about this, they say, I can't be right. And I show them. I've got dozens and dozens of these reports. This is what you're dealing with.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
But lawyers, they'll say, oh, he knows what's going on. I talked to him and explained it to him. Any parent will tell you, yes, my son or my daughter is going to be not in their head. And they'll parrot back what somebody said, but they do not understand it. They meet with the lawyer and then they come back and all of all these questions to the parent.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And you cannot convince the lawyers that they don't understand this. They don't know who to hire as an expert. They'll go to their buddy who helped them in their murder case. And the judge, the prosecutors respect this person. And they really don't know anything about autism, oversight the diagnostic criteria for autism and so on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And then what happened is that back in 2007, I got a call from a very well-known lawyer in New York City asking for my help on a case involving somebody who was charged with child pornography. in Rochester, New York, which is in our federal district.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
But they're not going to be able to explain to a prosecutor why this person is not really morally culpable and why they're not dangerous, why they're not going to do it again and be able to sell that. Picking the right lawyer and be very careful because they're going to be afraid. And sometimes, too, what happens, they might call me.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They may call somebody else who has a better handle than most on it. And they're afraid to get rid of the lawyer that doesn't know what they're doing. Get very much afraid that's going to hurt them. The first thing I have parents do is prepare their own narrative of their son or daughter's developmental history. It's a very challenging thing for them.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
These things run 30, 40 pages and it's very difficult for parents to go back over that. But they need to have a lawyer who makes them part of the defense team and is really listening to them and not brushing aside their concerns when they say he's very naive. He doesn't understand this. They don't understand this case. He didn't understand he's doing something wrong.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
For a lot of lawyers, it's like prosecutors don't want to hear excuses. We do have some lawyers have done good work in these cases. What I do is I consult with lawyers and I give them advice and I sometimes appear in cases all over the country. Honestly, I'm overwhelmed with these cases.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
We have to. It's just an awful situation right now. We've had great successes. I'm very proud of some of the cases we've had where somebody doesn't go to prison, doesn't get a conviction, and they don't have a stain on their life. But there are others where we actually have life sentences. Sometimes judges are angry.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I have one judge who said it's an insult to people with autism to try and raise this in your defense at a trial. There was a terrible case in Canada of a young man charged with a domestic terrorism kind of offense. And the lawyer raised the question of his autism. And the Autism Society in Canada railed against this lawyer and said, This isn't autism and it should never be used in a defense.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And so they're throwing their own people under the bus and covering over the fact. People with autism, maybe not to this degree and maybe not in this area, but they all experience the problem of not understanding aspects of our social world and complain about the fact that we expect them to understand this justifiably.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
I actually had written a lot about scientific issues and had a lot of cases that had scientific and mental health questions and things, a lot of syndromal behavior kind of issues, battered spouse syndrome, battered child syndrome, neonaticide, which is the dumpster baby kind of syndrome. So I had actually done an unusual amount of cases that involved
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Like I said, for me, the common denominator is where they cross a boundary they don't know but is enforced very heavily by and they end up in prison. It's cruel. To me, it's a human rights violation, and it's a challenge to our morality if we criminalize people who don't understand that they're doing something wrong.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
something that was basically called syndromal, which has a very special thinking that comes into play when you have something that reflects a known pattern of behavior because it gives you some very powerful tools in figuring out how to handle those cases. Anyway, I didn't know anything about Asperger's syndrome, really, when I first got this, because the lawyer said it was Asperger's syndrome.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
But what happened is I started researching this, and there wasn't that much on this at the time. There were some articles in the research literature where clinicians were talking about raising this sort of question. Was there a connection between autism and crime? And then they would recite some cases where somebody had autism. It might be an arson case or a threat case or a stalking case.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And then they'd say, more research has to be done on whether there's a connection between autism and crime. And you got a lot of cases like that where people were putting their hats in the ring and touching on this. And some people who were forensic psychiatrists and psychologists offering ideas about how autism may relate to competence or criminal responsibility or insanity.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
But nobody really was saying, how do you defend these people? What's involved in defending these individuals? I find that rather dissatisfying. So the first paper I did to explain what a lawyer really needs to do, what kinds of things you need to do in these cases. One was published, a book that Fred Volkmar edited, and Fred was head of the Yale Child Study Center.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
He edited this book called The Handbook of Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Law, and had several authors in this book. That was in 2021. There I really outlined in a way that any lawyer should be able to understand the kinds of components there are to defending these cases.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And I've been lecturing on this, but I'm still, I gotta say, I'm really quite surprised that I haven't found anybody that really wants to dig into this and make this something that they want to spend more time on. The whole
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
problem as being so outrageous and the resistance that I would see by a lot of prosecutors and the ignorance about autism and disabilities in general, but especially autism in the entire system from the police to prosecutors to defense attorneys to probation officers and judges and the derelict way these individuals are treated in prison. There's absolutely nothing being done.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
for them in federal prisons or state prisons, except there's a movement in Pennsylvania where they had a facility where they really tried to have it address people with disabilities. So I guess that's a long answer above how I got into it, but also why I can't get out of it, because this is a fascinating area.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
First of all, a lot of the cases that I deal with involve online sex offenses.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
This is all about the internet.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
In almost every area where we see people with autism charged with crimes, people say that it's common for people with autism to be charged with arson. I've never had one of those cases. But we know there's inappropriate touching that can happen or stalking that can happen.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
We have this whole situation where there's this whole internet experience that these individuals are exposing them to all these influences or temptations or things of interest, but they approach it without any social judgment. And again, I should say, we don't say that everybody with autism is going to be committing a crime.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
We don't say that everybody who has autism doesn't understand these things. But there's a significant percentage of individuals on the spectrum who, because of a very particular aspect that is very common to everybody with autism, which is this problem with what's called social visual engagement.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
This is this problem that actually you really don't see too many people really understanding when they start talking about crimes. And certainly forensic psychiatrists and psychologists don't seem to really understand this research. But typically developed people learn about the social world and its rules and its boundaries and its taboos is through social interaction starting in infancy.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
where we learn to understand other people by looking at their faces and their eyes and their expressions and body language. And we learn not just about things they say, but the hidden meaning behind words, the things that people say that they don't, the things they mean when they don't say it. That's the way typically developed people learn, but they don't understand that's how they learned it.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
People think that they know right and wrong because somehow it's hardwired in our brain, where they're really learning it in culture and they're learning it in social interaction.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
You've got a whole group of cohort of individuals who are on the autism spectrum who have their brain directing their attention away from the eyes and faces and the social elements of the world who don't learn these rules that everybody knows. So the problem with autism is that it's counterintuitive for typically developed people.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They can't imagine why somebody who might be bright, or maybe they've gone to high school or college, have a graduate degree, or they can drive a car, or they were able to maintain a job. How is it possible that they don't understand these rules and boundaries that everybody knows? Simon Baron Cohen, who's a very well-known world expert who wrote the book Mind Blindness,
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Early on, back in the late 90s, I think, and early 2000s, edited three volumes of essays under the global title of Understanding Other Minds.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
It's a very big problem. Autism globally, we have this tension between is there a medical model? Is there a social model? How do we talk about autism? And we have obviously autism self-advocates and questions of what language we use, person first, identity first, and so on.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Common denominator for me, whatever kind of construct you have, what I'm concerned about is the hundreds of people with autism who are in prison or convicted of crimes because there are boundaries out there that they just don't understand intuitively and nobody has told them. That's the beginning of the answer to your question about what do we do?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
We need to get people to really understand that this population can have somebody who can look normal. They can talk like a professor. They can have skills that are terrific, yet they may appear to lack empathy. It's often a very misunderstood question. They're not lacking in empathy as far as caring, but there's something called cognitive empathy.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
which is perceiving, looking at somebody and understanding their mental state. Or as Udo Frith, the very famous German autism expert would say, cognitive empathy is you laugh, so I laugh. But that doesn't mean you understand really what's going on in your state of mind. What do you think is needed? We need to have people learn that this is a brain difference.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
That people with autism may do things that appear to be deviant, but without the deviant mindset that Congress or legislators expect on the part of people doing these crimes. They assume that everybody knows these rules, so they don't make it a requirement in, say, sex offenses that somebody know it's wrong.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
There's a lot of education that needs to happen. Now, interestingly, the Department of Justice back in 2016 and 2017, the Civil Rights Division under Vinita Gupta, who was the head of the Civil Rights Division, issued a number of policy directives saying to prosecutors, look, you have an obligation to take disabilities into account.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And that diversion from the criminal process and avoiding unnecessary incarceration is of individuals who are disabled is something that would be an appropriate accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
A year and a half ago, Merrick Garland hosted a conference in Washington where Bryan Stevenson, a famous civil rights lawyer and death penalty lawyer, spoke about the need to avoid criminalization of disabilities. So we have this top level recognition, at least on the civil side of the Department of Justice. which says, look, disabilities are different. We have to treat them differently.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And in fact, by treating them the same as other people, that's really discrimination. Having done now close to 200 cases of people with autism charged with crimes in state and federal court, I have never seen a prosecutor who is aware of these pronouncements. There's no trickle down of this. On the other hand, we have this very hydraulically pressured system in state and federal court.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They'll call anybody that looks at child pornography a child predator. Prosecutors will campaign on, they'll have press releases every time some person is arrested with child pornography and they'll talk about child predators. We put them on the sex offender registry, which is complete annihilation of that individual. It's the civil death penalty.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And it has very little benefit in terms of preventing any kind of offenses, especially, say, child pornography offenses. What good does it do to have somebody on the registry? How does that prevent them from looking at images on their computer? So there are these things that make people feel good.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Punishments, putting people in jail for a long period of time, shaming them on the registry, driving them out of apartment complexes, that sort of thing makes people feel good. But what good does it do
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
There really should be legislation which provides an exception from prison, from minimum sentences, from sex offender registration for people whose conduct is directly related to their disability. So the way the statutes are written, on one level, I deal with how they're enforced. I go to prosecutors and I sit down with them and I say, look, this is crazy. Here's what autism really is.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And it's basically what I've just said. And here's why these individuals are vulnerable to doing things that you think are terrible, but without understanding that it's terrible, because they haven't lived the social experience that you have lived. And they don't understand, they didn't learn in the locker room what typically develop people learn.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
We've been very successful in our cases online, sex offense cases, for example, 40% of the time we're keeping people off of the registry and out of jail, which if you talk to any attorney who's done any of this work, they would be shocked.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
That's because, and this is the positive side is there are prosecutors, federal prosecutors and state prosecutors who when they hear this, they can be real human beings. They hear this and they say, wait a minute, I never really knew this. This wasn't familiar to me. And it's hard for prosecutors because they tend to put all mental health conditions in a single box. I don't deal with that.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
That would be competency or maybe insanity. But I don't understand this stuff and I don't trust myself to distinguish who are the ones who are dangerous and ones who are. And my point is to say, why is autism so different from other conditions?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Quick answer to that is it's the only condition in the DSM which, as a diagnostic criteria, recognizes the lack of understanding of social norms. So we've had prosecutors who listen to this and sometimes after two meetings, sometimes after three meetings, they say, you know what, we'll do this. And so the person might plead to something that doesn't make them go on the sex offender registry.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
But half of those 40% of the cases were dismissals or diversions or non-prosecutions.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
And for a lot of these prosecutors, that's a tough call to make because I've had one prosecutor in Texas who was afraid to do this because he thought his entire staff was going to resign because everybody's totally anti this. And we ended up not completely avoiding the registry, but diminishing the period on the registry. And the young man did not go to jail. And they're afraid of
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Will they get elected again? That some hothead assistant in their office might go to campaign on this person because he put a child predator back on the street. When it was an autistic individual who has a social competence, the level of a toddler who, despite having graduated from high school or college, their social level, social skills and social understanding improved. It's very diminishing.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
They have no clue they're doing anything wrong. They don't have an interest in sex with children. They don't present any risk of reoffending. I have 0% reoffending in all the clients that I've represented, which is now close to 200 people.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
Where I am, doing this almost exclusively about a decade ago, the thing that has always struck me, I started getting calls from people all over the country. I was surprised there weren't any other lawyers doing what I'm doing, certainly not to the extent that I'm doing it. There are some who say that they... handle these cases, but when you track it down, they're not really doing a lot of it.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
So there we come into the problem of what about the autism organizations? So Autism Speaks has only been... vaguely ever, and they're the ones that have the money, very obliquely referred to this problem.
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Mark Mahoney: Fighting for Autism Justice
The Autism Society only recently came around to instituting a criminal justice sort of project within the Autism Society of the United States, but they just let go the director that they had appointed for that. The ARC, which is a national disability rights organization, has done a little bit of this. A lot of these organizations are doing training for police and so on. But they don't train them.