
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ?
Christine Vester: Humanity Over Handcuffs: Protecting Autistic Lives in Legal Battles
27 Apr 2025
Send us a text Christine Vester shares her mission with Humanity Over Handcuffs, a national advocacy movement protecting autistic individuals from being criminalized by the justice system. Her organization supports families, educates legal professionals, and works toward reforming a system that often treats neurological differences as criminal behavior. • Autistic behaviors like lack of eye contact, shutdowns, and sensory overload often misinterpreted by police as aggression or defiance • Families seeking help unexpectedly find themselves battling a legal system unprepared to understand autism • Courts routinely fail to consider autism as a mitigating factor, treating autistic individuals like typical defendants • Prison environments create traumatic sensory overload for autistic individuals, who may face targeting by other inmates • Incarceration carries long-lasting consequences, creating barriers to housing, employment, and community reintegration • Humanity Over Handcuffs is developing resources connecting families with attorneys, mental health professionals, and support systems • Change requires judges, attorneys, legislators, and CIT trainers working together to create more compassionate approaches You're not alone and not powerless. Our children are not broken, autism is not a crime, and together we can show what justice should really look like—humanity first. https://tonymantor.com https://Facebook.com/tonymantor https://instagram.com/tonymantor https://twitter.com/tonymantor https://youtube.com/tonymantormusic intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
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