Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World
Doug Passon: Breaking Down Barriers, How Understanding Autism Changes Legal Outcomes
Fri, 11 Apr 2025
Send us a textDoug Passon shares his journey as a criminal defense lawyer and filmmaker advocating for autistic individuals in the legal system, drawing from both his professional experience and personal connection as a parent of an autistic son.• Criminal defense lawyer who uses documentary filmmaking to humanize clients at sentencing• Pioneered the use of video in sentencing mitigation, recognized by Wall Street Journal• Self-described as both lawyer and filmmaker who shows humanity behind the case file• Explains how many autistic defendants lack proper diagnosis before entering legal system • Describes the "Three Pillars" leading to legal trouble: isolation, hyperfocus, and poor executive functioning• Challenges misconceptions about "high-functioning" autism masking genuine impairments• Emphasizes perspective-taking difficulties ("mind blindness") common in autism• Reports near-zero recidivism rate among autistic defendants who receive proper support• Advocates for better education among legal professionals about autism• Warns parents about online vulnerabilities that can lead autistic children into legal troubleIf you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to TonyMantor.com and they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show.https://tonymantor.comhttps://Facebook.com/tonymantorhttps://instagram.com/tonymantorhttps://twitter.com/tonymantorhttps://youtube.com/tonymantormusicintro/outro music bed written by T. WildWhy Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)
Chapter 1: Who is Doug Passon and what is his background?
yeah so i'm a criminal defense lawyer and i have been for almost 30 years and i'm also a filmmaker so my whole life was one of two tracks lawyer or filmmaker as long as i can remember and when college was over i had to pick a path and i chose lawyer it made more sense i think my folks were worried i'd be sleeping on their couch till i was 35 if i was a starving artist but
I was always passionate about the law and always passionate about criminal defense. I wanted to be a public defender, passionate about justice issues. I chose that path, but I was always making films and immersing myself in story and reading all the books, taking classes. Eventually, those two things intersected, and I figured out very fast the system was so dehumanizing.
And we're not even at the autism piece. This is just the criminal justice system. When you get charged with a crime, you're reduced to a stack of paper and a file and you're going to be defined by the worst mistake you ever made and that's as much as you are and will ever be and you're a monster and we need to punish you to the fullest extent of the law and blah, blah, blah.
And I just saw that over and over again. And my job, especially given that most people who find themselves indicted, charged with a crime, they're going to end up at sentencing. That's the odds. You know, the odds are, you know, even in, I work mostly in the federal system, 96, 7, 8% of those people are pleading guilty. They're not even having a trial. So you know they're getting sentenced.
And then the small percentage of people that go to trial, they don't always win.
i found myself trying to be really just being a storyteller and showing the humanity of my clients my clients yes they made a mistake yes there's going to be a consequence but the question is what's a fair consequence and the only way you can measure that it's not by the crime it's by you've got to judge the person as much as you're going to be judging the crime and that's the only way you can judge what is a fair consequence so
What is your life story? And that's my thing. I'm a storyteller. And I need to make sure that the people that are making these life and death decisions understand the human being behind the crime. So I started making movies and cases.
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Chapter 2: How did Doug combine law and filmmaking to support his clients?
Wow, that's pretty interesting. When did you start doing the filming?
2005 was actually my first video, and I figured out it was a really powerful way to advocate. In the federal system, a lot of times the first time the judge ever lays eyes on a client is at sentencing, because they've gone through magistrate and other lower court judges to plead guilty and these ministerial things.
And now all of a sudden, the whole time they've just been, like I said, stack of paper and a file. So you can get this video. It's a short documentary about the case or the client explaining who they are, why they did what they did, why they're not going to do it again, whatever the case may be. And then the judge has that in advance of sentencing.
So he or she has actually had an opportunity to essentially meet the client, sit with the client, experience the client in their own world. So eventually I left the traditional legal practice to go focus on making those movies. And that's what I do for lawyers all over the country. And I help them build the story.
You don't get to the movie until you know what the story is that you're trying to tell. And then we make these movies. When I left, that was 10 years ago, and I just envisioned myself being the movie guy. But guess what happened?
What happened? With what you're telling me, I'm sure it must be pretty good. I met Mark Mahoney, actually. That's great. He's actually been on the podcast.
He is the lead autism criminal defense lawyer in the world, I would venture to say. He understood that the huge challenge in autism cases was to get people to understand the truth about our clients, because most people don't know what it is. They don't know why it matters. He understood that these sentencing videos would be a really powerful tool in autism cases.
so i started working on these cases with him and eventually i got pulled back in to the traditional legal practice and i handle these cases now like mark does and i'm always pulling mark up going i need this i need that but and he's so generous so now i'm a lawyer i'm a filmmaker and now i'm representing these clients as well in various stages of the proceeding that's so great what led you to doing this
I have a personal connection to this because I have a son who's on the autism spectrum. I think I got the issues more than most. And here's the big problem. There are very few lawyers who really understand that they can even recognize the issue when they have a case, let alone understand what to do with it, how to develop it, how to present it, and why it's mitigating, why it matters to the story.
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Chapter 3: What inspired Doug to focus on autism within the legal system?
and oh that probably doesn't matter anyway because they don't know what they don't know and i don't know how you combat that other than educate which is what you're doing again which is why i'm so grateful to be here and just hoping that a lawyer no matter how far you've gone in practice you still know that you always have something to learn that's just called life exactly
Another thing Mark brought up, a lot of autistic people can speak with you, speak with anyone like a Rhodes Scholar, yet they are still autistic. Sometimes they lack the process of that critical thinking, which is what you brought up earlier, where they put themselves in a situation not fully understanding they're getting themselves in a situation. How do you help them through this?
They're thrown into the legal system, which is very scary. It's the big unknown to them. What's the first step that you offer or take to help them?
There's a lot to unpack. If I can speak to how I support the family, here's the interesting thing. I think more often than not, clients are coming to me and they're not diagnosed. They don't know. They've had these problems. They've struggled their whole life.
And they've always just thought, I'm weird, there's something wrong with me, I'm whatever, I'm this, I'm that, and it's a horrible, lonely way to go through life. And the sad irony is this tragic occurrence of finding themselves ensnared in the criminal justice system is the first time they truly begin to understand what their struggles really are, and that there's a real diagnosis.
And I call it the rush of insight.
Okay, that's definitely interesting. Can you expand on that?
I'm a filmmaker, a storyteller, and the really good stories always have that big reveal, right? You didn't see it coming, but the seeds were always there. They were planted along the way.
and i always use empire strikes back as my go-to example which is luke i'm your father i didn't see that one coming but then you go back and all the clues made total sense and then your whole story comes into focus and that's what happens when you get the autism diagnosis
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Chapter 4: Why is it important for lawyers to recognize and understand autism?
whatever you're saying is not relevant. Of course they knew what they were doing was wrong. How could they not have? They graduated high school, they drive a car, they've held a job, they've gone to college, whatever it is, nothing could be further from the truth. And that is our monumental hurdle, and I'm sure Mark talked about that too, is breaking through that wall of
complete misunderstanding. And you know, in the criminal justice system, people are inherently skeptical about defense lawyers to begin with, that we're just trying to get our clients off and lie and cheat and sell snake oil. So when it comes to autism, a lot of prosecutors call it the excuse du jour. Oh, this doesn't really make a difference, but so what? He has it. He's high-functioning.
And so that means his autism is mild. I don't think your listeners can see these air quotes that I'm putting up, but I hate those terms.
Can you expand on those terms so the listeners can get a better understanding of what you're trying to put across?
They don't tell the truth about the true struggles of an autistic person. Yes, they can have a decent IQ, maybe even a high IQ.
But when you look at their emotional intelligence, their social intelligence, their receptive language skills, if you give some of these folks a test called the Vineland assessment, which is social adaptive language and adaptive skill set and all these things, they might come out as a 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old child on these tests. When I try to explain to the decision makers why this is real,
couple of things i fall back on and i will say i don't want to create the impression that people on the spectrum are completely broken deficient in any way yes it is a disability but any disability can be overcome but i do think that it's a superpower and kryptonite all rolled into one it's that kryptonite aspect that we need to shine the light on and say okay how is this so debilitating
Kryptonite kills Superman, right? How can autism be so debilitating that it could cause you to commit a crime like, oh, I don't know, downloading child porn, meeting a 12-year-old girl for a sexual encounter in a parking lot? Now, your listeners, their skin's going to crawl, but these are the kinds of things a lot of people on the spectrum find themselves in trouble for.
And then there are your basic fraud cases. How do they get in trouble for committing white-collar crimes? Not to mention like terrorism related offenses. Do you know how many 1-6 defendants are probably on the autism spectrum? I have a client right now who destroyed allegedly some energy facilities. Why? Because he's passionate about climate change.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do autistic individuals face in the criminal justice system?
First is isolation. This part always chokes me up because I think of my own son. Thank God he's never been in trouble a day in his life. Why? Because probably since he was four or five years old, he had a diagnosis and he had parents who understood this stuff and had access to therapy and resources and have understood what potential pitfalls and dangers are. I do this work.
How many times have I gone into my son's bedroom? Hey, just to make sure, kiddo, it's not okay to do X, Y, Z, right? And he's like, yeah, dad, thanks. This is the story I have a hard time telling with regard to isolation. I see pictures of my son when he's a young boy, two, three, four years old, and he has this beautiful smile, so happy.
Now I look at these pictures, and he won't smile for a picture. He just won't. Emotional affect issues and things with autism, and I was looking at how much emotion and how effervescent and beautiful this boy was. And I asked my wife who, and she has a great background in this. She's a speech language pathologist and she worked with autistic kids in the school district.
I said, Rach, do you think it's possible that autism is like comes later in life? Like it's an onset that progressive look at his emotional affect here and look at here. And she said, no, I think more likely than not that life has just beaten the smile out of our son.
Yeah, unfortunately that happens with a lot of kids. It's just life in today's world, I think.
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Chapter 6: How does Doug help autistic clients who are undiagnosed?
He was bullied with very little friends. Bullied. Always felt bad about himself. Teachers didn't understand him. Principals didn't understand him. So I'm sorry, I'm getting emotional.
That's quite all right. It's your son. There's no reason to not feel that way.
What happens to these kids? They get isolated. They don't have the social interaction to where they can learn the things that neurotypicals learn about. This is the way you're supposed to interact in a sexual situation, or this is social reciprocity, whatever. So what do they do? They don't learn, but where do they go? You know where they go.
They go online because it's so much easier to communicate with a person when you're not face to face and all that social stuff. And online is just a cesspool of epic proportion that there's nothing but trouble there. You're vulnerable in any number of ways. But it's also this idea, so now you're online, but you have this issue. This is the second pillar. What is it?
Hyper-focus, areas of high interest. People on the spectrum, I think it's a way they manage anxiety, just become so interested in one thing and always into that thing. Great. Online, you can go as deep and as wide as you want to go on any topic.
And you may hope that it's World War II airplanes, but a lot of times it may be QAnon or some crazy shit that they just keep going and going and going and going. The last pillar is the executive functioning component. So now you've got all this information and ideas in your head and you don't know what to do with it.
And you come up with a dumb idea like shooting up an energy facility or going to meet this girl or whatever it is. And you have this rigid thinking, which is once you get this idea, it's very hard to get out of it. You have executive functioning, which means you can't plan and predict consequences.
What happens three steps down the road if I do this thing and I end up in jail for this thing or my family ends up devastated and bankrupt from this thing or some child, God forbid, ends up getting traumatized from this thing? That's not the way the autistic brain works. And that's how they find themselves in this terrible trouble. And guess what?
That's why the suicide rate for autistic people is off the charts. Loneliness, rigid thinking, this is a solution to a problem, I can't think of a better one. And then total lack of how is this going to affect the rest of my life, my family's life, everybody. And it's those three pillars I think explains that, really.
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Chapter 7: What misconceptions exist about 'high-functioning' autism in legal cases?
one jurisdiction at a time, one judge at a time, and eventually there will be a tipping point. And here's the sad truth. I don't know if it's going to be 10 years from now or 20 years from now. I hope it's not 30 years from now.
But we're going to look back at the way we treated people on the spectrum who found themselves in trouble, and we're going to be horrified and ashamed about it, that we didn't understand this better and we didn't understand it quicker.
Absolutely. Interestingly, the first term autism was introduced in 1911 and associated with schizophrenia. Then in 1943, it was diagnosed in children. The way that we looked at it and treated it was not always the best. So in the last 25 or 30 years, it has gotten better, but we still have a long ways to go. We really do.
So in closing, we've talked about several things here, which is very important. What would you like to tell the listener that you think is very important that they hear regarding to what you do and what needs to be done in the future?
I, there's so much. We've talked about this from the perspective of someone who's in trouble. I think the most important thing is part of the perspective of someone who's not in trouble. I'm a parent of an autistic child. And I know the horrors that await them if they aren't given proper resources, if they aren't properly supervised, if they're left to their own devices to be online 24-7.
Parents don't understand how vulnerable their children are. And not just to being in trouble running a follow-up, but to being victimized online, too. My son went to an autism school, a high school, that was created by a woman who there were no good schools for her son, so she made an amazing school. And I gave a talk to the parents. Just so you know, these are the danger zones.
Make sure you understand and you're on top of this. God forbid this happens to your kid. It's going to devastate you. You've talked to the parents who have kids who have been in this system. I cannot imagine the pain and trauma that they go through every second of the day. So I gave this talk and it was a litany of like worst case scenarios.
And I think people were interested by it and they were grateful for it. I even had one parent come up to me and go, so interesting, but that would never happen to my Timmy. And guess what? A month later, the FBI was knocking at Timmy's door because Timmy posted something online about a pipe bomb. Now, Timmy was actually literally a rocket scientist. Brilliant kid.
But he built model rockets, and he would call the engines. They'd call them pipe bombs. Guess what? When the FBI hears you talking about explosive devices on Reddit or wherever it is, you're getting a knock at the door and that's the last thing in the world that you want. I just think the most important thing is I don't know if parents understand how vulnerable their kids on the spectrum are.
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Chapter 8: What are the ‘Three Pillars’ that lead autistic individuals into legal trouble?
And by the way, a lot of parents, they have kids, they're struggling. They may have gotten the school psychologist to say, I think they're just ADD. They may be on the spectrum, but you don't want that diagnosis. It's just going to stigmatize them and they'll still get services. No, you get the diagnosis so you can understand exactly what your child needs and set about giving it to them.
And that is the very best way to head tragedy off at the pass.
Yeah, absolutely. Wow, this has been great. Great conversation, great information. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk with us about this.
All right. This has been great. I so appreciate you.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to tonymantor.com. Contact, then they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show.
One more thing we ask, tell everyone, everywhere, about Why Not Me? The World. The conversations we're having, and the inspiration our guests give to everyone, everywhere, that you are not alone in this world.
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