Submission to the Select Committee on Autism by the Parliament of Australia
This submission relates to the important issues affecting persons on the Autistic Spectrum in the Criminal Justice system.
I had a late diagnosis of Autism at age 47. This has profoundly affected my life in ways that I could never have imagined, most notably in the area of Law and Justice.
Consider the following comments made by my own Defense Lawyer in his closing address at my Trial:
“You imagine living with [this] character. You heard the record of interview. It went for almost two hours. There were the diatribes of soul searching, over-analysing, analysis paralysis. Imagine living with him. It’d be like watching paint dry. He was a human irritant…”
“You heard him. It was an irritation to listen to him in the record of interview. Please don’t hold that against him. His boring monologue and his soul searching and his insights into this family dynamic, you would have found them quite boring.”
“and we had to sit — listen to that boring diatribe of a record of interview”
My Lawyer told me (more than once) that it was “the worst interview he had ever heard”. The Crown Prosecutor mercilessly attacked my interviewing style and responses, and in particular my “qualified” answers.
But nobody during the course of the entire Legal matter tweaked to the fact that I actually had pronounced Autistic tendencies.
I didn’t even know it myself, at the time.
I knew nothing at all about Legal matters. I didn’t know how Police operated, or what a Police interview was like. I didn’t know I should really have had a Support Person. I didn’t even know I was supposed to have a Lawyer.
I was naive, exceptionally helpful and trusting, and had an almost pathological need to please.
It is unfortunate that the blunt and overly-analytical responses I gave in my Police Interview were seen, not as manifestations of Autism, but of something entirely different.
People with Autism can be extremely black and white when talking about things. We don’t require any “truth serum” to be absolutely truthful - in fact, more than truthful. But in a Police interview, that becomes a problem.
Additionally, when we encounter an unfamiliar situation, we tend to analyse it to death. My mind goes to work on every new piece of information, pulls it to pieces, looks at it from every possible angle - and at times, as seen in my Police Interview, I verbalise the whole process.
When under the spotlight of a Police interrogation from a highly suspicious individual, a profoundly Autistic person is never going to fare very well.
Not only does our own neurological makeup work against us, but the system goes into overdrive to “punish” us for how we are.
Every step of the way, people seem to be falling over themselves to hold their ‘thumb on the scales of Justice’ as it were, and give Justice a little push, a little ’helping hand’.
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Beginning with the Officer who interviewed me. I found out later that the scenario he had depicted on the charge sheet actually didn’t exist anywhere in any of the testimony at all. The prosecution should never have happened.
This 26 year old junior officer subjected a person to an extremely adversarial and unfair Justice system for the sole reason that they suffered from a lifelong neurological condition.
I experienced further discrimination at the hands of my Lawyer, who decided on the basis of my extremely poor showing in the Police interview that I must be somehow incompetent or lacking the ability to communicate. He made precious little effort to communicate with me or tell me what was going on.
IT was not told until literally the night before my Trial that the charge against me had been altered from what was originally on the charge sheet.
Three relatives of the purported victim presented themselves at my Lawyer’s office wanting to help clear my name. Yet, somehow he didn’t manage to put a single one of them on the Witness stand.
Somehow a retraction letter signed by the complainant which repeatedly states that I’m innocent and ‘it has been misunderstood’ ended up not being submitted to the Court at all.
The same goes for a psychological assessment of the complainant, which would have been highly relevant to the issue at hand.
Because of my ‘terrible’ Police Interview, I was deemed incapable of taking the stand in my own defence. My only defence was literally my Police Interview. I sat there in a Suit for 4 days, my Autistic responses being picked apart. Not one single Witness or Exhibit was produced in my behalf.
Everyone seemed oblivious to the fact that the one single solitary direct reference to the supposed crime was the complainant saying “oh no no it was when”. My entire life hung in the balance over these six words!
This was after the story had been told twice over, completely omitting any mention of the so-called crime I was charged with!
Incidentally, the first description given by the purported victim could in no way be called a crime, and matched up precisely with my version of events.
The second (12 minute) interview consisted almost entirely of the interviewer repeating the version after the “oh no no it was when” and saying “is that what happened?”, to which the reply was “yeah”.
Even more bizarrely, the one item of supposed relevance offered by the only “Witness” was stated by him to be impossible no less than eight times. In the testimony, four people are named as being aware of this impossibility.
And yet the evidence was still admitted and the Crown Prosecutor tried to use it in the most “highly prejudicial” manner possible.
The Crown Prosecutor deliberately dropped the wrong word during his address to the Court. He pauses, and reads out an incorrect word from the transcript in front of him. Just like that.
The Judge read back the same portion of testimony (correctly) the next morning
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I still can’t believe that my entire life was destroyed by a Justice system clutching at straws with worse than no evidence.
The only conclusion I can come to is that they desperately wanted to “punish” me for the responses in my Police interview.
All this because I happen to have Autism - a disability which I suffer from and which is something I have absolutely no control over.
That a vulnerable person can be thrown into a filthy Jail Cell and subjected to all manner of unspeakable abuses, all over the words “oh no no it was when” is something I may never, ever fully understand.
While incarcerated, I was in an extremely precarious situation and in constant fear for my life. For someone with the sensitivities and social anxieties that an Autistic person suffers from, it became absolutely intolerable. Not even having the benefit of knowing that I had Autism at the time, I was unable to ask for help on that basis.
I cannot believe the things I experienced as an Autistic Person in the Correctional system. It was absolutely horrendous. Here are a few of them:
| was forced to witness a man being beaten within an inch of his life, beaten savagely about the head
and body for more than 10 minutes - all because he went to the Front Counter and said he needed ‘help’. They punished him because he wanted to ‘bail out’.
| was threatened by a group of men who said “we are going to drag you into the toilets and rape you”.
| was grabbed on the private parts or buttocks by at least 8 different men who would come up behind
me in the walkways, reach between my legs, and fondle my genitals and buttocks.
| could not even get some relief from it all by going out to the oval.
While there | was repeatedly harassed sexually over a period of weeks, culminating in the individual
pulling down his shorts & underwear and rubbing his private parts against me; and when | objected,
yelling out after me “I’m going to rape you!”
| was beaten up, belted about the face several times with the force of a baseball bat. | had simply been
reading a book.
Some tough guy repeatedly kept coming up to me, making slashing motions at my throat, and saying “Your life gone” and “You’ll be leaving in a black bag with a toe-tag’.
An inmate who was mentally disturbed began taunting me and repeatedly sneaking up behind me and punching me very hard in the back of the head; this going on constantly every day for a week.
To make matters much worse, I was not even afforded the dignity of being allowed to Appeal my unjust Conviction. Somehow I fell through the cracks.
During the first 30 days of my incarceration, I made two requests expressly for the purpose of appealing my Conviction. Neither of these requests ended up being followed through on, through no fault of my own. I also requested my Lawyer’s Phone number, but was unable to be provided with it.
I have documented evidence of these three attempts to access an Appeal in the form of official Letters. Despite this, my many submissions and requests to have my Right of Appeal restored have fallen on deaf ears.
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Since virtually every advertised position in my field requires a Police Check, I am left with a never-ending struggle to find enough Work to make ends meet.
I have been fighting to survive, fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by the never-ending struggle to prove my innocence, fighting to stop myself sinking into the mire of despair and depression, worrying myself sick about Police Checks, and Employers finding out. Some of the time I’ve been fighting not to kill myself.
My Mental Health has been in decline. The combination of Autism and PTSD is not a good one. When an Autistic mind is subjected to trauma it causes an escalation of the Autistic symptoms. I am constantly hyper-alert and suffer from severe avoidance of just about everything. I literally cannot engage with anything. I do not have words to describe how debilitating it is.
I have been completely and utterly destroyed - mentally, emotionally and financially. And for what?
I found out later via a Right to Information request that the case had already been marked “SOLVED AS UNFOUNDED - NIL DISCLOSURES” prior to my being interviewed. The only reason I was even brought in for an interview was an additional vexatious complaint made by a relative of the purported victim, which was immediately recognized as such.
The case was then again dropped by the Department of Public Prosecutions on the grounds of not enough evidence - that is, until they found out they had been missing a 30 minute segment of my interview!
I believe the matter being dropped twice proves that the case was known to be extremely light on evidence, and that it was unquestionably my Police interview that I was ultimately prosecuted and convicted for.
If I did, as has been suggested, ‘convict myself’ entirely on the basis of my Police Interview, how can that possibly be fair?
At the end of the day it was, not myself, but my Autism that was on trial.
What hope does an accused person have where it is genuinely the case that their Autistic traits and mannerisms exhibited during a Police Interview are used to effectively “build” a case against them in the absence of any real and tangible evidence?
How can a just outcome possibly be guaranteed when unusual differences in personality and makeup (which are no fault of the individual but a genetic and developmental anomaly) lead to discriminatory treatment in the Courts?
Without the Court being made aware of the fundamental cognitive divide that exists, and its probable effect on the Testimony, can genuine Justice really be carried out? Ultimately, how is the Autistic person going to be protected against the unconscious biases that arise throughout the Court process?
I believe that where there are red flags and indicators of unusual personality traits, it is imperative that the various parties involved in the Policing and Court process have sufficient awareness to recognise the potential signs and arrange for a psychological profile of the client to be ordered.
End of submission.
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