As with McKinnon (who also has Asperger’s) - he (eventually) wasn’t extradited because putting him at risk of suicide was a breach of the Human Rights Act. Competence to stand trial wasn’t part of the decision.
But that was a decision Theresa May (who wants rid of the Human Rights Act) made at the time, although she didn’t want to, then she changed the system so that the Home Secretary wouldn’t be in the position to have to make that decision.
In a dramatic House of Commons statement, May told MPs she had taken the quasi-judicial decision on human rights grounds because of medical reports warning that McKinnon, 46, who has Asperger’s syndrome and suffers from depressive illness, could kill himself if sent to stand trial in the US.
The irony that May’s most popular decision as home secretary was taken because of the Human Rights Act, which she has pledged to scrap, was not lost on her critics. But in a promised overhaul of the extradition laws that accompanied the decision, May indicated that future home secretaries would be stripped of the very power that she had used to save the computer hacker.
I don’t really disagree with this premise. I’m not sure if you understood that I’m not pro-locking folks up for information breaches of some sorts. But the specific argument against locking this specific individual up isn’t being built around anything other than his status on the spectrum, which I feel displays a pretty gross societal bias against such people.
Sorry, I usually mention when I’m responding to continue on someone’s thought rather than argue with it. I’m not disagreeing, I’m adding onto your thought with the caveat that I think Love’s chances are better for exemption on medical/mental reasons than Reuters is making his case out to be.
Plus my post is disorganized and all-over-the-place.
Hans Asperger was running a school, so he knew the students’ strengths as well as their weaknesses, and was busy persuading the Nazis not to exterminate them, so he emphasized the students’ strengths.
So Aspergers’ and Kanner’s are two ways of looking at the same spectrum.
And either way, who we are is not a disease.
It’s a disability because of violence, and discrimination, and the culture of ordering people around, and a lack of accommodation for our needs where they vary from allistic people’s needs. Besides the ordering people around, flourescent lighting, loud noises, food allergies, and fabric allergies could pose problems.
The US has more people in prison both per capita and in total than any other country in the world. Simplistic advice like yours doesn’t hold up under that kind of police state.
Right on. Also, the connotations to Asperger’s are different in the UK than in the US. The US only started to adopt the Asperger’s diagnosis in 1994, so we don’t know as much about it as we could. Also, this diagnosis is more common in areas with high property tax, good schools, good services, etc, and less common in poorer areas with no services and a school-to-prison pipeline. Funny how that works, huh? On the other hand, the UK adopted the Asperger’s diagnosis in 1980 under the guidance of Dr Lorna Wing, mainly as a way of soft-pedaling autism to parents who might resist an autism diagnosis. So even if one treats Asperger’s and Kanner’s as two distinct forms of autism because of speech delays and whatnot, Asperger’s is far more closely tied to Kanner’s in the UK than it is in the US.
The thing is how do you feel about what he did and with regards to what poor Aaron did?
He obviously did what he did because he was disgusted at what the US legal system had done to Aaron and now he is about to get he same in return.
So you give all your work for free to the college or uni or whatever and they then use some company like JSTOR who charges a shit load of money for other students etc to access it and in the process have the sole rights for something they didn’t commission or pay for and should be in the public domain in the first place, look at the profits these companies make for doing basically fookall.
The US gov is always going to side with the big corporations, end of story, until public pressure changes it!
Aaron was very intelligent and maybe if he’d gone after them in a legal way to get the files released into the public domain he wouldn’t have committed suicide, I guess he felt so horrified at the thought of the rest of his life behind bars that he couldn’t cope any more.
Watch ‘The Internets Own Boy, Aaron Swartz’, and see for yourself the worth of this young man and boy what he could have achieved, such a shame/crime.
How could a UK judge be so stupid as to find that US prisons would take care of this man’s healthcare needs? Has the judge not paid attention to the many investigative pieces about the US penal system that have come out in the last few years? Has this judge not paid attention to the insane levels of imprisonment, the overcrowded prisons, the reports of food so bad that Top Ramen has become a currency more valued than cigarettes, the over-sentencing that is the norm in the US, the slave labor in US prisons,… I could go on and on and on.
No reasonable country would be willing to send their citizen to the United States to face charges. If you must, charge and try your citizen locally, punish them locally. Don’t send them to the US. that’s just inhumane!
I’d also agree with some of the others here that aspergers shouldn’t rule out extradition in itself. In my case I do have sensory issues and other areas that could make life more difficult in prison, but not to the extent that I should be treated completely differently. I certainly wouldn’t want people to think that I was mentally incapable just because I have aspergers. People with aspergers have at least average levels of intelligence and I doubt he would be unclear that this was illegal. (I’ve also struggled in areas like university and managing in normal life too, so it’s not like I have no idea of the difficulties he’s had).
I guess it would be good if he can avoid extradition for this reason, but only because he shouldn’t be extradited in the first place.
I have sensory processing issues, and get beaten by backup beepers several times each week, and get hit with flourescent lights and agonizing noises in any kind of public building, so that affects my perception of these things.
I suspect my sensory issues are aggravated by salicylate build-up, perhaps due to diet and kidney issues, and have had slight improvement since switching to a lower-sal diet, so that affects my perception too.
I get rashes from polyester, so that affects my perception of the cruetly of the prison system too.
Actually where are the ECHR on this? Abu FHooking Hamza!
Quite happy to try and stop a known previously convicted terrorist and hate campaigner from being deported and costing the UK taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal fees!
Don’t fret. Not long now and you don’t have to worry about those pesky Human Rights any more. After Brexit is completed you and your fellow countrymen can get tortured, spied on and extradited to your hearts desire.
What I was saying is that a diagnosis of autism as opposed to aspergers means there are associated disabilities present, not that being on the spectrum itself is a disability. For this reason autism is quintessentially different to aspergers despite being considered within the same spectrum of disorders.
