The ten year sentence given to Neli Latson for assaulting a police officer who assaulted him first has been reduced to two years.  The year he has already spent in prison will count toward his sentence:

Prosecutor Jim Peterson yesterday urged Sharp to uphold the jury verdict.

“This is a case, not a cause,” Peterson said. “This is not about autism. This is about a violent man.”

But defense witnesses, who included doctors, a social worker and Latson’s former wrestling coach, said both Latson and society would benefit more from intense treatment rather than prolonged incarceration.

One of the reasons that it is difficult for people with autism to advocate for ourselves is that we often shut down when the stakes are highest. I am so angry about the Washington Post's article called "In Va. assault case, anxious parents recognize 'dark side of autism'" that I am having some trouble writing this.  Reporter Theresa Vargas has approached the case of Reginald Latson in a way so bigoted and misleading that I have trouble understanding how a paper as well-respected as the Post would publish it.

Latson's case is troubling, and worth the attention.  He has Asperger's syndrome, intermittent explosive disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.  He was waiting for the library to open one morning when some children became frightened of him and the police were warned of the presence of "a suspicious black male, outside the library, wearing a hoodie and possibly carrying a gun." Latson was approached by school resource officer Thomas Calverley:

The deputy approached. He squeezed the front pocket area of Latson's sweat shirt and lifted it to check for a gun. There was none. According to authorities, no gun was found, and the children, when questioned later, said they never saw one.

Calverley said he asked the teenager his name several times and, after the teen refused to give it, he grabbed Latson, told him that he was under arrest and bent him over the hood of a car. That's when the two started wrestling and fell to the ground.

At one point during the struggle, Calverley said, Latson flipped him hard onto his back, causing his head to hit the pavement. The teenager then hit him dozens of times and, at one point, took his pepper spray from him.

Latson has been found guilty of assault and is waiting for sentencing.

If you read Vargas' article, you will not learn that he has any condition other than autism until more than twenty paragraphs in.  I would argue that his intermittent explosive disorder is much more relevant to the assault than his Aspergers. 

A person with Aspergers without the tendency to explode is also likely to have trouble when he is wrongly accused by the police.  He might be tased, like Clifford Grevemberg, who won a settlement of $250,000 for the way he was treated when officers mistook his condition for drunkenness.  He might be shot in the head, like Steven Eugene Washington, who was killed in circumstances strikingly similar to ones under which Calverley approached Latson: both were black, autistic, and accused of having guns they didn't have. Leaving out the existence of cases like these is one of the problems with Vargas' article: readers are left with the impression that people with autism are a danger to the police but not the knowledge that that the reverse is often true. 

And without the intermittent explosive disorder, there is no reason to believe that Latson would have assaulted the officer.  So why is autism mentioned in the headline and the condition which actually led to the assault thrown in casually halfway through?

Because more people have heard of autism-- it's a common search term and people worry about it a lot.  We are being demonized by the Post as a way of driving up page hits and selling papers.

And let's talk about that headline.  This is "the dark side of autism?"  Not the suicides.  Not the people murdered by their parents.  Not the torture of people with autism at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Boston, ignored by American papers but documented yesterday by The Guardian.  Autism has many, many, many dark sides.  To suggest that violent tendencies we wouldn't have wihout co-moribund conditions is the dark side is more than misleading-- it's stunningly lacking in that thing you always claim we don't have-- empathy.

There are so many things wrong with this article that it has taken me this long to get my main criticism of the media when reporting on autism:  of course Vargas didn't talk to a single person who actually has it when writing her story.  She talked to tons of parents (although Latson's mom wouldn't blame his autism, so there is only one quote from her.)  She talked to Autism Speaks.  She talked to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.  She talked to-- unbelievably-- Holly Robinson Peete.

But one person who actually has autism?  Apparently not. 

Please, Theresa Vargas-- I would love to know why you thought the opinion of Holly Robinson Peete was more relevant to this story than the opinion than someone who could tell you what it is like to have autism and be approached by the police.  Who could tell you about the confusion and the anger of being wrongly accused because people don't like the way you like at them.

People with autism have a hard enough time.  People are already scared of us.  The Washington Post misled them into having another reason to fear us today.