Jury Duty

Yesterday, I had the privilege of being called to serve on a jury. I had been called two times before but in those cases I didn't actually get to the process. The first time, the defendant plead guilty right after all the people called had arrived so we were sent home. The second time, they changed the dates of the trial and I was going to Indiana for undetermined amount of time (we ended up staying 2 months).
I was really excited to be called because I wanted to really see the process. Watching crime shows on TV are not the same as actually sitting through an entire trial. The trial was short and deliberations were even shorter but the whole thing still took almost an entire day.
While sitting through this, I got to thinking. What would it be like for someone with Autism to sit on a jury? I'm one of those people who have Autism symptoms - like I can't stand for someone to tell me the "rules" and have no one follow them. For example, I worked at a nursing home. We'd have classes once a week where we would learn how to transfer patients and various other techniques. No one actually used those techniques in the nursing home and it drove me nuts. I couldn't function. I was in trouble because I would complain. I complained because I didn't understand why would they train us one way and not have us actually do the work in that way.
This is a skill that helped me on the jury. We were told that our job was to see if the evidence supported the law that we were given. In this case, the law was Washington State's definition of assault and culpability.
It was very black and white for me. There were no feelings involved just facts - did the facts support the state's definition of the law. We felt that they did.
The case was a young man had been drinking. He was taken into protective custody and proceeded to spit on an officer and a nurse. It may seem like a silly case, it did to me in the beginning, but the law says that spitting with the intent to harm is assault.
There was no disagreeing that the young man spit on the officer and the nurse - the question was did his intoxication make him responsible for his actions. This brought me back to Autism as well (I think I have Autism on the brain). I remember hearing a case of a young man with Autism who had assaulted his parents. He was found guilty even though he was mentally impaired. I know that there are situations where a person absolutely can not tell right from wrong. These cases are ones where the individual is so mental impaired they can not control their actions. One example used was a patient with Alzheimers. I have worked with Alzhiemers patients and they are not always aware of what they are doing. They do turn violent because the disease changes the way their brains work. Most of the time (if not all of the time), they are not even aware that they were capable of such acts. I remember a case of a man with Alzhiemers who killed his wife in a fit of rage. He couldn't understand where she had gone.
In those cases, I would understand that the defendant was not capable of controlling their behavior. Children with Autism may not be able to control their feelings but they understand what hurts and what doesn't. They make choices as to how they behave. They can swing out in anger but they choose what they swing out at and if they make contact. Xavier chooses words that he know will hurt when he yells because he wants to inflict pain. He wants us to know he's hurting and we are responsible. (We're not always responsible but he sees it as that way).
We hold him accountable for his actions and he can't choose his brain chemistry. Back to the case, yesterday, that young man chose to drink and drink to excess. I think he's lucky that all he did was spit. What would have happened had he actually hit someone or hurt someone? What would have happened if he had killed someone?
I'm glad that he didn't and maybe he'll learn a lesson. Me - I learned a lot. I learned that lawyers can ask the same question 20 times and be shocked that the answers are the same (or create confusion so no one knows what he's asking anymore). I was reminded of that Albert Einstein quote "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."