Brian Shrader: How Autism is Misunderstood in the Legal System

Welcome to Why Not Me The World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. We had
joined today by Brian Schrader, a seasoned criminal lawyer with
a distinguished career in the legal system. Initially, he served
as prosecutor since two thousand and eight and briefly participated
in the mental health diversion program. Subsequently, he transitioned to
criminal defense after leaving the State Attorney's office. We are
fortunate to have him share his vast expertise on our show.
Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, any oportuity to help out?
Thanks so much. Can you give us a brief introduction
to what you do?
Sure, I've been doing criminal law since two thousand and eight,
started ou as a prosecutor, including a short stint in
the mental health diversion program that everyone had to go
through as kind of part of the promotion. Chine and
then left the State Attorney's office to do criminal defense
work and a few other areas of law as part
of primal defense work. It's inevitable and we're going to
encounter a lot of different mental health issues, substantial amounter
related to drug addiction, either mental health issues caused by
drug addiction or mental issues that lead to drug addiction.
But we also see people and I can't sit here
and say that it's always been referred to by its name.
Is autism or any other type of neudivergent or what
some people refer to as neurodivergent situations, It's not always
called by its name. But what we see and where
I think I've seen autism, it's specifically in the criminal
justice system the most is mostly with dealing with escalating
and de escalating situation. I have not seen a lot
of situations where I can say my autism caused me
to commit a theft. That's not necessarily something we're going
to see. But what we will see is someone who
commits a theft is then confronted by law enforcement taken
into a small room, there's four or five people trying
to interrogate them, and the situation will escalate into something else,
or a law enforcement will go to arrest someone, grab
a hold of them, try and manipulate their body, and
we see them resist, tense up, start to have a
very strong emotional physical reaction to it, and we see
those things certainly escalate the situation. Instead of someone who
perhaps was not on the autism spectrum, who was called
doing something as basic as a petty theft from Walmart,
they may be able to talk their way out of
it a little better, and they may be able to
de escalate the situation a little more comprehend if law
enforcing give them the option of a pre arrest diversion situation.
And so that's where we've seen autism actually called by
its name in the situation. If we want to talk
about the mental health situation the criminal justice system generally,
I don't think we have enough time in the day,
or the week or the month to really dive into it.
Yeah, I can understand that for sure. Is the criminal
justice system really set up to handle mental health or
autism generally?
I think i'd be negligent in talking to anyone in
a public forum without mentioning. Our criminal justice system is
not equipped to deal with mental health situations. It is
not equipped because lawyers are not trained on this from
the start, We are not trained on it throughout our careers,
and we are certainly not seeing training on these specific
things mandated for the people who maybe need to know
the most, which are prosecutors and judges, and to a
certain extent in the federal system, the probation officers who
are preparing precidence investigation reports. There's almost not even a
recognition of these things. We've seen a lot of progress
or attempts at progress in dealing with substance abuse problems
in and of themselves, and we'll see some carry over
into dual diagnosis situations. But when I do encounter something
that is purely a mental health problem or a mental
health situation first, where perhaps drugs were exacerbating the issue,
or drugs were just secondary result of the underlying mental
health issue, or the situation that the mental health issue
put someone in, there is almost no resources and no
procedure to really handle that mental health situation. Aside from
challenges to competency, which are not always going to be helpful,
especially in an autism spectrum situation, or just challenges to
overall capacity to even commit a crime, kind of not
guilty by reason of insanity a Laymans term. That also
a lot of people don't fit into it, and so
we were often left with no options or no good options,
especially in situations there's no insurance. But that's a really
long rambling answer to a very basic question, not a
problem at all.
Now you have been on both sides, as a prosecutor
and as a defender. What do you see the differences
the way they approach it as a prosecutor and as
a defender. How can we help get more understanding for
the prosecutors judges, get them to understand that people with
autism or mental health issues are not just sitting down
and planning out how to commit a crime. They are
doing things that they just don't understand themselves, which puts
them in a situation where they're faced with the legal system.
Education has to be the key, and this is perhaps
for our entire society. We still deal with a lot
of stigma on mental health issues. We still have a
lot of misunderstanding. There's still a lot of in the
criminal justice system, especially on the prosecutor side, of believe
that people are faking it or they're using it as
an excuse. When we have really good doctors, and we
are very fortunate I work with some tremendous mental health
doctors who can explain it and talk to the judges
about it. It still is coming from the standpoint of
a criminal defense attorney doing their job, so sometimes I
think it gets written off. We have these presentations, we
can discuss these scientific level of diagnosis and understanding, what
the different kind of thresholds for behaviors and reactions and
thresholds for understanding and comprehending presented and laid out before
the port, and yet there's not enough willingness to listen,
and there's not enough willingness to put the effort into
understanding amongst a lot of my colleagues. I have to
be careful not to talk about examples. Trial attorneys love
to tell war stories, and I really want to dive
into this one case specifically that I'm actually working on
right now that has been extremely frustrating. But suffice to
say that when we see mental health situations come in
that are purely mental health situations, we're really screaming into
the ABYSS trying to get someone to pay attention, and
we're very lucky when we get people. For someone like me,
I'm very lucky. There are people who work at the
State Attorney's office still, and I know on a personal
level that I can come to and say, I'm not
just being defense attorney here. This is real. This is
something that is unique and needs to be looked at.
Even then, sometimes it's difficult because we don't have a path.
Our mental health diversion program in Hillsborough County, Florida has
a six month wait list and the answer to the
question for people who've committed committed crimes, and then sometimes
when they're having a true mental health break, there'll be
crime after crime. They make it arrested for something, managed
to get out, They're going to pick up something else
right away. Now their bond gets revoked, And the answer
is they just sit in jail for six months waiting
to see if they get at a diversion program and the
jail gives no treatment. Am I coming close? Yeah?
Absolutely, I think you hit it spot on. I've talked
with so many people regarding this subject matter. I've talked
with attorneys such as yourself. I've taught with judges, psychotherapists,
CIA trainers. They all have similar thoughts, such as yourself. Now,
I've seen where mental health issues are one percent of
the population, the autistic community is one percent of the population.
They are a small minority, yet their numbers are staggering
with the legal system. Because of that, you would think
they would put their heads together come up with a
plan that will help these people. There's a retired judge
in Miami that's created a two hundred and eighteen thousand
square foot facility because he sees the need. How do
we get other people, other judges to join this initiative
where it can help all these people around the country.
And that's the key. You've got to play on the idea.
And I don't want to be too cynical, and I
don't want to get in trouble with any of my
judge friends. They want to do the least amount of
work necessary to get through their dockets, and so do
The prosecutors are not paid by the case, they're not
paid by the hour, and so if you can convince
them that this is a way to get the files
off their desk for good. That's going to be one
of the first thing that's going to trigger. And it's
a very cynical view. I think a lot of the
people that I work across from or up on the
bench are good hearted people who if they got a
chance to really help someone, would want to do it
because they're good people. But from a more cynical standpoint,
if we can just show the system in general that
this is a way to get people out of it,
to stop being a burden. I use the air quotes
on that because it's not how I feel about it,
but that's how a lot of people would see it.
If we can get them to see that, then maybe
it's worth investing in. And we've seen it in the
drug treatment. We've seen some progress. It is not where
it needs to be. We still overincarcerate for drug abuse issues.
We still just approach the whole system wrong. But if
someone gets arrested on a multiple drug charts, I can
get them into a rehabilitation facility quick. I can facilitate that,
and the courts are ready for their air forms with
every thing almost filled out for you to get a
lot of that done. Comes to mental health, we're starting
from scratch in every single case.
I recently spoke with a former police officer. He trains
other police officers around the country about autism and how
to interact with him on a call. He gave me
an example that he uses in his class. It shows
how a qualified and highly trained police officer can misinterpret
the actions of someone that may be autistic. The officer
did everything by the book, and everything he did would
have been correct in most every situation except for that one.
He had not had any training of autistic people. This
autistic person was just stemming, and he took it as
a drug issue. Everything the autistic person was doing mimicked
what a person on drugs would have been doing. The
person did tell the police officer that he was stemming. Unfortunately,
the officer just did not understand. He treated it like
a drug issue, handcuffed the man. As luck would have it,
the mother was close by, explained everything and it worked.
Out all right.
Now. If the mother had not been there, this would
have turned into a legal situation. I realize that there
needs to be more training on the first responders, which
a lot of people are doing, and a lot of
the first responders are getting. Now my opinion is the ADA,
the DA judges, anyone involved in the legal system has
to get this kind of training. I realized there's not
any ongoing training that the legal system has to have yet.
This is so crucial to getting the understanding of autism
and mental health issues out there so that the legal
system can better serve those that need it.
How do we get that done. You're going to have
to start with the Florida Bar the Florida Supreme Court
start mandating mental health for training for prosecutors. When I
was a prosecutor, we took all the really cool classes
that we thought were exciting about murders and gang prosecution
and blood and gut stuff we weren't interested, and then
the mental health stuff. And like I said, I spent
a short time in the mental health diversion program because
it was just part of the promotion changes. You had
to serve your time in there before you could go
to the next step. It wasn't a destination, it wasn't
anything anyone was deciding to focus on. But it extends
not just between kind of the people who we see
maybe at the top of the pyramid, the judges, the
prosecutor's law enforcement, but even the people who work under them.
For example, mental health client goes to the jail, they
put them on opioid withdraw therapy. The guy had never
done a single opioid, but he was presenting with a
lot of the same symptoms as someone who was on
fentanyl or some strong opioid, and they're they're telling him
he's going to take all this medication to go through
if you withdraw it was a bipolar situation. Aren't there
nurses and doctors there doing these evaluations and shouldn't they
be trained to recognize this right away? And when they
see it, shouldn't they have an obligation to say, hey, look,
red flag. This is a situation that needs to be
treated differently, and especially shouldn't be treated again in ways
that escalate locking them in some small cell alone, stripping
them down, nake it into a paper jumpsuit. All of
these hands on with people can be very overstimulating, very scary,
and it can really trigger things to get much worse.
We've got to train everybody on that, and there has
to be accountability, and unfortunately, accountability in the criminal justice
system for law enforcement tends to only come after someone dies.
Yeah, which is sad. What you just brought up remind
me of a conversation I just recently had. Whether it's judge.
He was sent to a prison. He was seventeen years
old at the time. The inmate was being treated with
schizophrenia and given multiple drugs. As it turned out, he
wasn't schizophrenic at all, he was autistic. By seeing that,
he remembered it. When he became a judge, he tried
to use empathy in the way that he treated the
people that came in front of him. He found by
putting them in places they could get treatment, they didn't
show up a second time, which saved taxpayers millions of
dollars over a period of time. So if one judge
in one part of the country can figure this out,
why can't we get other judges across the country collectively
together so that it could save taxpayers millions and millions
of dollars plus help the people that actually need the help.
That's the answer is, we've got to show them that
the system will be saved, because clearly saving an individual
is not enough to motivate anybody. Otherwise, this would have
been done by now, but we still have first responders
who are not properly trained, and we don't have people
to accompany them to situations who are if that was
a possibility. We don't have prosecutors who are trained to
recognize that, and you take a step back there, we
don't have prosecutors with the resources to even try and
evaluate it if they wanted to. I think at one
point I had one thousand files when I was a
prosecutor assigned to me, and we were turning these things
like every ninety days. I wasn't reading the police reports,
I wasn't digging into each file in any detail. I
was looking at the general allegations, looking at their criminal history,
making a plea offer, and trusting the defense attorneys. We're
going to do it. But a lot of these individuals
are going to end up with public defenders who also
are taxed to the maximum, who have very little resources
and have too many files assigned to them. And a
lot of public defenders are tremendous attorneys and tremendous people
who really are trying to do the best they can,
but they're given an impossible task, and so absence someone
at the public defender's office being willing to allocate resources
that they may not even have, it's not going to
get flagged there. We have to have a system number
one to identify the issues because right now I think
there's a lot of underreporting or under consideration of how
significant the problem is because we don't know, we don't
know what's out there, especially in some of the homeless population.
People aren't getting medical treatment regularly, they're not being diagnosed
by anyone ever in a lifetime, and so that's not
getting reported. We talk about one percent or these low percentages,
I think much higher percent in reality. I think we
have a lot of people who have successful careers, are
seen as having successful careers or living normal lives, who
suffer from some form of diversence or mental health issues.
And that can span all the different types of diagnoses
and levels of it, whether it's anxiety and depression which
can be rippling for some people, all the way through
schizophrenia and total psychosis and things like that. So until
we can really identify this and we have a resources
in place to be able to really track it and
say this is a much more significant portion of our
population that's being underserved and it's being mistreated, and then
the step two would be then provide the resources for it.
Maybe step one we're so far from achieving, so unattainable
under our current set of values and resources as a society,
that we can't even talk about step two yet.
What's really sad. I've spoken with many people the thing
that they say, we need to get it changed on
the state level. Then I'll talk with others. They say
we need to get it changed on the federal level,
because then the federal level will dictate what the state
level actually does. However, that's not always the case. Getting
anything changed at either level is like climbing Mount Everest.
I spoke with a legislator on the national level. If
it wasn't for his name and connections that he had
which allowed him to get his bill on another bill
that was already happening. If not for that, it wouldn't
have happened. He worked very hard to get change. So
we need more like him that we'll try to get
some things going for everyone's benefit. So how do we
get past this because it seems like the paperwork is
just getting overloaded while people are still getting thrown in
the system that just don't belong there.
It is a system that's going to have to fix itself.
While running at full steam. There's not going to be
an ability to stop the need. We're going to have
to just interject ourselves into things as they're happening and
try and fix it on the fly. At a state level,
you know, might have more of a chance of getting
someone to listen than at a federal level, at least initially,
it'd be great to have federal resource is allocated. Although
I won't get into the current political and crazies we
may be facing with getting any of that a type
of assistance or strange things that are going on, but
we have to do something. And I know there's a
lot of other criminal defense attorneys who would agree with
all this. I wouldn't hesitate to call up my colleagues
and say, don't you agree and they would all say, yeah,
we agree, but we don't know what to do. We
don't have an answer to them to how to fix it.
And a lot of that is because we're looking. We're
not looking a year down the road of five years
down the road. We're looking six weeks down the road
when I have the hearing, and then that hearing comes
and goes, and unfortunately that file gets closed out. We
move on to the next thing, and we start all over,
and we may have some rotained institutionalized knowledge that I'm
I'm happy to share anything I have with anybody else,
and I find most of my colleagues in the same way.
But it may need to come from public defenders. The
elected public defenders are pointed public defenders depending on the
jurisdiction to be able to talk about things loud enough
and with enough kind of background in statistics that they
keep themselves, So that might be a great place to start.
I've always been a believer, a firm believer that if
you want to get something done, you work hard enough,
it can get done. With that said, when you get
into legislation, you get into the political side of things,
and then all the parameters of it you just brought
it up. Everyone's busy doing their own thing. They're focusing
on one case at a time. When that's done, they
move on to the next one. There has to be
a way where someone can get across to these people,
make them realize not only are they saving millions of dollars,
but they're saving themselves time and they're helping people along
the way. I hate to say that it seems hopeless,
but boy, it almost seems like you're a novice mountain
climber looking at Mount Everest as your first mountain to climb.
Yeah, change is hard. Change is real hard, and people
will resist change every step, especially in the system where
there's a lot of motivation for like I said, for
people just to get things off their desk and move
on to add an extra step in there as someone
to spend some time putting into place in new system
is tough. Funding It is always going to be a problem.
And these are programs that have to be government funded.
There's not going to be a private donor step up,
And who are going through the systems sometimes by the
very nature of what they're going through, are not going
to have the personal financial resources to be able to
fund their own way. That's just a reality for a
lot of people. And I know I mentioned before and
I'll bring it. Our homeless population is full of mental
health problems probably could be treated and these you know
a lot of the individuals who are just languishing and
really struggling on so many fronts, not just from a
poverty front, but from the mental health front and physical
untreated physical ailments. A lot of these people who rate
in our face every day. We're going to have to
provide the resources for them, but we can't get them
to get a job, take some responsibility for yourself. We
can't do that until we can get their mindset right,
until we help get them set up to succeed. Otherwise
we're just picking them up, dusting them off. Maybe we
give them some new clothes, some toilet trees, place to
stay for a few nights, and they're going to be
right back out in the struggle again. They don't have
those tools mentally to put together everything they need, and
a lot of them are very ill.
Yeah, there's a certain amount of the population that will
never ever get better. Unfortunately, they seem to be a
lost cause. You just mentioned the homeless. They're not a
lost cause. They don't have the knowledge, they don't have
the money. They just lost their direction. They have the stress.
Some of them are autistic, have sensory overloadd It just
throws them into a world where they just don't.
Know what to do.
Then they have those that push back telling them they
can't do it, which takes away their hope in trying
to do it. Ultimately, we have to get across to
the legislators both state and national, that this is something
that absolutely has to be changed to make things better
for everyone. How do we do this?
Tragedy sometimes will in the media to do something. It's
a terrible thing to think is what it's going to take.
But we saw some reform after things like the death
of George Floyd, and we can see some changes in
policing there. We're also dealing with a certain level of
disparity because when the wealthy, the powerful class has someone
in their family with a mental health problem, it gets treated,
it gets dealt with. This shouldn't be a problem in
their eyes. You just go do the thing, and as
long as you do the things, everything's going to be okay.
And why isn't everyone just doing the things? Obviously now
we can go down the rabbit hole of our healthcare
system in this country, spend a few hours on that.
But it just makes sense to me when we're looking
at a portion of our population that the cynical and
i think ill informed portions of society look at it.
It's a burden where those people are dangerous or those
are people that are prone for criminal activity. And we
know because common sense tells us, in addition to our
own experiences that a lot of that portion of population
has untreated mental health. Why not provide a little bit
of those resources so we don't have to provide the
other resources.
Absolutely, So, in closing, what would you like to tell
the listeners that you think is important that they hear
about what we've been talking about, and of course what
you're doing.
There are people in the system who do care and
who do want to learn, and who do want to
take whatever we learn and share it with our colleagues
so that we can make change. But we're not equipped
for it naturally as part of our professional progression and
the path that most of us take to get to
these positions. So we will miss some we will swing
it some pitches and can totally miss and maybe even
strike out on some issues. But there are those of
us who really do care and who really do want
to see change, and who do want to see these
issues addressed properly. We just need we need help from
people in the medical fields and informing us and coming
forward and providing us with scholarly articles and information that
we can use. And we need help from our colleagues
on the law enforcement side in the judiciary to listen
and have an open mind for this, but we are here.
We do want to help. There are a lot of
us we talk about it. If really is a significant
issue that for however long our criminal justice system that's
going to go on and has gone on, it's going
to need to be addressed. Shocking it hasn't yet.
Yeah, so true. Well, this has been a great conversation,
a lot of great information. I appreciate you coming on.
Yeah, thank you, Tony. It's great to get the invitation.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the
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