Tony Mantor: Why Not Me the World

Brian Shrader: How Autism is Misunderstood in the Legal System

• Tony Mantor

Share episode

Send us a text

Brian Shrader, a criminal defense attorney with experience as both prosecutor and defender, exposes how the justice system profoundly fails people with autism and mental health conditions.

• Autism often leads to escalation during police encounters rather than directly causing criminal behavior
• Mental health training is virtually non-existent for lawyers, judges and prosecutors
• The system lacks procedures and resources for addressing mental health issues beyond addiction
• Mental health diversion programs have extensive waitlists while jails provide no treatment
• First responders frequently misinterpret autism behaviors as drug-related symptoms
• Public defenders and prosecutors are overwhelmed with caseloads, making individual attention impossible
• Addressing these issues requires federal and state-level policy changes
• Many legal professionals care but lack the tools and training to help effectively

Tell everyone everywhere about Why Not Me The World, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world.


https://tonymantor.com
https://Facebook.com/tonymantor
https://instagram.com/tonymantor
https://twitter.com/tonymantor
https://youtube.com/tonymantormusic
intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
Why Not Me the World music published by Mantor Music (BMI)

Speaker 1:

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. 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 are joined today by Brian Schrader, a seasoned criminal lawyer with a distinguished career in the legal system. Initially, he served as prosecutor since 2008 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.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, any opportunity to help out.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much. Can you give us a brief introduction to what you do?

Speaker 2:

Sure, I've been doing criminal law since 2008. Started out 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 chain, and then left the state attorney's office to do criminal defense work and a few other areas of law. As part of criminal defense work, it's inevitable that we're going to encounter a lot of different mental health issues. Substantial amount are related to drug addiction either mental health issues caused by drug addiction or mental health issues that lead to drug addiction. But we also see people 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 neurodivergent 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.

Speaker 2:

I have not seen a lot of situations where I can say my autism caused me to commit a theft.

Speaker 2:

That's not necessarily something we're gonna 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.

Speaker 2:

Or 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 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 caught doing something as basic as a petty theft from Walmart, they may be able to talk their way out of it a little better. They may be able to de-escalate the situation a little more, comprehend if law enforcement 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can understand that for sure. Is the criminal justice system really set up to handle mental health or autism?

Speaker 2:

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.

Speaker 2:

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 pre-sentence investigation reports.

Speaker 2:

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 would 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 layman's term that also a lot of people don't fit into and so we're often left with no options or no good options, especially in situations where there's no insurance. That's a really long, rambling answer to a very basic question.

Speaker 1:

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, the 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.

Speaker 2:

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 belief 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 tremendous presentations. We can discuss these scientific level issues 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 court, 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.

Speaker 2:

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 that 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.

Speaker 2:

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 crimes and then sometimes when they're having a true mental health break, there'll be crime after crime. They might get arrested for something, manage 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 into the diversion program and the jail gives no treatment.

Speaker 1:

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 talked with judges, psychotherapists, CIT trainers. They all have similar thoughts, such as yourself. Now I've seen where mental health issues are 1% of the population. The autistic community is 1% of the population. The autistic community is 1% 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. Come up with a plan that will help these people. There's a retired judge in Miami that's created a 218,000 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?

Speaker 2:

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. They're 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.

Speaker 2:

We've seen some progress. It is not where it needs to be. We still over-incarcerate for drug abuse issues. We still just approach the whole system wrong. But if someone gets arrested on multiple drug charges I can get them into a rehabilitation facility quick. I can facilitate that and the courts are ready for it. There are forms with everything 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.

Speaker 1:

I recently spoke with a former police officer. He trains other police officers around the country about autism and how to interact with them. 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. 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.

Speaker 1:

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 realize 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?

Speaker 2:

You're going to have to start with the Florida Bar. The Florida Supreme Court started mandating mental health 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 in 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 chain is 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.

Speaker 2:

But it extends not just between kind of the people who we see maybe at the top of the pyramid the judges, the prosecutors, law enforcement but even the people who work under them. For example, a mental health client goes to the jail. They put him on opioid withdrawal 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 telling him he's going to take all this medication and go through opioid withdrawal. It was a bipolar situation.

Speaker 2:

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 be trained to recognize this right away? And when they see it, shouldn't they have an obligation to say hey look, red flag, red flag. This is a situation that needs to be treated differently and especially shouldn't be treated again in ways that escalate. Locking him in some small cell alone, tripping him down naked 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, which is sad. What you just brought up reminds me of a conversation I just recently had with a retired judge. He was sent to a prison. He was 17 years old at the time. The inmate was being treated for 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?

Speaker 2:

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 it 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 a thousand files when I was a prosecutor assigned to me and we were turning these things like every 90 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 that the defense 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, absent 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.

Speaker 2:

We have to have a system, number one, to identify the issues 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 who 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 1% or these low percentages. I think a much higher percent.

Speaker 2:

In reality. I think we have a lot of people who have successful careers, or seen as having successful careers or living normal lives, who suffer from some form of divergence 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. And so until we can really identify this and we have 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.

Speaker 1:

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 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 will 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.

Speaker 2:

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 resources allocated, although I won't get into the current political and crises we may be facing with getting any of that 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.

Speaker 2:

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 how to fix it, and a lot of that is because we're looking. We're not looking a year down the road or 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 retained institutionalized knowledge that I'm happy to share. Anything I have with anybody else and I find most of my colleagues are the same way but it may need to come from public defenders the elected public defenders or appointed public defenders, depending on the jurisdiction to be able to talk about things loud enough and with enough kind of background and statistics that they keep themselves. So that might be a great place to start.

Speaker 1:

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 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.

Speaker 2:

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 or ask someone to spend some time putting into place a 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.

Speaker 2:

And I know I mentioned before and I'll bring it up, 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 are right in our face every day. We're gonna have to provide the resources for them, but we can't get them to get a job. Take some responsibility for yourselves. 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 toiletries, a place to stay for a few nights and they're going to be right back out into the struggle again. They don't have those tools mentally to put together everything they need and a lot of them are very ill.

Speaker 1:

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. 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 overload. 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?

Speaker 2:

Tragedy. Sometimes we'll spurn 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. 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.

Speaker 2:

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 and say it's a burden, or 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 the population has untreated mental health. Why not provide a little bit of those resources so we don't have to provide the other resources?

Speaker 1:

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?

Speaker 2:

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 at some pitches and 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 want to see these issues addressed properly. We just need help from people in the medical fields 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 and the judiciary to listen and have an open mind for this.

Speaker 2:

But we are here. We do want to help. There are a lot of us. We talk about it. It really is a significant issue that, for however long our criminal justice system is going to go on and has gone on, it's going to need to be addressed. Shocking, it hasn't yet.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so true. Well, this has been a great conversation, a lot of great information. I appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Tony, it was great to get the invitation. It's been my pleasure. Thanks again, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know anyone that would like to tell us their story, send them to tonymantorcom contact then they can give us their information so one day they may be a guest on our show. One more thing we ask tell everyone everywhere about why Not Me, the world, the conversations we're having and the inspiration our guests give to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world.