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Negative portrayal on TV and discrimination

Robert124

Last night I was watching a documentary on C5 about the Rachel Nickel murder.  They made a clear comment that the actual killer, Robert Napper, had Asperger's syndrome.  Was that necessary?  Is it discrimination?  If they had talked about his race, religion, nationality or skin colour, there would have been an uproar.

  • in reply to DaveAsperg

    Yeah, I agree, I used to run a members club that was the local unofficial police bar and id be working there getting on with things while all the older officers who had been in the force since the 70's would be bragging about the horrid things they did to people. Most notably as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I used to get pretty upset about the stories of baiting gay people (usually men) then beating them up, etc before arresting them. They were proud of these things, these men would then be intentionally outed to the community to "make sure they don't do it again" 

    Regarding the media though the main issue is you just don't seem much positive representation of autism so as a result, a negative reference like this one ends up with a weight entirely out of proportion with the actual figure. It's not really the fault of this one show, it's the fault of the media as a whole. This is why negative propaganda tends to stick to minorities, if the only time you ever hear about a minority is when your preferred newspaper or online media is talking about a horrible crime you're going to make a connection between that minority and the crime that's hard to shift in anyone that doesn't already have examples to out weight it.

  • in reply to Pax

    The police and the media can gruesomely distort the truth. Checkout the first person accused of the murder. ... Colin Stagg who the police worked on with a honeytrap. a female police officer saying she would love to be raped at knife point

  • I mean you can imagine situations where autism might be argued as a defence. Say an autistic man is having a BBQ and is out cutting meat in his front garden. A neighbour who doesn't like him volts over the fence, walks upto him and screams in his face repeatedly causing the autistic person to panic, feel very threatened, have a melt down and lash out with the knife killing his neighbour. That would generally be manslaughter anyway but with the autism you could argue he had an inaccurate perception of the threat he was under and was in a mental state where he might not have realised he could run away. You could argue he legitimately believed he was acting in self defence. The question will then be was the use of force reasonable (probably not, courts tend to disregard mental state when assessing this, but you never know.) Failing that you could argue that a melt down amounts to a state of automatism, a complete, abet temporary, loss of control, this could also be a defence. #notlegaladvice

  • This is entirely my opinion and I haven't seen it and I'm not likely to but I think for me it feels like it depends on how it was presented. If it was a passive description of mental health, something like "Robert Napper who has Asperger's syndrome and a history of depression..." then I wouldn't say it was particularly discriminatory given that crimes like murder do usually need to take mental states into account. Similarly to if someone had commented on a race-related crime mentioning race suddenly is relevant. 

    However, If they used it to try and insinuate it was a major contributing factor in why the murder was committed, something like "Robert Napper who committed the murder was taken into custody, it was later discovered under investigation he had Asperger's syndrome" Then yes I would say its unnecessary discrimination verging on outgroup fear-mongering. Saying it this way suggests people with Asperger's syndrome commit more murders and would be damaging in the same way it would be for any minority.

  • ok there are at least 2 sets of laws being talked about USA vs UK  they are very different then there is the resr o Europe and then the rest of the world ( the majority )

  • The one time I'm aware of where autism was used as a defence in a murder trial related to a young man who, for the entirety of the trial, sat quietly and read a book. The appeals court ruled the judge should have instructed the jury to disregard the mans odd behaviour in court as being related to his autism. I can't recall if they gave they a retrial or not but their did criticise the first trials judge.