Suspect in Idaho killings has autism

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Brian Kohberger is charged with four counts of murder in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, students who were killed in the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, at a rental home near their campus in Moscow, Idaho.

Bryan Kohberger has autism, according to his lead defense lawyer, who is arguing the diagnosis means he should not face the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted of the murders of a group of University of Idaho students who were killed in a 4 a.m. home invasion attack in November 2022.

Apparently some people think autistic people don't know what they're doing.

Autistic or not, my personal opinion is that the death penalty should only be used for political leaders or people in high places guilty of war crimes and similar offences. For ordinary criminals I think a life imprisonment is sufficient.

I think people who do horrible things like murder, ASD or not should be punished. I used to support corporal punishment but now I find it repugnant, life in prison in really bad cases like this.

What concerns me here in regards to the media is, yet again people on the spectrum will be portrayed as " The next school/workplace shooter" or " The Unabomber".

Unfortunately that's where things are going, at least in the US. Some people will see autistic people as dangerous.

Many people already see autistic people as dangerous. It's only a matte of time before the orange tumor has concentration camps built just for us.

When you have a gullible public such as in the USA, this is how this stuff starts. It got worse after the Newtowne shooting IMO.

Before they made autism ‘dangerous’ they vilified the lone wolf type of personality. There are probably some parallels. I’m with those are don’t want the death penalty, but the above poster who made the comment about war criminals and people in positions of power made a valid point that I can think about.

There have been moments or times where I have come off as the lone wolf type. Obviously, not every lone wolf type is on the spectrum, but many are. A majority of lone wolf's I think just want to be left alone and not be bothered with issues of the world.

However, when some massacre or something of the like occurs, you always hear " He walked alone" " He always kept to himself". When Newtowne happened, this is when I think the whole autism connection came into play.

I remember when folks tried for the insanity defense.
That stopped when they realized the difficulty of getting out of a mental institution.

You can never leave...

Autistic or not, it isn't going to save this guy from lethal injection. Unfortunately, more people will potentially think we on the spectrum are potential timebombs.

I wonder if he really is though. There was an early Simon Baron Cohen book I read (I can't remember the title) where he contrasted autistic people with several other types of people, including non-human persons, actually, which was weird.

There were some characteristics that autistic people and psychopaths shared. The obvious and notable differences were that autistic people have higher senses of logic and ethics which makes autistic people highly unlikely to commit crimes of any sort. Psychopaths have rudimentary emotions that are like in a negative/selfish spectrum and do not seem to include ethics. So they will commit crimes if they think they will not be punished.

But I wonder if he could be a psychopath who knows enough about autism to have faked the diagnostic criteria.

We don't know though, so I guess I personally will accept that whoever did the assessments knew what they were doing. Maybe his special interest was murdering people. If so, that's a rough special interest.

Well, he can be both. You can be autistic and pretty much anything from psychopath or narcisist to highly empathic and unselfish. That he is faking being autistic seems very far-fethed.

If Kohberger is or is not autistic is not the most important thing. The most important thing and the reason I cringe is that yet another mass killer has been linked to autism. That is the reason me and probably you want Kohberger to be allistic. That is why we may be looking for reasons why Kohberger is autistic. At this point there are no legitimate reasons to “undiagnose” him or opine about his neurology at all.