attorney Albert Watkins made news on Tuesday while trying to defend a person who participated in an attempted insurrection aimed toward overturning a legitimate election. Watkins represents Jacob Chansley, the self-proclaimed QAnon Shaman who donned a horned headdress, animal skins, and face paint, then joined a mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, in the commission of a president who had trained his supporters to believe there was no legitimate way he could lose an election. Chansey was charged within days of the riot with "knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly behavior on Capitol grounds." He has made it clear that, like most accused criminals, he doesn't want to be found guilty.
So now his lawyer is using what I'm getting to call the Bumbling Aspie Defense (BAD): Stigmatize autistic people so your client can escape with a significant crime. I'm not suggesting autistic individuals are bumblers, to be clear. (I am autistic, and have interviewed subjects as diverse as Temple Grandin and Elmo the Muppet on this issue.) But within the eyes of certain people, perhaps, autism is perceived as an excuse for bumbling through life without being held in charge of your actions.
Enter Albert Watkins. during a recent interview with Talking Points Memo, Watkins said his client has Asperger's syndrome and added that "a lot of those defendants — and I am getting to use this colloquial term, perhaps disrespectfully — but they're all fucking short-bus people. These are people with brain damage, they're fucking retarded, they're on the goddamn spectrum."
Watkins proceeded to feature that this quality of being "fucking retarded" didn't make the Capitol defendants "bad people," only that they were uniquely vulnerable to "four-plus years of goddamn propaganda the likes of which the planet has not seen since fucking Hitler."
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