Brian Shrader
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Brian Shrader’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. Any opportunity to help out?
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, 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 situations. 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 law enforcement will go to arrest someone. grab ahold 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 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 deescalate 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.
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 pre-sentence investigation reports, there's almost not even a recognition of
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.
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 of questions.
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. 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 you know 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.
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