Judge Kim Taylor
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Judge Kim Taylor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the situation in our country right now, to me, is pretty scary. Because it seems to me that compassion, people are not doing anything based on compassion or attempting to help other people. And I don't know what you do other than try to elect somebody that does have those qualities.
Because right now it seems that a lot of the folks that we're putting into government are just concerned about promoting themselves or some monetary issue.
Yeah, I'm not seeing much of it.
Judges are elected here. They're elected, you know, partisan elections. We used to have nonpartisan, but partisan elections. What you've got to do is make it part of their platform and part of the way you get elected is to show people that you have the ability to understand what's the difference between right and wrong. You know, what's going to make your society safer?
What's going to save your society resources? You know, what's going to keep people from coming back to the courthouse and courtroom over and over? Because I can tell you, I have sentenced people. I've done it for so long. I've sentenced people and then sentenced their grandparents and their grandchildren. It's sad. that you see this.
I guess a lot of it depends on where you are geographically also. Because if you grew up in a metropolitan area, like, for example, I grew up in the Triangle, which is Raleigh, Durham, Capitol Hill. And, you know, there are a lot of different folks there. You know, it's a lot of university people, educated people, people of all different walks of society.
And I grew up with that kind of environment. But somebody that grows up, say, in rural North Carolina or maybe rural Tennessee, it doesn't see anybody except the people that are like them. You know, they only see the people that look like them, talk like they do. And they don't expand their beliefs and they don't expand their horizons to understand why other people do things the way they do.
Yeah, we do. We do, and I'm not lost hope because, as I say, even when we did this thing back in 2005 with the legislature, I had district attorneys and law enforcement, all these folks that were wanting to help and wanting to be a part of our educational efforts. So it wasn't as bad as you might think.
It seems to me once you get people on an individual basis to care versus a large group of people that, I don't care, I'm wrong, you know.
That's true. That's true. And judges and VAs, you know, we focus so much on consequences, but let's focus some on preventative measures. You know, what can we do to divert this from the court system?
I think probably the most important thing is to open your mind to differences among people. And if you're going to be working with the public, and especially in the court system where you're making life-changing decisions for people and for families, you need to understand what these terms mean. If you hear the word, you know, autism, you need to know that it's a developmental disability.
People don't get cured of it. They can do better and function better, but they're not going to be cured. And if they actually have the diagnosis, there are certain things similar among folks on this spectrum. And in your mind, too, a possibility. I think that this was true back five or six years ago, maybe still true.
We had the University of North Carolina have a program to diagnose and try to train classroom teachers, for example, about how to deal with my own spectrum. And so the military started sending people with families with someone on spectrum to North Carolina. And we just had a large influx of people coming here, you know, that needed these resources.
I've been told, and I'm not sure it's true, but I've been told that other states now are advanced over North Carolina. How do you make people have incentive to care? I don't know how you do that.
Exactly.
I'll give you an example of that because I've seen it personally. Somebody, you know, you talk to people out driving while impaired. Oh, put them in jail, shoot them, blah, blah, blah. And then it's their son or their uncle or somebody in their family. Oh, but he's a nice guy. And you're exactly right. Nobody cares until it affects their family and their life.
And autism can happen in anybody's family.
That's fine.
Well, I went to undergrad at Duke and I wanted to go to medical school. My mom was a registered nurse and my dad was a scientist. Didn't really like the chemistry and when I got out of school, I went and worked for Social Security Disability. That was the worst job ever.
I did that for a year in a cubicle where you have to tell people they can't get this ability and they try to convince you to turn them down. So then I decided I'm going to go to law school. I loved law school. A lot of people didn't like it, but I loved it. I was there with the people that understood me and how I thought. I really loved it. And still I associate with most attorneys.
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