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A man with autism is being held on $100,000 bail for talking to some children.

The man, Daniel Lee, 26, of Wayne, Pennsylvania, spoke to a group of three siblings—ages 8, 9, and 10—last week, asking them about their school and telling them he was on his way to a cabin in the woods. It’s unclear if he told the kids he wanted them to join him or not.

He walked off then found and talked to the kids again 20 minutes later near Wayne Elementary School, whereupon the children’s mom saw him and called the police. The police found the man in just two minutes.

Why so fast? My guess is because he was not a crafty creep trying to elude the authorities. He is a man with a disability that makes it hard for him to interact like a “normal” man around kids, which apparently means never interacting with them at all and instead running in the opposite direction screaming, “Get away! I hate kids! I am not a predator!”

Now, WPVI reports, Lee is in jail, “charged with Attempting to Lure Children into a structure, which is in reference to his statements about a cabin, corruption of the morals of a minor, and harassment.”

Corruption of morals? Really? How, exactly? He doesn’t seem to have said anything salacious. And police say that at no time did Lee make any physical contact or even attempt to make physical contact with the children. Yet here’s how the news anchor played up the story:

The big story on Action News tonight is word of an attempted luring at a Radnor Township school and police have a suspect in custody.

My God, they make it sound as if the kids just barely escaped a depraved menace. As Lee’s mom explained to the reporter—and police—Daniel has autism, and sometimes likes to talk to kids.

But, WPVI reports, “The police say…they can’t take any chances.” After all, here’s a grown man, living at home, with a part time job at a movie theater. Why cut him any slack?

A psychiatric evaluation will be performed on Daniel, and if it’s determined that his parents are not making up their son’s diagnosis, perhaps the charges will be dropped.

But shouldn’t the charges be dropped for anyone facing such an accusation? Is it really a crime to talk to kids about a cabin in the woods if you never touch or attempt to touch or grab them? Wouldn’t that make it a crime to read “Little Red Riding Hood” to a kid who isn’t your own?

Daniel’s mom said that she will teach Daniel that what he did was wrong. Who will teach the police that it’s wrong to throw a man in jail when he clearly has special needs and hasn’t done anything more than talk to some neighborhood kids?

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Just a couple months ago, Bernie Sanders lambasted Uber as an “unregulated” company with “serious problems,” but financial disclosures by the Democratic presidential candidate reveal that whenever his campaign requires a taxi, they literally always turn to Uber.

According to research done by National Journal, 100 percent of Sanders’ spending on taxi and ride-sharing services was spent on Uber. Among 2016 presidential contenders, that’s a distinction Sanders shares with only Bobby Jindal, Martin O’Malley, and the defunct Scott Walker and Rick Perry campaigns.

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Minorities favor injured plaintiffs and give them inflated awards. This folk wisdom in the legal community influences choice of trial locale and the screening of jurors. A Los Angeles court is said to be known by local lawyers as “the bank” because of the frequency and size of its anti-corporate awards.1 A newspaper article summa rizing court results suggests, only somewhat jokingly, that the Bronx County Courthouse should post a warning: “People who get sued here run an increased risk of suffering staggering losses.”2 Beliefs about the influence of factors other than race, such as income and urbanization, also are common.

This article tests these beliefs by studying the mass of tried cases.

...

V. CONCLUSION

We find little robust evidence that a trial locale’s population demographics help explain jury trial outcomes.

In torts cases, jury trial awards and plaintiff success rates do not consistently significantly increase with black population percentage. The mixed racial effects in torts cases are telling because the number of observations, over 30,000 federal and state torts trials, is surely large enough to detect a socially meaningful effect. The demographic effects that do emerge are not present in both federal and state courts. If there is a national Bronx effect in torts cases, it is likely more tied to poverty than to race. We do find evidence in state court of increased plaintiff tort trial success rates and awards in more impoverished urban areas. But this effect does not emerge in federal torts trials in urban areas. So poverty is likely not the only factor at work and federal-state juror pool differences may be the explanation.

With respect to employment discrimination cases, we again find no consistent pattern. Increasing black population percents do correlate with higher plaintiff win rates in federal urba n trials but not in state urban trials or federal non-urban trials. Award le vels do not significantly increase with increased black population percentages in federal or state court. We find little evidence of a significant correlation between poverty rates and higher awards or win rates in employment cases. The most significant effect is a negative correlation between increased poverty rates and plaintiff win rates in urban federal trials.

Our results do not negate the possibility of litigation “hot spots,” where awards or plaintiff win rates are unusually high. The results do suggest that hot spots may be more a function of local conditions than of widespread demographic patterns. The pattern of inconsistent or non-robust demographic effects offers indirect support for what other research suggests: that the evidence in a case is by far the most powerful influence on its outcome. Juror characteristics are most often of minor, secondary importance.

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