How ASAN Helped Issy Stapleton Get Justice

Kelli Stapleton was recently sentenced to 10 to 22 years in prison for child abuse, after attempting to kill her autistic teen daughter Issy. We spoke with lawyer Samantha Crane, who is the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network’s Director of Public Policy, about ASAN’s efforts on the Stapleton case: both in helping the prosecution send the message that disability does not justify murder, and in urging the court to ensure Issy saw the same justice as any other victim of felony child abuse. TPGA: How did ASAN get involved with the Stapleton case? SC: ASAN generally issues statements after individual incidents of violence that come to our attention, often statements concerning media coverage. But with the Stapleton case, since I’m a lawyer and I started at ASAN one month after the attempt on Issy’s life, we really wanted to see if we could influence the trajectory of the case, not just the…