Hacker's Mum appeals to Prime Minister

THE MOTHER of Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon has asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown to stop her son's extradition to the US where he will stand trial and face a possible 60 years in jail.

The autistic rights movement has also joined the campaign, handing their own letters to the Prime Minister today before joining a demonstration for Gary outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square at 5pm.

Gary's Mum, Janis Sharp, joined other campaigners in asking the Prime Minister in a letter if he would try Gary in a UK court. She appealed for leniency to be shown Gary as someone diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.

"Gary has a right to be tried here in his own country and extradition would have a catastrophic effect on his mental health which has already deteriorated over the past six years because of the stress of the proposed extradition," said the letter.

Jacqui Smith, the UK home secretary, has already refused to allow Gary's Asperger's to persuade her to try him in the UK.

But organisations representing autistic people are insisting that Gary's plight, and theirs, and that of other disabled people, be fairly considered by the legal system.

Roderick Cobley, of the London Autistic Rights Movement, said the government should give Gary a break: "People on the autistic spectrum frequently find it very difficult to live in and understand a complicated world that is not made for them, and often are prone to getting into trouble because of their different perceptions of the social world."

Gary couldn't cope with a long sentence in a US jail, he said. Yet other people who were not disabled and who had been caught hacking into sensitive US systems had been allowed to stand trial in their own countries. He noted that Gary had not been prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service, the UK's public prosecutor, after his arrest in 2003, and three years passed before the US decided to have him extradited.

Nadine Stavonina-de Montagnac, an autistic screenwriter, described in another letter to the PM how many people with autism were like Gary driven to drink and drugs because of the problems they had coping with life, and this often led them into trouble.

"You must have heard the National Autistic Society reports about the horrendous bullying, rejection and abuse autistic people go through every day: how can that NOT affect people? How can that not sometimes cause them to withdraw from society and slip into Obsessive Compulsion Disorder and depression?" she said.

She said the UK government was to blame for Gary's drug-fuelled hacking crime because it had not done enough to improve diagnosis of autism. Gary did not discover he had Asperger's Syndrome until this summer. Had he been diagnosed earlier he may never have fallen foul of his obsessive, spliff-laden search for evidence of UFOs on US computers.

"Saving Gary is very important for the sake of ALL our vulnerable children on the autistic spectrum," she said. µ