hypoglycemic amnesia and crime

[clrid]

My son has had type 1 diabetes for 2 years. He was charged with burglary and theft of some insignificant and significant items recently. He says he has no recollection at all of burglarizing.  He found the items that were taken the next day, and could not account for them. He is type 1 diabetic on insulin, and this occured after he drank way too much and way too fast.  He walked out of the bar, and said he couldn't remember anything that happened after that the rest of the night. He is being charged with felonies, yet remembers nothing.  Could you point us in a direction for information that might be helpful to our case.  He has no prior criminal history. We are scared about this.

[JDRF-VOL-RL]

Hello.  I would look into the recent case from the San Francisco area with Doug Burns, who is the current Mr Universe and a type 1 diabetic.  He was arrested after he went low and showed the classic symptoms of lows, including confusion and loss of balance.  The police thought he was drunk or on drugs or something, and he was arrested, but was the charges were subsequently dropped once the police and prosecutors understood the conditions related to diabetes.  

Contact your local American Diabetes Association chapter, they have the resources to help you on a local level with issues like this.  I'd also suggest you contact the Children with Diabetes organization, here's the page where you can contact them:

http://www.childrenwithdiabetes.com/about.htm

They do advocacy as well as education for legal issues like this.  Good luck.

[clrid]

Thank you so much for the information and contacts.

[dwombo]

I was a coach, during my time with the team, One of our guys had low blood sugar and was in W.M superstore, He grabbed something to drink and eat and was charged with shoplifting. To the ignorance of the police they did not believe him at the time. He finally had charges dropped, but the general public needs  to kow about these things. whose to say it might help alot of people out. My husband is Type-1, insulin depndt. there is alot to deal with and people need to understand how to deal with it. there is a reason for every action. Most are health related and it goes un-recognized.

[JDRF-VOL-SG]

Back to the original issue: your son hopefully has had an awakening of the dangers of type 1 people drinking heavily. Hypoglycemia is a real danger to type 1 diabetics. Most doctors recommend drinking no more than 1 alcoholic drink at a time, for alcohol damages the liver's ability to release emergency sugars if the person gets hypoglycemic. Your son needs to wake up to this reality. Yes, he may have done this because he was hypoglycemic, but since no blood test was done to prove it, one can also assume that he was just drunk and therefore unable to remember his actions. People who are not diabetic do dumb things when they drink heavily, too, and often they cannot remember doing them. So in a court situation, you can probably expect this to be brought up. Your son needs to never put himself in a situation where he loses his ability to think clearly, for this can be life-threatening to a type 1 diabetic. He probably has already realized this, but while we are sympathetic to the fact that when hypo we can do things that we truly are not responsible for, we really should never combine that danger with the danger of being too drunk or stoned to be responsible for our actions. The combination is just too dangerous to us.

I don't mean to judge or preach. I just thought that while on the Forum, this point needs to be made clearly to those who read this thread. The reality is that he may not be able to convince the judge that diabetes had anything to do with his behavior at all since he had been drinking. If he had not been drinking heavily, his case would be much stronger.