I feel for him too. In a lot of ways, having the mind of a child is a terrible thing. It's where you're your dumbest and make the most mistakes. Sometimes I'd make people mad by accidentally putting my foot in my mouth (mainly my decade older elder siblings) or get myself into trouble. Not out of malice, but just by being a dumb kid that fucked up before knowing how or why I fucked up. It's a lot worse if that extends beyond the first 11 or 12 years into the rest of your entire life.
This is very relevant and while Farmers are free to igore this, the courts can't:
Could he have made up the Barbcest full cloth? Yes, by all means yes! The only indication - but that is just a hunch, and only really apparent to farmers, CWCwikians, EDiots and 4chan oldfags, not the courts - is that the Barbcest narrative was to a conspicuously larger extent than his usual flights of fancy tied to the world as people
unlike Chris perceive it.
So: The whole trial being so obfuscated seems to me - correct me,
@Pointless Sperg, if I am mistaken - mostly, almost exclusively even, to be due to
the question of Chis' legal sanity refusing to be resolved in a fashion that satifies the word of the law.
The outcome we have at present looks like some sort of probation/assisted living period for a year. This would seem to be, if one is bound to follow case law by the book as the courts are, a reasonable way to deal with the above - warning him off, in no uncertain terms, and then sending him on his way, but supervised, for lack of robust evidence in the face of a well-founded suspicion that got stronger jail letter by jail letter.
An attempt to teach him the wrongness of what he (for legal purposes)
claims to have done, and see if he is coherent enough that the lecture isn't buried, like guests at Elagabalus' orgies, under fresh new flowers blooming on the twisted and reticulate family tree that sprang from one hedgehog on amphetamines and colloid silver boinking a rodent-like capacitator (or vice versa).
High-Functioning Autists of Chris' grade are rare, very rare. Even less often, they end up in court for serious crimes. Most who have what Chris is having lack the High-Functioning bit, and never even understand the concept of feces - that it should not be eaten or thrown, that while wallowing in fresh stool feels orgasmic at first but will soon turn ugly, and that it is, except in the direst of circumstances,
not fingerpaint.
tl;dr:
The court could easily determine that Chris had pretty concrete ideations of and motivations to commit Barbcest in early Summer last year. And it could as easily determine he was indeed a High-Functioning Autist (they now have a written professional record on that).
But it
cannot, with the evidence at hand,
reliably determine if Chris, at the time when he (she?)
could have raped Barb, was more High-Functioning (and
did it), or more Autist (and merely made it into the most notoriously depraved piece of fanfic outside Japanese pedo slasher snuff).
Even the most concrete ideations and motivations to commit the most heinous crime are unpunishable in any legal system that is recognizes freedom of thoughts and spech, as long as no
attempt to actually
commit that crime is actually made. Gross porn fiction distributed exclusively in private is also not a crime.
So they give him a year in which they'll observe his habits, assigning some trained professional (tard-wrangler/life-assistant) to Chris to make sure that this experiment is terminated at the first indication that what happened was not SHE CAME FOR CWC version 2.0.