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What does it mean to be “crazy?” I’ve spent much of the past few days stewing on the story of Lindsay Clancy. For context, she is a mother who, in the throes of postpartum something-or-other, whacked her three kids. Killing your own offspring is, on its face, an unambiguous evil. Only the most fanatical (and likely also psychotic) of anti-natalists would suggest otherwise. Clancy has not been characterized as an unambiguous evil. The exact nature of her mental illness is still at issue in the trial, but many figures have converged on the idea that Clancy was not of sound mind and thus is not culpable the way you or I would be. I suspect that no matter what her sentence is, a vocal chorus of mental health advocates will decry it as excessive. I sympathize here — having worked with the severely and persistently mentally ill, living with acute psychosis is hardly living at all.
I think this case is an interesting segue into something I’ve noticed more and more about how we adjudicate moral harms in the public sphere. I’d like to soapbox for a moment. Cool? Thanks. The experience of harm, at least colloquially, is limited to two parties: the offender and the victim. These people experience the qualia of the situation with their own eyes, ears, limbic systems, pain receptors, and memory banks. Unless we were physically present, the rest of us schmucks don’t have that privilege. We can only experience the event through language. We describe what happened. We ideate on the nature of the harms, the observed damages, and the more latent impacts. Most importantly, we construct a theory of mind for those involved. We daydream about what they might have been thinking, or, in cases like Clancy’s, if they could think at all. Bluntly, we want to know if we should treat them harshly or if there are, say, intervening factors that reduce their culpability. All of this is mediated by language.
Many of these intervening factors can be modeled on a spectrum. Someone can be more or less psychotic, more or less cognitively impaired, more or less ignorant to their situation. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Clancy experienced severe psychotic symptoms. In this case, minimal gymnastics are required to describe her nature as such. Clancy is psychotic → therefore she didn’t know what she was doing → therefore she’s off the hook. Thus, it is written. However, how should we treat someone who was a little less psychotic? How about a little less than that? What if they had psychotic symptoms, but they were subclinical or didn’t neatly fit diagnostic criteria? This is where language fails us. Human qualities may be modeled on a spectrum, but language is discrete. And so, the spectrums get “sticky,” and the labels gain outsized importance. A line must be drawn. The person must be sorted.
These sticky spectrums exist for a variety of traits. If you’re “just” poorly socialized and have a blind spot for a particular social norm, you’re expected to do better. If you’re diagnosed neurodivergent, it’s more tolerable to break the norm because you “can’t control it.” If you’ve had a few drinks and crack skulls in a bar fight but are otherwise a normal chap, you’re probably on the hook for assault. However, if you’re a person in the throes of capital-A alcoholism, you can break into a family’s home, sleep on their child’s bed, and avoid charges because you’re burdened by a sickening disease. If your IQ is 70, you can be sentenced to death. If your IQ is 69, you’re much too intellectually disabled for that to be fair. In each of these cases, the mental states at the time of the offense are similar if not near-identical, and yet resulting judgments vary based on how we categorize the offender’s nature. We don’t adjudicate based on “sort-ofs” and “somewhats.” In common parlance, either you’re an alcoholic or not. Either you’re intellectually disabled or not. Either you’re culpable or not. This strikes me as unfair.
I suppose I’m advocating for the spectrums to be less sticky, or for words to have less of a gravitational pull. Clancy will likely receive a modified sentence based on her state of mind. Yet, what ought we to do with people in the midst of mild, manageable psychosis who may still yet have impaired judgment? Maybe they don’t get away with a full insanity defense, but their sentence could be modified accordingly. This is why I oppose mandatory minimum sentencing. The job of the court — and the court of public opinion for lesser matters — is not just to determine what happened, but to determine the appropriate consequence. The question is whether or not this is a utopian suggestion. Is human nature too punitive to implement this mindset at scale? Are we interested in justice or just blood?
Relevant Scott: The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
It bears mentioning that lipstick feminists are grabbing her story to present it as a parable on this evil, heartless, misogynistic society abandoning victims of postpartum depression to their misery.
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I lean in the other direction. Tying justice to the concept of freewill, the way we did, is a mistake. Freewill doesn't exist, everything we do has a cause it's just that sometimes the cause is too complicated and indirect to understand it. We call this type of ignorance freewill. The more we understand of psychology the less people will look culpable under this model.
This is a mistake, the point of justice (as in the institution, not the philosophical concept) is to make society better. A low IQ, hearing voices, to me are signs of an individual that is inherently defective and so should be given a harsher sentence.
I mostly agree, but would point out that there is a slight difference in adjusting the contributing goals of the justice system. Psychologically defective individuals are less responsive to incentives, and therefore punishments should be more tailored towards incapacitation and less towards deterrence. Additionally, rehabilitation attempts, if possible, are more likely to be through psychological and pharmaceutical help rather than education or time to reflect on their behavior.
I think on balance this probably should result in longer jail sentences rather than shorter, but it probably varies on a case by case basis. If someone can figure out what's wrong with this woman, get her on medication, sterilize her so she never has children again, and never let her alone near anyone else's children again, she might be safer in society sooner than the average triple-murderer. On the other hand, if they can't fix her condition then she might never be safe in public again. The optimal length of her sentence varies based on how fixable her mental state is.
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I started a comment and then remembered you might be one of the people with an actual medical background so I won't perseverate and will ignore some of the misunderstandings of people below.
What's your read on the actual dx? I've been trying my best to avoid the details but the case is now everywhere so might as well try and dig in.
I've also spotted an interesting culture war element, even in medicine (and even among my friends who work in mental health) nearly all of the women don't think she did it (they blame the husband). Most of the men? Think she did it (and with most of those also thinking it wasn't psychosis).
The only exception I've run into was a forensic psychologist.
Perhaps something to chew on.
Comment as you wish! I welcome more discussion even if you think it's redundant. I have education in the issues at hand, though I do not currently work in a diagnostic capacity with psychotic populations. I'd describe more, but I am overly protective of my online footprint and anonymity is why I enjoy participating here.
I haven't read about Clancy extensively, so my comments are tentative and open to correction. Generally speaking, psychotic diagnoses are a shitshow. Presentations vary wildly within the same diagnosis and treatment is a blunt instrument, to put it nicely. The defense claims she experienced some form of bipolar disorder with accompanying post-partum depression. From what I have read, her presentation aligns more with depression with psychotic features, but again, these categories are extremely fuzzy.
Notes taken from her psychiatrist indicate she was experiencing what are commonly called "command hallucinations," or voices that tell you to do things. It seems trivial to us mentally sound folks to resist voices - just say no - but it's not merely a voice. These hallucinations are often experienced like a form of possession, where the voice is accompanied by a loss of control or feeling of being "overridden." I once worked with a man who attempted to strangle me while crying and saying, "I'm so sorry, I don't want to do this." I believe him. He warned me when he was about to lunge so I could avoid it. I knew him well and in his right state of mind, he was a kind and gentle person. During his worst moments, he believed he was possessed by a pagan god. There was nothing we could do to talk him out of it, the only thing that worked were very strong doses of rescue medication (usually benzodiazepines). It is entirely possible that Clancy had similar experiences. It's hard to say. Much of the commentary around her mental health has focused on the depression, suicidality, and sleep disturbances that she experienced, rather than the psychosis. I am surprised the defense has taken this approach.
The other point I'd like to make is that the day-to-day experience of psychosis varies incredibly. I've worked with patients who have had fantastic weeks and consistent upward progress. These good periods can create a false sense of security and normalcy and often result in medication adherence wavering. Naturally, the progress comes to a swift halt (or even regression) in these cases. Even worse, sometimes downturns occur for no apparent reason despite consistent treatment. Here, there is little that can be done other than providing rescue medication, hoping the episode passes, and tweaking the prescription. Even within a single day, presentations can change dramatically. As such, the claim that she could wake up in the morning, take her kids to school, and come home to kill them does seem psycho-medically plausible.
Ultimately, it's hard to diagnose her remotely or evaluate the validity of the expert claims. I am very interested in her presentation these days. She appears to be able to sit in the courtroom with minimal difficulty and is evidently not experiencing these symptoms anymore. Perhaps she's just better at concealing them. I wonder what changed - was it time, or a new treatment?
I've written this and am only now seeing you are a physician. Apologies if some of these observations are elementary to you.
I'm quite interested in the differential, even if the information to really figure it out isn't available (and it wouldn't be appropriate anyway).
The impression I got is that she didn't endorse any CAH before or after the killings until meeting with someone hired by her defense. If this is true....yikes.
While patients lie about and minimize AH all the time it's usually noticeable enough, especially in someone getting enhanced scrutiny (for instance after murdering their children).
I'm therefore not sure I buy that she has some form of postpartum psychosis or unmasked BP w/PF, especially given the blatant doctor shopping, help seeking/unseeking behavior, and odd regimens (which can of course stem from poor clinical care but usually involves some element of questionable patient decision making).
If you toss out primary psychotic pathology it rapidly gets really interesting (and this dovetails into your original post). The observed behaviors are demonstrably abhorrent. Do you need to automatically catch a diagnosis as a result?
DSM personality pathology requires persistence and pervasiveness, I haven't heard any evidence to establish that. Is this instead Cluster-B adjacent coping mechanisms in the setting of some other process such as anxiety, depression, or abusive behavior from the accused of being personality disordered himself husband?
I don't think laymen should really be weighing in on criminality and legal proceedings for psychosis because that gets thorny pretty quickly (aka what is Anosognosia anyway?), but I think it's pretty mainstream and reasonable to treat DSM personality pathology (especially BPD and ASPD) as criminality instead of insanity. Likewise terrible stuff that doesn't quite fit into a diagnostic box.
Although if psychosis was present - it's easy to underestimate the danger in first episode psychosis, without proper practice managing symptoms things can go off the rails very fast.
Uh-oh. In my experience CAH tend to be quite persistent and well-documented, since they are public enemy no. 1 when it comes to patient safety.
I think this is the only scenario that I could really accept - if the killings happened in her first episode of psychosis, prior to treatment. It's going to come down to how thorough her psychiatrists were in documenting the progression and severity of her symptoms, so they can generate a rough timeline of her illness. I think we will probably never know these details and can only hope the court does its due diligence.
My understanding is that she was consistently appropriately assessed for psychotic symptoms through a longitudinal series of interactions with multiple providers including during an inpatient stay. None endorsed and none observed until she met with a defense hired witness (and this was all presented in court).
Now the above could certainly have been misrepresented to me, but I don't think there is really any consistent evidence of psychosis.
That goes a long way towards making criminal liability appropriate.
Yikes. The defense just wrapped. If the prosecution is any good, they'll pounce on this.
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Same thing, sometimes. Kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the innocent. We owe some victims blood. We owe ourselves blood sometimes. We owe the perpetrator blood often. We owe potential future victims peace and safety. Every crime victim after the first one is a choice made by society as well as the perp. Every shattered family, every alcoholic survivor, every permanent disability. The waves of misery sent through a community. We choose to let that happen, when people think justice is not denominated in blood.
I'm guessing you still support kindness to police, prosecutors, and judges, who violate, slander, and sentence innocent people every day, if only by reckless negligent accident, and rather that this means that they should be extra mean to their victims. The problem with this is that their «law» is not morality and you don't even know who breaks it or not. Evidence is almost always partial at best.
They are not owed that, they should secure it themselves. Otherwise we are selecting for cruel tyrants and complacent sheep instead of autonomous individuals.
Don't know where you got any of that, but I disagree, obviously.
Keep guessing though, this could be entertaining.
You disagree with what part?
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In the past, "we" committed injustice by spilling innocent blood. Nowadays, often enough, "we" overcorrect. Justice sometimes demands the spilling of torrents of blood, but "we" deny it, sometimes for good reasons (in dubio, etc.), and often for bad (weak stomachs, negative utilitarianism, protected geoups, etc.).
In this sense, I think that quantifying psychoses or IQ is completely irrelevant to justice. Justice should see three murdered children and unsheathe its sword.
Things are working fine without torture or the death penalty, and the system remains still too harsh. So I don't know where you are getting this torrents of blood logic from.
Rotherham; rail hatchet and knife murderers in Germany; mass border crossings all over Europe. Edit: Lindsay Whatshername, too.
Things are not working fine.
The solution is inegalité, not more tyrannical egalité.
Please elaborate.
Get the immigration and public transport access situation under control instead of neglecting it and relying on increasingly awful state retaliation when someone who shouldn't even be allowed on the train behaves predictably.
Sure. Sounds good.
But why not both?
Free white men have the right to do as they please free of the state.
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A single IQ point determines whether you are responsible enough for a death sentence, because we have laws. Laws should be legible, consistent, and standardized tests provide both. If it is more cruel to execute a person who scores a 69 IQ person than one who scores a 70 it is because we or [this code] say(s) so. The spectrum of culpability or responsibility is typically done via sentencing, as you note, but if someone clears the bar for insanity we also say it has to be a threshold. It must be, because the judgment is binary. As for your questions on psychosis specifically, as I understand a psychosis diagnosis is not a get out of jail free card. One must suffer the kind of trial going on now where either the state or a defendant proves why a specific instance of psychosis means one should or should not be held accountable for a crime.
My hot take: it means shrinks observed something enough times to give it a name and stuck it in the DSM. These observations, decisions, and writing are all indeed mediated by language.
Allow me to be a punk and consider something really crazy. There is and has been an ongoing epidemic of an unnamed affliction which primarily effects young men. It is an old affliction, possibly as old as time. There are differences in observable rates of this condition demographically speaking, but it's definitely higher in the general population of young men.
The generalized case sees a young man taken in the blink of an eye with blind rage. A man with this condition is overcome and engages in swift, brutal, disproportionate violence against another -- most often another man. Without proper studies early researchers of the condition have informally dubbed it Insulted Shoe Disorder, or ISD. The name stems from one case discovered by researchers in the field which involved a man who upon hearing an insult (made against the shoes he was wearing) flew into a blind rage, beat another man to death, and took the victim's shoes. The police arrived to the scene shortly afterward and immediately arrested the man. In custody, the man repeatedly stated he couldn't say what came over him, he could not say why he flew into a blind rage, and he could not say why he took off the man's shoes. "I don't know," is all the man could say, face in hands. While awaiting trial, the man's lawyer arranged for several psychiatrists to come and see him. Each time he told the same story, "The man insulted my shoes, I saw red. I don't remember much after that. The next thing I know my fists are covered in blood and I'm looking at two cops pointing guns at me, a shoe in each hand."
Sociologists, always ahead of medicine, have visited areas with suspected cases of ISD to draw comparisons between them. They found that even while adjusting for things like culture and race that young men separated by thousands of miles were generally at risk of suffering the affliction. They regarded this as a natural kind of illness, though the sociologists admitted they were unqualified to definitively say. Sometimes they found the young men had a history of violence prior to their first documented ISD episode. In other cases, the sociologists found that the young men had no history of violence at all. Seemingly, they found something just inexplicably snapped within these men at one moment in time which evoked a reaction that could not be undone or considered sane.
What could be more crazy than to kill someone simply because they insulted your shoes, truck, hat, or mother-- is it not a mental illness because it is more common relative to cases of filicidal mothers? But of cognizance and choice, what sane thinking person would choose throw their life away over that? Certainly there are some who exhibit signs of ISD while still being responsible for their irresponsible actions, but there must be those afflicted who had little choice in the matter. The sociologists even tell us this responsibility may be diffuse, perhaps medicine could confirm this. Medicine could recognize few young men want to experience an episode of ISD. Identifying which ISD cases might suggest a temporary insanity and separating them from the hardened thugs is a moral imperative. We are talking a massive scale here. Potentially tens of thousands of young men a year unfairly prosecuted as if they had control of their actions to an extent they should be held criminally liable.
These can be and often are the same thing.
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As I mentioned in another subthread earlier this week, Clancy had sufficient presence of of mind to send her husband away on an errand to give herself the time needed to kill the children. From what I've seen/heard of the trial, there is absolutely evidence that she was suffering from mental issues, but in my judgement not nearly severe enough to completely strip her of her agency and free will in deciding to brutally strangle her children (including an infant).
As I also argued in the other subthread, if women's hormones are strong enough to cause them to murder their own flesh and blood against their own free will, that's one of the strongest arguments imaginable against women's rights and female autonomy you could come up with. Testosterone causes its own problems for men, but nothing like this.
I didn't read the previous subthread, so I can't speak to the discussion you all have had there. I'd just like to point out that you're displaying the behavior that I described in my post. You acknowledge that she has some degree of mental issues - in other words, her cognition and impulses are different from yours, perhaps more distorted or reactive. Yet, because she isn't "completely" stripped of agency, you are choosing to categorize her as "culpable," which is likely the moral matrix in which you would regard yourself. Of course, what she did is monstrous and she is culpable in some form. But why does it have to be an either/or?
I think suggesting that a short-term medical anomaly affecting 1-2 in 1000 women is representative of baseline female hormonal function is quite dishonest. When people are in the throes of mental illness, we do deprive them of autonomy and rights temporarily (5150's), but once their mental normalcy returns, their rights return in tow.
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The problem with discussions like this is always the same thing, we can't decide on what exactly punishment (and jailing someone in particular) is meant to be for. Is it revenge? Deterrence? Rehabilitation? Is it just keeping known dangerous elements locked up? It's all of those to some degree, but also kinda none of them either.
Like imagine for instance a virus is created that causes .5% of the population with a rare biomarker to go and kill the nearest person. They can't control themselves and once they kill they go back to normal and build up an immunity so they can't be infected again with it. These are known and proven results, no amount of willpower can resist it and no one with the killing virus has ever done it a second time. Should we still punish them? I think there's a fair argument towards no, that they are perfectly fine and good people who had their sense of reason momentarily snatched away from them.
Ok now imagine it's say schizophrenia, extreme enough that they engage in violence and murder but we invent a long term cure and 95% of these violent schizophrenics are no longer violent and won't reoffend, should we let them out of jail early since the problem is solved? Are they not too fine and good people who had their sense of reason snatched away, and now restored?
Or what if we believe there's a high chance that a mentally ill killer won't reoffend again if we put them in a nursing home and just have them watched all day? What if the postpartum depression mother, overwhelmed by uncontrollable thoughts and feelings, won't ever hurt anyone else again and with some careful watching of any future pregnancies won't be able to reoffend? Should we punish those people still if the problem is solved?
Of course the real world isn't so clean and simple as thought experiments and erring on the side of caution is what I'd do for real world scenarios, but there's definitely a lot of fair discussion to be had.
There's a lot I wonder here.
In the Catholic framework and the theological traditions that believe in sacramental graces, the state can grant a mercy to the condemned-to-death by allowing them last rites and Christian burial. But there is mercy in life in prison rather than condemning to death, especially in traditions that don't believe in sacramental graces but do believe in prevenient grace, such that a murderer might with time gain repentance.
I wonder if this latter, in part, contributed to what became the idea of rehabilitation. That as we moved into a materialistic framework the idea of mercy was retained and repentance became the generic idea of a person being rehabilitated. I have a problem with this as a critique for the materialist framework: if murder dispatches a mind to oblivion, execution would surely become the only just punishment, as it is the only punishment that approaches proportionality, except perhaps for letting the murderer live but only to put them through physical torture until they die.
I want to stay generally abstract but there is a common response, from those who advocate for leniency-based reforms around incarceration, of questioning the incentives. The death penalty doesn't work because people still murder. Maybe, it wouldn't be unfair for a person to say there were many more executions in the past and there was still crime, what's it doing? But this all supposes we punish crime as a disincentive to crime, but that framework, consequentialism, looks out the corner of its eyes at countries like El Salvador, or another example with Indonesia. Indonesia has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, and not to put too much stock in genetics, but Indonesia is not high on the IQ charts. They just very aggressively prosecute crime, as El Salvador now does, to great effect.
A last note on this point: I also wonder if it's not so much that the death penalty doesn't work, it's that there are many, many individuals in the US who could have been justifiably locked away for life long before they ever murdered. Around 50% of US inmates have 10 previous arrests. It's difficult not to suspect people who say policing and incarceration don't work when some of those people dedicate their lives to making it harder to police and incarcerate.
But this still looks at the problem by assuming a given framework. I don't believe in punishment to stop other people from being criminals, I believe in punishment because crimes, evils, create disorder, the literal lived disorder but also and, for me the greater, gestalt moral disorder, and disorder must be matched with order. If only one person ever murdered and we knew no one else would again, we could still punish that murderer even if it were an objective certainty no disincentive to future crime would be produced. We can put a murderer in prison for the rest of their life because what they have done, in and of itself, justifies that treatment. I don't believe we have to caveat it as the secondary to the primary purpose of rehabilitation. We don't owe it to criminals to see to their rehabilitation.
To this, the examples given suppose the rehabilitatory or incentive frameworks. If we put the murder-virus person in prison, they're already technically rehabilitated, and you can't disincentive a virus that overrides reason. Same for the schizophrenic, if they're rehabilitated, why keep them locked up? Within these frameworks these are good hypotheticals, especially since these frameworks are how the West now largely approaches crime.
But I still don't buy the frameworks. If a person inexcusably takes life, that itself, for no other considerations, is sufficient grounds to lock that person in a box until they die. If they were in a psychotic state, we can put them in a different, softer box, that they will nonetheless remain in until they die. If they wouldn't again, I would say that doesn't matter, because my framework isn't that we lock them up to stop them from committing more crime, it's that what they've done is enough to lock them away forever. If it doesn't stop others from doing it, that also doesn't matter, because we can put those people in the box, too.
To branch to something very specific: this is one area where I'm extremely optimistic about coming automation. Robot guards and human-simulacra orderlies for lifelong psychiatric institutions will do a lot for assuaging fair concerns at institutional abuse. Robot guards can't be killed or themselves be complicit in crime such as smuggling in drugs; a simulacra orderly won't torment or rape the persons under their care. These alone won't necessarily perfect prisons and psychiatric institutions, but solving the problem of manpower could allow these institutions to be run in new and much better ways.
What sort of work is "inexcusably" doing here? You don't consider being in a psychotic state to be an excuse, so what excuses do you find acceptable?
It seems like most of the excuses you might accept would be in a similar camp to things you dismiss as irrelevant like recidivism, deterrence for others, etc.
Do you treat negligence the same way as outright killing? Should a parent who accidentally suffocates their child while co-sleeping with them, or a parent whose child drowns because the child wandered to the background swimming pool unattended be put into a box for the rest of their lives? If not, what do you think distinguishes the two cases, since you seem a-okay with locking up a murder virus carrier or a schizophrenic, even if we're sure they'll never do it again.
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Prison has always been a bad solution. Per a comedian on a recent Kill Tony, 1/3 of the people in prison should really be in a mental hospital, 1/3 should be in drug rehab, and 1/3 should be taken out back and shot because they are irredeemable.
Unfortunately, our system of justice has to be 'blind', because society is too large and varied for subjective judgements about people. We can't look at a whole person, their life in the community, their past and future, and determine how best they should be dealt with to make them a useful part of society (even if judges do have some leeway on this). We have to look at the specific crime or law they've broken, and decide how to punish them for that. We have created a system that is as 'fair' as we can make it, even if the end result is a disaster for the individuals in it. In other words, our modern justice system is fundamentally bureaucratic over and above useful or even just.
This reads like you think individuals are property of the collective. Law should be about individual torts and feuds and not about the collective grounding down the fundamental unit of perception, the individual, into dust if one isn't complacent enough.
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I doubt the issue here is society being too large and varied. After all, there was a time when executing certain people and putting other people into mental hospitals (against their will, that is) were part and parcel of living in a functioning society and the great majority didn’t even give it a thought. You’re definitely right about the drug rehab part though.
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I believe in punishment for deterrence and prevention.
Prevention: will she have future kids? Will she get some future hormone imbalance that makes her go on a killing spree? Maybe she should be monitored and given therapy, and to prevent this situation happening in other parents, we should monitor and give therapy to those suspected with PDD. But prison is overkill.
Deterrence: this justifies some kind of prison, someone who regrets having kids may fake PDD and kill them for similar release. But I still think a long sentence is excessive, prison is miserable and giving up your kids for adoption should be less.
More generally, the US has such long prison sentences, does it have any effect on crime? For frequent (3x) offenders I support the death penalty (with strong evidence), but for others I think it’s wasteful and unnecessarily cruel.
I believe in punishment for punishment's sake. It is a necessary component of justice and a simple extension of the golden rule: as a person harms another, so too they also shall be harmed. I find that a lot of people express a belief that punishment is a vicious necessity, to be minimized whenever and wherever possible and used only to the extent needed to serve other material ends (especially with respect to women). I don't agree with this at all, and I think it undermines the goal of justice to eliminate righteous punishment for the guilty.
You have that backwards. The golden rule is treat others how you want to be treated. It's turn the other cheek, not an eye for an eye.
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That's not the Golden Rule, that's the lex talionis ("Eye for an eye") principle. An ancient and venerable principle of justice to be sure, but not the same principle at all.
It's a simple logical extension of the principle. In logical terms:
Do unto others → done unto you.
By modus ponens, harm unto others → harm unto you.
I actually think you're getting the logic of the Golden Rule backwards. It isn't:
It's:
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I had the same thought, but then had this idea: there's also an element of mental rehabilitation. If Clancy is now in her right mind, she probably wants to be punished for what she did. Maybe not in an explicable way. But anyone who does something so heinous, whether they were in psychosis or not, will feel they deserve punishment, and will not be mentally whole until they get what they feel they deserve.
I don't necessarily stand by this as a theory of law, but thought it was interesting enough to share.
Im of the strong opinion that findings of insanity should mean treatment until youre sane enough to be punished, then punishment should begin. Hinkley should have begun the normal sentence for an assasination once he was released from the mental institution.
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My thoughts were similar. I believe pretty firmly that filicide is a crime worthy of death. I believe it firmly enough that if I ever murdered my children, I would probably administer the punishment myself if the state refused to. The only wrinkle is that I also believe suicide is immoral—but does a self-administered death penalty really count as suicide? I’ve come to think no.
I believe the death penalty is immoral but suicide is not. With some asterisks. Suicide is bad if it harms your family. Then it's an offense against your family. If you have no family or it's a benefit for your family (for example, you are terminally ill) then it's not wrong. The death penalty is bad when imposed by a stranger because it's tantamount to murder. That doesn't mean killing is always bad, but it is generally bad. Self defense is okay, including in the extended sense.
Interesting how different our moral intuitions are. I would say, for example, that the teenage boys who kidnapped, raped, brutally tortured, and murdered Junko Furuta should have been immediately executed, and the fact that they weren’t was a terrible injustice. Likewise the murderers of Iryna Zarutska and Debrina Kawam, the would-be murderer of Bethany MaGee, and everyone involved with the Pakistani rape gangs. Allowing any of them to live, let alone to ever see the outside of a prison cell, strikes me as a horribly anti-social policy. I honestly can’t understand the mind of someone who disagrees.
You don't have a basis to condemn their behavior if you're willing to stoop to that level though.
I agree that life in prison is a reasonable penalty for murder. I don't understand the additional point of state executions. I do think that prisoners should be allowed to commit suicide as I would likely do this if I were incarcerated for life for whatever reason. There is no point to living in a prison.
The issue is more what is the basis of your moral superiority? How do you condemn the man killing Iryna Zarutska only to stoop to his level and kill him in return? It makes more sense to incarcerate him for life although the present state is a deadly one that murders a lot of innocent people (particularly overseas where they do not need to be convicted for a crime they did not commit, although a lot of people are falsely convicted, usually by accident but not always).
With no more moral difficulty than I'd have with forcibly arresting someone for assault, imprisoning a kidnapper, or fining an embezzler. Whether an action is morally or legally a crime depends on the full context, not just on the immediate action. It is not okay to kill someone for sitting in front of you, but it it is okay to kill someone for wantonly murdering an innocent.
Practically, I'd still rather not have a death penalty, because our justice system makes mistakes and when it does I prefer the mistakes to be as reversible as possible. "As possible" is doing a lot of work here (if those assault and murder suspects turn out to be innocent, we can't undo a forceable arrest or a false imprisonment, even if we make recompense), but we can do the best we can, and giving life imprisonment to murderers is part of that under most circumstances.
For sure. However in practice people ignore this and say badge means it's okay, no badge means less rights. They are not taking into account full context of actions, rather they are establishing a perverted, travesty caste system between state employee and individual.
How do you determine who is innocent? If someone receives the consequence of their own principles, such as believing in equality and then receiving equality on public transport, was that person innocent? The full context is not considered when we focus on spilling schizophrenics' blood. Rather, the entire concept of public transport, riding it, voting for it, the system of who lives where and why, the system of who is born when, where, and at all, and why, must be interrogated. Otherwise we're playing justice dress up, where limited and select context is taken into consideration and at the end of the process, the common man pats himself on the back and considers himself «good.»
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Does the immorality of suicide cause the self-administered death penalty to be more justified, due to how it punishes not only your life but also your sense of self and identity compelling you into a sort of morally contradictory situation where you feel like you have no choice but to do something you consider immoral, or does it cause it to be less justified, due to how it would require you to commit yet another immoral act? I can see the argument for both.
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Hence a prison sentence is justified regardless of sanity. The if she wants more “punishment” she can administer it to herself, ideally by community service.
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She is both crazy and unquestionably murdered her three kids. Whether she spends the rest of her life in jail or a mental hospital is kinda irrelevant; it’s not really a question of ‘deserves’.
If Lindsay Clancy receives her preferred verdict she will be acquitted of the crimes for which she was tried. The involuntary commitment that follows this verdict is not, legally speaking, a punishment. A commitment to a mental health facility is not for the protection of society, but an acknowledgment that the verdict logically allows the state to confirm a mentally ill person is no longer mentally ill. That commitment is not to be used to lock away people who the state or an institution may consider dangerous beyond any danger that is tied to ongoing mental illness which requires treatment.
People want to believe the system will not treat her as acquitted of these crimes. I am sure this belief is validated in some cases. Medical professionals are probably skeptical of releasing the infamous from the looney bin even if they have no need for treatment. That is an injustice according to our legal fiction, but it's probably true that it happens.
A person who was somewhat crazy for a couple months, but very crazy (due to failed treatments) only for a 60 minute window where they strangled their own babies might only require treatment for a little craziness and depression now. For this reason I think we should rework the legal fiction and allow the state the option to pass down real sentences with this type of verdict. An individual can opt to transfer from the looney bin to prison to complete their sentence once they are deemed mentally fit if they so desire.
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Except people found "not guilty for reasons of insanity" can get weekend passes from their care facilities... https://wtop.com/fairfax-county/2026/08/man-found-not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity-in-fairfax-co-killing-flees-on-one-way-flight-while-on-hospital-pass/
I think there's a problem if we think a insanity verdict is a lesser sentence, instead of a heavy sentence where you are still locked up, and additionally subject to medical treatments against your will.
I think the main issue is that the system HAS to make a binary determination that either makes the person completely irresponsible or completely responsible, and only has imperfect expert testimony to go on to make that determination. Everything flows from the fact that we have to make a hard choice, and the perverse incentives are inevitable in that context.
Sure, the current system does. But as philosophers here, we could muse about alternatives. What about a fractional responsibility regime?
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Correct, this binary distinction is precisely what I'm talking about in my other examples.
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If her condition is treatable or self-limiting (as post-partum psychosis normally is) it makes all the difference in the world, because if she successfully pleads an insanity defence she will be released when she gets better.
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Of course - legally speaking, she has minimal wiggle room and the consequences will be unquestionably severe. Her case just got me thinking more about how attitudes toward moral transgressors develop generally. Should we regard someone with derision, pity, anger, fear, or another emotion? What makes something a "troubling mistake" or an "act of depravity?" Should they be treated with dignity or cruelty, punished or reformed? All these questions are at play based on what the cultural apparatus deems is the person's nature, and I think language isn't doing us any favors.
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