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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
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 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.
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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