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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5221 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.

To expand on this, she was evaluated many times prior to the killings (including specifically for the type of pathology she allegedly exhibits) and those many evaluations did not find she had that type of illness.

Usually in these cases the person has a known and obvious illness or has never presented for psychiatric care.

It seems questionable that someone had been seen by probably more than a dozen mental health workers of various types and nobody spotted it. Either her presentation was exceptionally unusual, she lied about her symptoms, or she was able to minimize in a very productive way. Or she made it up on the advice of her attorney.

I don't know that it's so much that she made it up on the advice of her attorney as it is that it's a plausible defense and the only one really available to her. When people commit unspeakable crimes in the absence of any other motive, the default is to believe they are mentally ill, and she had a history of mental illness. The question is whether her mental illness rose to the level that rendered her unable to tell the difference between right and wrong or appreciate the consequences of her actions. There's definitely enough meat on the bone for her to amount a plausible defense, and it's up to the forensic experts to present the evidence and the jury to decide whether she meets the standard. I'm responding because I don't want anyone to get the impression that I think there's some Yates Standard that Clancy doesn't meet; Yates isn't the standard, and I know too little about the Clancy case to make a judgment about her culpability one way or the other. I was just responding to the original article, which made it sound like the two cases were closer than they were, and that even Yates wasn't as easy a call as the article made it sound.

Fair enough!

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