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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
Some thoughts as I've been forced to learn much more about this case than I've wanted to know:
-A common response to the media conversation around this case is to criticize women for brainless takes that do not engage with the information about the case or expert commentary. This includes me, I've been frustrated.
-It seems like actual experts in this field are landing on a psychotic process (most likely postpartum psychosis) as the explanation of events. That is to say she is legitimately not guilty by reason of insanity. This moved the needle for me. How can I criticize women for being retarded and not listening to actual information if I don't listen to experts and people with specific knowledge of the case.
-As a legal matter, it sounds like the expectation from knowledgable parties has been a hung jury or not guilty by reason of insanity because of structural, jurisdiction specific aspects of this type of defense in MA.
-I don't know how easy it will be to parse this without a medical background, but for a relevant podcast by a forensic psychiatrist you can search on YouTube " Lindsay Clancy Trial: Forensic Psychiatrist Explains Psychosis, Malingering, & Insanity Defense."
-Incidentally I strongly suspect one or both of the hosts of that podcast are Rationalist/Scott diaspora types, so if you are reading this: loved the metal gear reference.
Probably because experts had spent 20+ years of burning the trust that they had built (not that expert witnesses deserve any goodwill at all, they are as sincere as prostitute having orgasm with a john). Also what ratio of said experts could be classified as woke?
Assuming experts are wrong without any investigation is even worse mental hygiene than assuming they are right without any investigation, and is a massively common intellectual failure in certain communities including our own.
Yes, expert witnesses are paid to support a side during the trial, but that doesn't mean that all expert witnesses are equally credible. Some expert witnesses wrote the textbook. Some expert witnesses evaluated the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. Some are random fillers. Guess which the Clancy defense team got?
Likewise experts in the field may in fact not be involved in the case at all and taking a stance, as in my link.
Lastly - I hate woke and see it everywhere, but Jesus you can't reach to it for everything. Forensic physicians are some of the least woke people around for obvious reasons.
That's not what's happening here, though. People are noticing that expert opinions disagree with their own judgment and deciding that the fact that the opinions come from "experts" doesn't override their judgment, because they value the "expert" opinion no more than that of a layman. It's not assuming that they're wrong, it's using the conclusion that they lack expertise in what they claim to be experts, which might be correct or incorrect, but certainly eminently reasonable when it comes to anything around psychology in 2026.
To claim that "expert opinion" should sway your opinion either way is assuming that they are (more) right (than a layman) without any investigation. To not let it sway your opinion and simply disagree when their opinion disagrees with yours isn't assuming they are wrong, no more than it's assuming any layman is wrong if you don't let a layman's opinion on something convince you.
Judgement requires discernment. Most of the opinions on this case I see here and elsewhere are unwarranted opinions generally without any specific information about this case or information on how mental health or insanity pleas work in general.
It is the same level of zero effort opinion put forth by the women on social media who say that the husband did it "because he just looked like he did it okay." Prettying it up by appealing to anger at doctors for covid or wokeness doesn't change the fact that much of the ink spilled on this is uninformed and is absent any specific or general knowledge.
The number of times I've seen people mix together psychology and psychiatry, or argue that somehow this case was going to excuse women from murder charges because of natural hormone variations is unreal. Very basic misunderstandings of facts should be a sign to step back and ask questions.
I'm not seeing a lot of that.
OK, so maybe everyone's judgment about this trial here is bad, exactly as bad as Clancy's supporters. I don't see anywhere in what I wrote that would conflict with that at all. This doesn't change the fact that it's entirely reasonable to conclude that "expert opinions" in this case is no more valuable than one's own judgment. Whatever lack of discernment that anyone here (or anywhere) has, given the current state of psychology and experts thereof, it'd be entirely reasonable to conclude that those experts' opinions are corrupted or biased or incomplete or just plain wrong to a similar extent, i.e. like any non-expert layman's.
If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not an aerospace engineer, is disagreeing with the findings of aerospace engineers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of the airplane, who happens to be hired by the defense" that is an accurate enough presentation.
It also makes the commentary look stupid.
I don't know what your job is, but imagine you are explaining something about your job and a used car salesman slams in like Kanye and goes ima let you finish but you are totally wrong.
That also sounds pretty stupid, no?
Aren't expert witnesses usually paid?
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This is a terrible analogy, and I think you're smart enough to know it. Let's use an analogy that's more akin to psychology:
The difference between aerospace engineering and homeopathy/psychology is that the former has loads of empirical evidence and concrete track record of success as detectable and measurable by a layman in everyday life, while the latter 2 not only lack empirical evidence but often go directly against it.
If you want to claim that modern psychology as practiced by modern psychologists has as much credibility as modern aerospace engineering as practiced by modern aerospace engineers, then just say that. That can be an interesting venue of conversation, where people can discuss the various details and specifics of what gives these people credibility or doesn't. But just making some vague statement about "expert opinions" and "assuming" they're wrong (again, no such thing happened) looks like you're just trying to smuggle in a bailey via a motte.
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Out of all the medical fields, psychology is probably one of the most wishy-washy ones. There is a good underlying question.
Can women be convicted of anything once a month, postpartum, in perimenopause... ?
Could a hypothetical transwoman or transman with no apparent mental illness, diagnosis, psych ward visits on record, etc, claim the insanity defense based on their injection or unusual fluctuation of crazy-inducing female hormones?
So much of this is based off of misunderstandings and this is why I get so tremendously frustrated with people here.
Psychology is not a medical field. Psychiatry is. Large chunks of psychiatry are functionally psychology, large chunks are not and have just as good or bad of an evidence base as the rest of medicine. Usually people here complaining about medicine and psychiatry don't seem to realize that everyone involved has a very good understanding of what has firm and shaky evidence and so on. Psychiatry also is the victim of long running smear campaigns by august institutions like Scientology and individuals who literally have the inability to acknowledge they have an illness even as the voices tell them to kill their family.
With respect to the specific issue at hand only part of this is medical at all, a large chunk of it is multi-century long discussions in the fields of law, politics, and ethics about how governance, criminality, and the law work. Coming into an intellectual tradition of some of the wisest and smartest people who have ever lived trying to figure out how to organize society and going "IDK insanity defense is bad" is profoundly ill advised.
Yes screeching women on TikTok are making weird arguments but none of the actual knowledge holders or decisions makers are trying to excuse women from committing crimes because they are on their periods. This is a profound misunderstanding of the issue at hand.
You can get a serious, permanent mental illness (ex: schizophrenia) from menopause, you can kill someone because of that illness, and you can still be held criminally liable.
People are just pouncing on preexisting biases without any understanding of how this works.
I think there are a lot of problems in the field. Over diagnosis of disorders and over medication are perennial concerns in psychiatry and psychology. Psychology, upon which psychiatry is based has a replication problem meaning that most results are never subjected to scrutiny. Given these problems, I don’t think it reasonable to simply nod along to what psychiatry says without bothering to do something as crazy as read the evidence.
I have no objection to people attempting to evaluate for themselves the persuasiveness of the arguments, the research, the literature, and so on. It is very common here and elsewhere for people to just go "no fuck you they must be woke and im mad about covid" which is the exact level of analysis exhibited by the "he did it cause he's a gemini" people.
Psychiatry is fundamental a medical field which means that inter rater reliability, effect size, and so on are baked in and seriously researched. They do have some problems but most of that is structural (ex: SSRIs clearly work, why does the literature not show that to some extent?...well medical research is hard).
While medical research has all kinds of problems the stance here is comically overblown.
For instance most of the over-dx problems make sense in context (for instance giving people labels so they can get insurance coverage for therapy, scummy patients/doctors in the ADHD market, and so on).
SSRIs do not clearly work. That is, it is far from clear the benefit outweighs the harms. There has been little studies on long term SSRI usage despite SSRIs being highly addictive (ie trials were measured in terms of weeks; not years).
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I noticed that you conveniently ignored my question related to the highly scientific qualification of transgenderism as mentally sound by competent psychology experts.
There are plenty of competent people in Psychiatry and plenty in Psychology as well. By your own admission, these bright, competent, highly-educated experts may spend up to 2 weeks a year in training meant to erase racial or sexist biases that their lying eyes have implanted in them.
Very few of them ever complain about this state of affair, or under the cover of pseudo-anonymity on such platforms.
The ones that do, once in a while, point out that the emperor is naked, end up in big trouble with both their own regulation agencies and the government, as was demonstrated between say 2020 and 2023.
They may have very good understanding of what has firm and shaky evidence, but they are not always compelled to share that understanding with the wider public, and sometimes, perhaps, they disguise it in favor of what their Masters ask them to.
Or maybe going 'IDK maybe black people are just as smart people?' Oh that's not ill-advised, that's just uh socially-acceptable.
Now, what was socially-acceptable way back when experts were still respected? One of the fathers of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot was all about hysteria, you know the 'b# be crazy, yo' disease. Why'd we give up on that again?
Same profoundly scientific reason that the threshold for mental retardation was lowered to 70 in the 70s to conveniently not have half of the African-American population qualify as mentally retarded?
I didn't bring up transgenderism because it's not relevant. Medicine has blindspots just like everyone else does. Blindspots aren't the same as blindness.
Starting by blaming politics/wokeness/feminism/whatever is retarded. Investigate first then blame PRN. Sometimes a blindspot is pumped in Pharma money, but you can't just assume all drugs were only approved because of Pharma. That's stupid.
Insanity pleas are part of a long running attempt at codifying criminal responsibility that has been argued about through many waves of predominant social ideologies.
Also hysteria doesn't work the way you think it does, and bringing it up is a feminist complaint anyway?
How many blindspots should the common man assume that the experts have? Would an expert know how many blindspots they have themselves?
It's a good starting point when examining anything coming out of academia after the Long March through the Institutions.
Experts have been telling us that they are activists, that they are biased, that not being biased in the same way they are is against Science, etc. We are listening to the experts.
Who do you trust more to keep a secret in confidence, the guy with a rainbow or the one who drops the nword in front of you?
I probably don't have a good understanding of hysteria and other mental issues that have been credited or discredited in history in accordance with political, cultural or social changes.
Why not? Women are already excused from murder charges for their prepartum condition, they call it 'reproductive healthcare'.
Why should this new cultural development not end up like the previous cultural developments, such as the 'sex change' or 'soul mixed up at birth' lunacy?
What makes you confident that this slope is not that slippery?
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The definition of "fitness to stand trial" is defined by law, not by psychiatrists; tossing this standard aside to give carte blanche to psychiatry - who's guild has publicaly announced opposition to the death penalty, btw - is rank injustice.
Yes, the "experts" are wrong, and in fact they are proud to be so.
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