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Clancy, insanity, or mitigating circumstances notwithstanding, why not hang women who kill their young children? At least the egregious cases. There can't be too many egregious cases and distinguishing them from whatever mitigating circumstances bar Clancy clears might be a good distinction. If these women are going to rot in a mental institution or prison forever, then no great loss to hang them. As a punishment for a crime it seems fair. Taking a child's life away from them is pretty high up on the unforgivable crime pole.
In Clancy's case, if you want to weight the ex-husband and family to punish her that seems fine, but as a principle this is perverse. So long as he had the consent of the injured parties, or silenced them, Chris Benoit could have saved himself the trouble, stopped early in his familicide-suicide, and been well underway enjoying a born again journey by now.
In America, for someone only mildly crazy or formerly crazy, I suspect mental institutions are preferable in both cases.
How? The second principle of justice, that of a guarantee against recurrence, of the segregation of an antisocial individual from society, would not be satisfied. If he was locked away in an asylum forever with the consent of his victims’ relatives because they believed earnestly that he was psychotic, that would be fine with me.
As for the death penalty, I am no opponent of it. I would prefer death to life in prison myself.
If we defer or heavily account for punishment by polling the will of living relatives, then all he needs is people who love him to back his insanity plea -- or kill them if not -- regardless of whether he was in a state of psychosis or not.
Punishment taking into account familial sensibilities is a sensitive consideration in a homicide. The state is willing to listen to the will of living family of a victim while some overworked prosecutor (also the state) attempts to represent the harms imposed on those in the ground. I don't think it's wrong to consider the will of living family to a victim, although in the case of filicide or familicide this is complicated. Decent people can and mostly do continue to love indecent family members -- to say nothing of decent family who have done an indecent thing -- and tend to defend their well being.
The will of living (injured as you say) family is a more meaningful consideration when the victim is not related to the accused. Deferral like this is, frankly, unfair otherwise. Yes, the ex-husband thinks his ex-wife isn't a cold-blooded murderer. Maybe that's fine, true, or just in this case, but this feels (admittedly a feeling) like an incomplete or biased representation of the injured. We can't ask a dead child whether or to what degree they might want their parent-murderer punished, but if we could and they could answer, would we consider that too?
Lock'em up and toss away the key! But, in the US we don't even do that for murderers who juries consider guilty. Our courts don't lock away people forever in an asylum; they place people in treatment until they no longer require it.
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