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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.
This case has done two things for me.
First it’s convinced me that insanity as a defense has become more about excuse making and dodging of responsibility than about getting people help. There’s a lot of her behavior that points to her trying to build a case for the defense more so than suffering an actual psychotic break. And for juries intent on not punishing a person who they like are often going along with the insanity defense even when the person doesn’t seem to be suffering from any real disorder.
To make my case rather briefly, she doesn’t really seem to have symptoms at any inconvenient or embarrassing situations. There weren’t any reported weird ass unhinged social media posts. She doesn’t seem to act weird in front of friends or family. Her five year old doesn’t seem to be reporting her telling him anything weird. Her husband thought she was okay — if he hadn’t believed that he would have either not run the errands or called a friend or family member to watch her while he was out. Even the doctors, while they’re definitely trying to treat her don’t seem to think she’s suffering a break. They don’t force her into a mental hospital, (she committed herself), and they didn’t seem to report it to any state agency. AFAICT she had her labor and delivery nurse liscence and job the entire time and CPS never visited the home. Moving on to the journal, the reports I’ve read about it sound like this is a cohesive clinical report of her trying to get a diagnosis. This seems pretty weird that a person supposedly suffering a psychosis can somehow interrogate their own thought process, the effects of various medications, and so on. There are no weird things in there, no voices or demons, no mental confusion, and no actual psychosis.
Making the insanity defense about sentencing and not guilt makes such things less likely. If you’re not guilty by reason of insanity, you can “recover” the day after the verdict and the court cannot touch you. You go home after a few rough weeks in a mental hospital. If you’re guilty but insane, then either you serve the whole sentence on recovery or if the sentence is that the mental hospital treatment runs concurrent to prison serve the remaining time in prison, it removes the incentive to use insanity as an attempt to allow people to essentially get away with it.
The more disturbing thing is the number of ordinary people who seem to be taking her side on this. They see her as the victim, and the justice system being broken because it’s attempting to prosecute a woman who’s claiming to be insane for killing a couple of kids. There’s no sympathy for the children who were strangled with exercise bands and more than likely watched at least one sibling killed before it was their turn. No sympathy for the father who was tricked into leaving her alone with the kids so she could slowly kill them. Nope, the killer was the victim. She was insane. And anyone who blames her for a killing she admits to doing is Red Pilled and wrong. I just can’t believe that this is the consensus opinion.
I really want to ignore all the defenders as idiots amplified by Tik-Tok. But the astrology stuff brings out my inner fedora.
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Have you ever interacted with a five year old? They don't really notice when adults are weird.
They don’t think the adults are weird, but they also have very little filter because of that and a prone to repeating things that adults would find weird and disturbing or inappropriate. If she’d said something like “you’re going home to Jesus on Tuesday” maybe the initial reaction would be an assumption about church, but after the kid dies on a Tuesday, the person would absolutely remember that kind of conversation.
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I can understand why western justice systems consider insanity as a defense against a finding of guilt, but the incentives seem to align better if it's considered an aggravating factor in sentencing.
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I felt that way after Hinkley was released a few years ago. Taking a shot at a President should either mean never seeing the outside of an institution or execution.
Hinckley was the first person I thought of when Freddie deBoer said that an NGRI verdict means Clancy will never leave a mental institution.
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