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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.
What's the expert explanation for her preparing for the act by sending the husband away for chores, and even biding her time by calmly picking up the phone whem he called?
While it is common for people with mental illness this severe to be grossly disorganized (think homeless guy wandering around mumbling to himself) it is not required. People who don't understand what is real, what is happening, and what is right/wrong can engaged in organized behavior to accomplish psychotic goals.
That's what makes this shit scary.
See: Charles Whitman
In other words, the only thing that makes this psychosis is that she wanted to kill her kids? Then what distinguishes her 'psychosis' from any other criminal's desire to do evil? If I killed someone in a crime of passion, what stops me from claiming it was a temporary 'psychosis'? I really can't see the distinction here.
It's a complicated construct but if you pick at it makes more sense. There isn't a rational reason to do this in the way she did. Most people just leave their kids or abandon them. Maybe you frame the husband. She slowly and intimately slaughtered her children making no effort to protect herself from the ramifications of her actions and with no clear gain (see: serial killers and sexual gratification, sicarios and money and fame).
This strongly points to something like altruistic filicide. She thought they were better off dead and that it was the right thing to do. That's pure madness.
In the case of a crime of passion you know what you were doing is wrong, if you try and pretend you were briefly randomly psychotic you'll get "by what mechanism" "oh so you chose to do drugs knowing that drugs are illegal and bad."
The crime to some extent does point to madness being an explainer.
Except these days it's trivial to get prescribed drugs from a doctor, which you can then use as an excuse.
I'm more open to the psychosis explanation than most people here, but I feel like "the experts" are on shaky ground on the issue, and are pulling a "trust me, bro".
The experts in this case (both testifying and misc. people commenting) are essentially the people in the legal system/healthcare whose specific job is to tell if people are full of shit. The field has well developed and researched things like forensic inventories that are designed to catch people who exaggerate or mislead about their symptoms. These tools are not readily available online for the obvious reasons, but to give an example of the kind of thing you would do - if someone is pretending to have cognitive deficits to avoid blame you can ask them a question that even someone with severe retardation or dementia can answer like "what's 2+2." Anyone who can't answer that is going to be highly suspicious. The actual assessment is going to be a much more robust and complicated elaboration on that sort of concept.
It's also going to involve actual exposure to similar cases, knowledge of the criminal profiles involved (what does narcissistic family annihilation actually look, how does it contrast with borderline, suicidal, and so on).
The field has some limitations of course but doctors are doing this every day all over the country and it works fine and is a standard part of the legal system.
How many murderers have you actually met? I've treated hundreds and I'm not even a forensic psychiatrist - and even with that caveat I could guess the type of crime sometimes from doing my unrelated business. Resnick has probably evaluated 1,000s of killers and he's made a career out of sorting them and even wrote the book on it.
I'm not 100% convinced of the argument but I do have enough information to understand that expertise can exist on these matters and I'm seeing a bunch line up in a certain way...
You can say the same thing about transgender healthcare, that doesn't mean it rests on sound assumptions. Everything you said here only reinforces my impression that this is more of an art than a science, and the whole thing is based on trust, which I don't have a lot to spare at the moment.
This in particular sounds like the whole thing rests on "the experts" having 20-30 IQ points on the people they're investigating, and being reasonably confident they'll be doing the manipulating, rather than being manipulated. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption here, and I'm really not seeing anything that's supposed to catch this case in particular.
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I've not paid close attention to the trial but surely she could possess a rational rage toward her children for dashing her hopes and dreams of being an international superstar, superspy, or some other path incompatible with being a responsible mother of three.
Absolutely but what do people with those types of feelings do? They lash out impulsively crashing their car. They grab a weapon at hand and do something. Most commonly they attack the husband.
The mixture of poor/irrational planning and premeditation supposedly leans towards this kind of pathology.
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She "gains" the ability to die knowing no one will be able to take care of her children better than she did, and they will never love someone else more than her.
I do think she's mad, you don't kill your kids and try to kill yourself because you're mentally well, but being unwell enough to think your kids are better off dead isn't the same as not knowing that killing them is illegal, which is what the insanity defense is meant to cover.
This is true but you've already narrowed the solution space down quite a bit once you are talking about this from every motivation in the world to a much smaller subset with a higher percentage of possible explanations involving type of illness the insanity defense applies to.
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