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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.
Massachusetts specifically having the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove that the defendant is sane, rather than the defense having to prove the defendant is insane, seems backwards to me. The downstream implications of this seems disastrous to me? Nevermind the fact that proving a negative is often much more difficult, sometimes even impossible.
So anyone can go to Massachusetts, act insane and get diagnosed with some kind of mental illness, then go out and commit a crime, and has the excuse that they were not mentally sane and get away with the highest charges in their court? 25% of women and 13% of men already take some kind of psychiatric drug, and that number only seems to be going up decade by decade. All the defense has to do is show some possibility someone is not sane, then the prosecution has to do the much harder task of proving someone is not insane?
In my non lawyer/medical opinion, someone who commits a crime is already someone that is abnormal, someone that murders other people with no cause (e.g. self defense) I would consider mentally ill already, because regular sane people do not typically murder people.
If "insane" people cannot be criminally responsible for crime they commit, then it stands to reason that they lack the mental capacity for entire other categories of living, like voting, holding a job, access to social media, just being part of society in general. For most of the world this is not an issue because the default assumption is that you are sane and that your insanity must be proven. But in Massachusetts it seems there is an inconsistency is not choosing to apply same standards outside the court of law.
Honestly seems to me the real issue is Massachusetts' backward stance on the burden of proof having to prove sanity.
I would guess that in practice, this principle of law is simply ignored most of the time. So for example, suppose some drug addict with a long history of psychiatric treatment robs a convenience store while high on 3 different drugs, shoots and kills the cashier, and gets charged with murder. If you were the defense attorney, you might have the clever idea of asking for jury charges on the sanity issue. But one way or another, I doubt you would accomplish anything. Because at the end of the day, the only question that really matters to the judge and jury is what would be a just result in this case. And absent any culture war issues or extenuating circumstances, they will all agree that justice requires your client to go to prison.
I think that at the heart of the Clancy case lies a similar question: What's a just result? People start with the answer to that question and then work backwards to justify it. And that's where the culture war comes in to play.
There are countless cases of walking garbage getting acquitted for the worst crimes possible. This one I remember was notable but there are tons more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Eina_Kwon
In your view, roughly what percentage of the total is represented by such cases?
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