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Putting all the other crazy things about this trial beside, I can't understand why she is even going with a defense at all. If I had done what she did, I'd want to be dead. I'd long for death. Sure enough, she did try killing herself.
Because of this, I can't really shake off thinking that painless MAID is the the solomonic solution here; If she did do it during a psychotic break and now genuinely regrets it, she deserves the release from her unfathomable pain. If not, death is perfectly appropriate as well. It literally doesn't matter.
No she didn't. She's a nurse who made some cat scratches across the road and then threw herself out of a second floor window. Very obviously a fake attempt to provide cover for her triple homicide. The only thing she didn't plan was actually hurting herself in the fall.
I have no firm opinion as to whether she intended to survive, but the argument in your comment seems self-contradictory. Surely her medical expertise wasn't worth that much if she failed to foresee that the fall could paralyze her.
Four story fall seems to be the 50% fatality point. Eight story fall is 90%. I would guess that a two story fall has a fatality rate well below 25%. The bigger flag is the wrist-slitting. She used a huge kitchen knife and managed to only give herself minor wounds going the wrong way. You'd think that if a nurse knows anything, it's where the wrist veins are.
I would hazard a guess that the majority of healthcare workers have encountered a patient who experienced life altering injury, paralysis, and even death from a fall of two stories or less.
It's not certain, but it can easily and obviously be quite bad.
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Side to side for attention, up and down for results. And honestly, yeah, that's a lot more damning than anything else as a consequence (and reflects even more poorly on a jury that had other persons with the same kind of medical expertise).
One might argue that slashing yourself that way requires you to do something actively painful to yourself, while more passive methods are arguably preferred since the invocation of potential energy (gravitational, chemical) or toxicity doesn't actually hurt by themselves.
But the fact remains that she injured herself in the "the adults will know I was serious" way, not the way that actually kills you; one would expect an economy of pain commensurate with actual results from someone who was serious about it working.
It's not like she can argue she didn't consider asphyxiation as a method, of course.
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She jumped from a second story window, right? Breaking a spine from a second-story window jump seems unusual to me – although I am not sure if it was a lawn or, say, concrete, and exactly how high it was, and exactly how she jumped. I think most people in their thirties could probably walk away from a 15-foot jump onto soft soil. A 20-foot jump onto concrete is a different story.
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