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Very meagre for a top-level comment, I know, but I felt it was worth sharing because it's peak culture war: it turns out the sole holdout in the Lindsay Clancy case was a Black man.
(For those living under a rock: Lindsay Clancy was the woman who killed her three young children, pleaded non guilty on the basis that she suffered from post partum psychosis, and the murder trial ended in a mistrial because only 1 out of 12 jury member found her guilty.)
I think this revelation will end the debate about whether the jury failed to reach the right verdict. Although ostensibly the discussion revolved around what level of proof was provided (Massachussets has an unusually low bar for insanity defenses, in that the prosecutor must prove that the defendant was capable of discerning right from wrong beyond reasonable doubt, rather than the defense proving their client was incapable at least to the level of preponderance of evidence, as is the case in most jurisdictions.)
In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.
I am very unsettled by how much we know about this guy. Yes, he's no longer a member of an active jury, but I feel like it's unheard of for a juror to be practically doxxed and berated publicly, even if he was obstinate or unreasonable. I can't even begin to imagine the chilling effect this will have on jurors assigned to future high profile cases. I'm extremely disappointed in our media for fueling this extravaganza.
I think many people (perhaps most) believe he was not unreasonable
By MA law, the women were probably in the right to find not guilty by reason of insanity, but that doesn't seem to be their motivation for finding her not guilty. The law just happens to conveniently work in their favor in this instance, but they would very much want to find her not guilty anyway. This significantly complicates the story.
I don’t think the women were correct at all and the idea @it’s just the laws fault” is not correct. Again I think people are short cutting NGRI to “was Clancy in her right mind.”
The standard is not “was she crazy.” The standard is did she know what she was doing was against the law and did she have the capacity not to do the act. There is ample evidence she knew what she was doing was not legal and that she had the capacity to not act.
Moreover the standard beyond a reasonable doubt is not 99.9%. It is a high standard yes, but it leaves room for small doubt. The preplanned murder of kids showed control of faculties and an attempt to hide the attempt. The phone call that interrupted the event also shows that. Is there a 5% chance she somehow was super crazy but still tactically rational? Maybe. But 95% sure is sure enough to convict.
I think these two standards are very slippery, especially when you're dealing with a jury of people who habitually default to an external locus of control. They take "mental health" very seriously, by which they mean that aberrant behavior is, in general, best understood as a kind of mental malfunction that is in some sense external to the true self of the person who is suffering from it. When you adopt this frame, it's very easy to satisfy those standards, especially if motivated by ulterior goals.
I don’t blame them. I think the over-emphasis on mental health is a disaster. It’s basically a strong dose of learned helplessness applied globally. I find my issues and quirks to be much easier to deal with and fix when I think of them as just a normal brain that does X sometimes (for me, mostly anxiety) and that the thoughts are not reality. When it’s just that you somehow picked up a false narrative of reality and that you can unlearn it, you can work around it. But modern “mental health” narratives do the opposite and turn temporary issues into permanent ones and make living with it harder.
It also, for those inclined, serve as an excellent excuse for doing all kinds of shitty things to people. You have trauma so you get to treat people like crap. You get to demand special privileges. You get to cut your family out because of some mental health issue. And the claim can be used to avoid responsibility for crimes committed if you can cry mental health to a jury.
The disturbing thing about this case is that a lot of what she did seemed so calculated to making an insanity plea after the fact.
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