I mean it also helps that he was tried in Texas where they don’t believe in mental health exceptions. She’s being tried in Massachusetts, which has a very different political climate.
Also, in Texas, the burden of proof for insanity is on the defense. In Massachusetts, burden of proof is on the prosecution. His defense had to prove he was insane when committing the crime while her defense just had to poke holes in the prosecution’s case.
This seems way more sensible to me. I understand if the actual underlying crime should be innocent until proven guilty but if you are insane that specifically should be a higher burden of proof .
I just don’t think unqualified layman in the jury really should be the ones deciding whether someone was clinically insane or not.
The jury should just deliberate on whether the defendant committed the crime in question, if they rule they did, then the defense should be able to request a review by a panel of mental health experts who will be tasked with determining whether the defendant was criminally liable or clinically insane.
This is actually the biggest issue other than different states having different standards and why comparing any two cases is pointless. Both sides bring on highly qualified experts and the case often then hangs on which one performs best in the eyes of the jury. And since it’s also a different jury every time it’s really hard to make a comparison.
Yeah I have met some people who are very, very well respected and high performing in their narrow fields. They can be genuinely geniuses… but, socially? Kinda grating. Them trying to explain something to absolute laymen would be a ridiculous endeavor. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong, or any less educated or experienced or specialized or anything like that. But communicating complex concepts to a jury takes more than base specialized expertise and also challenges their capability to communicate with and even educate an average or - likely present - below average intelligence person. So I can easily see how you could get an expert that is absolutely correct in their analysis… and yet have a jury that doesn’t buy into it. Because specialized experts in niche fields are not necessarily natural gifted communicators or educators. Also, in a jury of “peers,” there’s going to be representatives of the lower half of the bell curve, too. You just can’t bank on the jury being able to comprehend an expert’s testimony.
Whereas now you have the opposite problem. Juries refusing to grasp the concept that DNA being present is not a slam dunk for guilt in and of itself, or unable to accept that not every case is going to have extensive DNA evidence establishing links for them.
I think it's gone the other way now due to so many crime dramas. People take any DNA evidence as open/shut without considering contextual factors or errors.
I am someone who testifies as an expert in criminal trials, most often crimes against children or murders and I what I do is digital forensics and cell tower analysis (estimating position based on what towers the phone was communicating with). I think I'm at 54 over 4 years.
It's not just communicating with the jury, that comes later,
Prosecutors are lawyers, they (in theory) are good at law and most of them not much on technical matters. Getting the subject matter across to the prosecutor so they can handle your direct testimony, ask the right questions and finally be prepared to redirect after the defense does their cross is perhaps even more challenging than testifying to the jury. If defense does a good cross, guilt or innocence may hang on the prosecutor asking the right questions on redirect, letting you respond to the defense in whole, not just what defense let you say.
A lot of experts are either scientists, engineers or cops who got really good at something like forensics or accident reconstruction, generally not people people. Some of them have some difficulties with both the prosecutor pretrial and the jury later.
Then comes trial, no matter how good you are at what you do, how much of a subject matter expert you are, you are talking to 12 (14) people who don't really know the law or the discipline you are there to discuss. You have to talk to your audience at or just above just above their level, you have to give a 30 minute crash course to the jury on the topic and convince them to believe you, if you go deep in the technical weeds you will lose them, they don't understand and aren't interested. That is where I see experts (and lawyers) screw up all the damned time.
Over those trials and working with the lawyers a lot, I've learned to take kind of a jr. high school teacher approach, just talk about my findings and the basics of how I arrived at them. Just "the movement of the defendant's phone from array to array and tower to tower suggests eastbound travel along I-666 at highway speeds". Really simple and generic, something a jury will understand, also facts I can easily support.
If defense wants to drag me in to the technical weeds, my credentials and my work are solid AF, I'll beat them up in the weeds, I've done it before.
Expert vs. expert is where it's really fun because on technical matters there shouldn't be much difference in what we are saying, the data is the data, we usually just differ in our interpretation of it.
I think people also don’t realize that there can be experts involved who aren’t getting up and testifying in front of the jury. I’ve worked on cases where I didn’t even have to be deposed.
I am also a schlub, but a technical schlub because I deal in both accounting and IT.
When I was in teir 1 helpdesk, I'd get people with problems that they needed solutions on. Commonly, these were user errors and not technical ones, so it relied on the user cooperating with my expertise to get them results.
Man, I tell you, there's a certain type of person that will come to you for help and it would be like pulling teeth to get them to do what I'd need them to to fix their problems. They would complain the entire time that blank doesnt sound right, that they werent sure if I knew my job well enough to fix their issue, and other stubborn behavior that made resolving their ticket take longer or not get resolved at all. The only thing I could think of when I dealt with these type of people is "holy shit, they must be a nightmare to have on a jury."
Your comment reminds me of how my parents answered questions when I was very young g.
My dad often couldn’t think of how to say something accurately, so he just spouted nonsense. He was always very unserious.
My mother on the other hand got too detailed… but often missed the crux of the question, especially whatever would have been age appropriate.
So like for example I asked where babies came from, and my dad started telling me about how he and mom bought us from a kmart on sale because we had tails and the stork delivered us to their door st a discount.
My mother instead launched into an explanation of the female hormone cycle and ovulation. I didn’t have the attention span to withstand distilling her detailed accounting down to the eventually explained but could have been summarized gist that mom had an egg, dad sent over a sperm, these two cells met up, a fetus formed and grew in mom’s uterus, mom’s belly grew the baby, and then she gave birth.
My childhood was exasperating, honestly. I was relieved when i started to have access to the internet. If I hadn’t, I might otherwise have the strangest ideas about stuff.
Most expert witnesses have never given testimony that wasn't supportive of whoever hired them. In fact you can hire 20 "experts" and if only 1 thinks what you want, there's your "expert". It's also generally undertood which experts are more friendly to the prosecution or the defense. There was recently a murdet trial that included "expert" testimony on what is considered a pseudo-science at best. By most accounts that testimony was pivotal in the jury's decision AND the judge disallowed the witness the defense had that was going to explain how it wasn't remotely settled science or necessarily possible, because she said his testimony wasn't a direct contradiction, or because his expertise didn't overlap in totality. Basically the judge decided something she was not remotely educated in and it greatly affected the outcome. That case is in the process of a possible retrial as we speak. Expert witness is not a title that you need to prove by taking tests or properly diagnosing cases that were already proven. They don't even have to disclose how often they end up being right or wrong or how well they did in school! Nobody has to explain how to "experts" disagree and the court won't provide experts for public defenders more often than not. End of the day, likeable people with money get off disproportionately more often than their poorer less likeable counterparts
That's a very good point. From going through interviews with the medical experts (several, various fields, fairly complex) for my own medical negligence case, I can confirm that the role does not guarantee a good communicator. Or that they're actually even listening. Part of the problem was, I was naive enough to think the point of the exercise was to work out the truth, which was what I desperately wanted, for closure. While one of them was focused on their pet theory (interesting, not really relevant), and at least one of them I think now in retrospect, if they weren't just defaulting and not understanding my case was more complicated and fell more under the other specialisms, was trying to 'help' with an angle that was not only different from what I expected (so we were possibly talking past each other), but from what, over years, I'd been told by multiple specialists actually treating me, incl. an internationally-known spinal surgeon, someone really significant in the field...and that sort of specialist doesn't seem to be the ones who give evidence usually. And that legal medical expert managed to totally flip something pretty straightforward and factual I'd told them, which was actually important, in their first report. It just added to the already confusing tangle.
And this is on my own condition, that I at least understand as decently as a lay person can be expected to, perhaps a bit more from some uni level experience with biology papers, helping with choosing to read ones about my condition. So my own communication about it for someone who isn't a doctor is at least decent enough that medical professionals I'm seeing for treatment usually comment on it, and are happy to explain in more depth to someone clearly morbidly fascinated (with the cool pics! I got a printout of the inside of my stomach!).
Not an unfamiliar condition, where lay jury members likely won't have personal experience with to understand what it does, and may not have even heard of it before. Even someone who was interested in mental illness, health, can't be aware of everything. And public understanding of severe mental illness, like psychosis, doesn't seem good if this case is any indicator.
It's hard to do a 1-to-1 like in this post, but it is well established that women receive lighter sentences than men for comparable offenses. It's part of Sentencing Disparity, and the fact that women are generally more sympathetic than men will be partly what's at play here.
Men would not show up in droves in matching colour t-shirts for a man who did what Lindsay Clancy did.
>Men would not show up in droves in matching colour t-shirts for a man who did what Lindsay Clancy did.
Women do.
Parkland shooter, killed 17, injured 17 others
Shortly after Cruz was sent to prison, he began receiving stacks of fan mail and love letters.
Some of them included provocative photos like one of a woman from Chicago in a bikini eating a popsicle and one from a teenager who goes so far as to describe her body and bra size to Cruz.
"There are women that are sexually aroused by people that have committed violent crimes or the idea of people committing violent crimes," Needle said.
And that point is not really about Lindsay Clancy. It's about how the system not only failed to catch her becoming a danger to herself and others - it made her worse, and increased the danger she posed.
Because every time she tried to get help the doctors gave her some drugs and pushed her out the door, and since none of them had access to the full medical history they didn't know everything else she'd already been put on.
She ended up on a cocktail of drugs that interact badly with each other, and made her mental state even more fucked.
How many other times has that happened? How many killings, assaults or other harm by unstable people would have been avoided by a better health system, where information is more properly and thoroughly shared and there was proper intervention earlier.
That's the point.
It's not a gender-issue, or gender-solidarity or any of that... and that's where they fucked up by branding themselves "Team Lindsay" and calling for "Justice for Lindsay"
They do. I certainly won’t disagree with that. But cases of legal insanity are almost impossible to compare because so much of it depends on the competing expert advice rather than independent and verifiable facts. And such a small number of cases use a legal insanity defence, and even fewer succeed with it, that it’s not really a number large enough to analyse.
I work in medicine and have seen a number of malpractice cases over the years. They are a fucking shit show. Both sides pay expert witnesses to plead their cases, which most often involves twisting facts, making wild statements about what is “standard of care”, and playing Monday morning quarterback despite the fact that physicians’ entire job is essentially educated guessing with limited available information. Half the time the lawyers don’t really get what’s going on or really understand the nuances of the case, and just buy into whatever their paid witnesses are telling them. Then a jury of completely non-medical, mostly uneducated people get to make a decision based on what they were told during this circus of proceedings, but mostly just side with who is more personable or who they feel the worst for. This is the reason why the overwhelming majority of lawsuits settle out of court. Better to have your insurance pay out 500k than risk being in the hook for millions because a group of idiots picked the other guy in a popularity contest. There have been a lot of BIG verdict trials that got tons of public support for the plaintiff, but virtually the entire medical field sided with the defendant because they understood the reality of the situation and not the popularized sob story.
It’s a huge problem in fraud cases. It’s one of the reasons the SFO (serious fraud office) in the UK has such a terrible conviction rate. It spends millions upon millions on cases that frequently collapse because it’s almost impossible to explain the intricacies to a layman. There are other reasons that they suck including too many links to the type of people they’re investigating. But the almost impossible task of explaining complex white collar crime to 12 jurors is a big part of it. And then if the defence get an expert who performs well its very easy to convince a jury that hey everything is so complicated that clearly the defendants just didn’t understand what they were doing…
That's the US "justice" system for you. Every country has issues with this though.
Japan infamously has a conviction rate over 99%, higher than North Korea, and just assumes anyone put on trial is guilty where police use forced confessions as the only proof, ignoring every other piece of evidence. Sweden recently had investigative journalists uncover that many of the "judges" (different system, not a judge but also not a jury in the US sense, kinda like "elected jurors") have been arrested and convicted for the same crimes they themselves are overseeing in the same courtroom, their sentences were greatly reduced and in some cases just acquitted because the jurors were their former colleagues. I'm pretty sure most countries have some level of corruption in their justice systems.
Both sides bring on highly qualified experts and the case often then hangs on which one performs best in the eyes of the jury.
I agree that this can be a problem for truth-seeking. But in terms of why the jury system exists, this is a feature, not a bug. Those above in positions of authority and power, such as the government, police, and all forms of experts regardless of how "highly qualified" they are, they must present themselves in front of regular people and be judged by the lived experiences of regular people
Oh I agree to some extent, but it’s a huge problem for comparing cases. Have the exact same evidence presented by different experts and you could get a different result.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the jury is supposed to do when you've got multiple highly qualified experts disagreeing with each other. I guess you've got to go with reasonable doubt at that point but it seems like there must be a better way.
It doesn’t matter where you live in MAN OR WOMAN-what state, your immigration status, your skin color, hell it doesn’t even matter if you were a law abiding citizen for 50 years! If you murder, kill children, sodomize , kidnap, mass shooter, terrorist threats with bombs; kill with gross neglect (like a DUI with multiple fatalities)commit an armed robbery—-you need to go to prison. Full stop. For your life. But they are more focused on locking up BOB because BOB is a 3 strike felon and will spend of his life in prison over weed while this b@arch strangled her kids with rubber bands ONE AT A TIME and gets a lackey driven one hour wheelchair ride around in the gardens every day now (we can’t have her fall, she’s medicated). I said it on a different post and I’ll say it again-
I sure hope her guardians are more diligent than they were with Epstein
Well, you’re going to have to get the whole basis of the law re-written then, because it doesn’t agree with you. If you are insane to the point you either do not know what you are doing or don’t know that it is wrong then you are legally not guilty. I don’t know much about this specific case but there are plenty of cases out there where someone was either having a psychotic break or a sudden onset of delusions or their condition had not been treated or not treated correctly and they have killed someone. In which case they are found not guilty by reason of insanity. Usually that means they are sent to a secure treatment facility until their condition is either cured or controlled through medication.
Obviously some people can’t be cured or treated so they end up detained for life. Andrea Yates is one example. She’s currently in a low security facility but it seems every time she becomes stable she is capable of understanding what she did and that causes her to regress. The possibility of release is there but doesn’t currently seem likely. Austin Harrouff is also detained, probably for life, in a secure facility after his crimes. If you want to go back further in time there’s Major Henry Rathbone who helped fight Wilkes Booth after he assassinated Lincoln (and is likely the reason his leap to the stage failed and he broke his leg). He ended up killing his wife due to his deteriorating mental condition and ended up in an asylum. Or there’s William Li in Canada who was the greyhound bus killer. There’s also Herbert William Mullin. He failed in his bid to be not guilty through insanity because his use of LSD accelerated his schizophrenia, making him partially responsible for becoming insane and thus partially responsible for the crimes. Just as being drunk doesn’t work as an excuse because it is self administered, if you do something that exacerbates your medical condition or go off of medication that was keeping you stable then it is almost impossible to claim legal insanity.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but your opinion doesn’t line up with the law. The standard you need to look up to understand the law is M’Naghten rules, formulated in the UK in 1843, and adopted by about half the US states. 4 states have no insanity defence. There was a different standard used in a lot of states and the federal system that was broader, the Model Penal Code, but after it was used by Hinckley in his case for trying to kill Reagan many of them reverted to M’Naghten. (I thought it was McNaughten but wiki says otherwise so I’m going by their spelling). There is also a verdict in some US jurisdictions of Guilty but Mentally Ill, where you are found guilty and it doesn’t change the range of punishments available but ensures mental health treatment.
I think its a fair point but I think my arguments against this are:
Juries already have to determine truth in expert testimony. DNA, fingerprints, handwriting analysis, even stuff that ended up being mostly bogus like blood splatter analysis, all have to be considered by a jury. Its an important safeguard to ensure the justice system stays tethered to the will of the people
Psychiatry has genuine expertise that juries should take seriously, but retrospective determinations of someone's mental state and capacities aren't sufficiently objective or reliable to justify transferring the ultimate legal judgment to them
This would give psychiatry particular authority that we would never give to another discipline (ie in a lawsuit over whether a building was negligently constructed we don't just hand the case over to a panel of engineers after a jury determines that the building did factually collapse)
It gets to the heart of the whole notion of culpability; perhaps it really is true that free will is an illusion and nobody is really culpable, that people just respond as their genetics dictate and could not have acted otherwise than they did, so that we all suffer from "diminished responsibility", the only distinction being to what degree.
But even if that were the case, the state would still have to take some action, removing certain people from the community or restricting their interactions with others, in line with that difference of degree. Because as mythical as free will might be, there are still some people whose freedom of action is more obviously impeded than others.
"This would give psychiatry particular authority that we would never give to another discipline"
Doctor are the only one who can determined if somebody is dead. Therefore, no murder without doctor approval (It can be important in some case, brain dead or alive is not obvious).
If whether a victim is dead or not is in question do they call in a doctor to testify as to their status (which the jury then takes into account) or do they just pass the case over to a special body of doctors to determine whether its murder or assault?
The first right? Its pretty clear being brain dead isnt obvious if brain dead people like you are posting on reddit
I think the problem is that clinical mental health diagnoses are factored the same as reason's like environmental and wealth inequality when it some to a trial. Like, "outside factor <X> is the reason they did what they did, so you should go easy/hard on them."
When, to your point, it should be ruled as evidence or a statement of fact in the trial. A non-bias, third-party panel of mental health experts would be a great compromise that prosecution, plaintiff, and defendants would all hate cause it would make it a definitive answer. It would then be up to both sides of the trial to explain what the diagnoses means, while not being allowed to trash the credibility of the panel.
It's a good thought, but it has to be a random jury unfortunately. If it's an expert, or even a panel of experts, it far too easy to exert pressure on them to say what you want them to say and get the rulings you want. It's the same reason we have juries at all and not just judges who make all the decisions.
There's genuine medical and political discussion around this issue, so I think there could be found ways to do it and make it fair, or other improvements. Here in the UK, the reliance of the case (and it doesn't matter what we may personally think of this specific case) of Lucy Letby on complex medical evidence, and the potentially biased selection of expert evidence offered to the lay jury, triggered a lot of concern among medical professionals, and suggestions for changes incl. expert juries.
I went through a life-altering medical negligence case myself as the victim, and don't feel it's even fair to put that burden on non-specialists, who may be only hearing of a medical condition for the first time. Even with their determination to keep it out of court (and this issue would contribute to why), it was so hard to go through the interrogations of my own legal team, checking their case - sometimes it was just, how can I know, I'm not a doctor and this is highly specialised too! For a lay jury who have the additional burden of the impact on someone else's life...it doesn't seem fair on them either. And this ongoing case has placed a particular pressure on the jury, with people wanting to know the motives of the holdout (I don't think it's acceptable if they really weren't trying to follow the law, but the court of public opinion would not be the place for that to be handled).
That would require amending the Constitution, which is no longer possible. You couldn't get Congressmen to agree cannbalism should be outlawed if the "other side" proposed the amendment.
Technically and legally, it can be done (except in idaho, cannibalism is banned). The hardest part would be convincing a hospital to release to you what is considered regulated medical waste. Sometimes they make exceptions for religious or deeply personal beliefs, like mothers requesting placentas for burial or cremation, but they probably won't if they think you're going to do something weird. Assuming you can get it released, the next hurdle is making sure it's actually safe to eat. It may have been kept refrigerated in the mortuary but you don't know how long it's been kept at room temperature or if it was exposed to pathogens (plenty of those in hospitals). Another issue is that human muscles do a lot of work. We aren't bred for our meat and generally, the older the animal, the worse the meat is. You likely wouldn't enjoy eating your own leg.
May you do it? Yes (except in Idaho)
Can you do it? Maybe, if you can convince a hospital to release it
No you shouldn't, you're not a butcher and there's food safety to consider. Nothing to do with cannibalism everything to do with not dying shitting yourself !
It's more about the meat itself, how sure are you that 1 your meat doesn't have bacteria, virus that might survive the cooking process ?
2 doesn't containt heavy metals or problematic medication ?
3 since I suppose there's at least a couple weeks between cutting and eating how sure can you be of the "freshness".
Handling food is a complicated thing that's why there's do many regulations most of then at production level !
Not trying to piss in the soup just saying butcher is a hard job !
No, they shouldn't. The problem is some charges require a jury trial. In Mass murder is one of them. Lesser charges you can do a bench trial and in an NCR bench trial the department of healths recommendations for commitment tend to be what the judge goes with.
That wasnt the issue in this case. Both the prosecution and defence agreed that Clancy was mentally ill. The only issue at hand was whether she was suffering from the effects of that illness at the time of the murders, which you can already see is a fairly difficult argument for the prosecution, and for good reason. It seems like a very artificial argument for the prosecution to make, because it is.
They shouldn't be. I'm not from the usa and I'm absolutely horrified at how the public there is reacting to this. No one is examining the child welfare system or her medical team and there should be a public inquiry. It seems like the public there only sees as far as hating her. That doesn't protect the next child.
"No one is examining the child welfare system or her medical team"
They aren't? Her entire base of defenders blames the mental-health profession. Despite the fact that multiple doctors repeatedly evaluated her and agreed, at her request, to change her medications to minimize side effects and help her stay on her meds. She seemed determined to ignore or overrule her doctors.
Casually blaming the medical profession and pretending nobody is criticizing them is unfair. They're being overly criticized, in my opinion, as an excuse to defend the accused.
The burden should be on the defense to prove insanity. Its their argument. Just as proving someone committed a crime is on the prosecution as its theirs. Mass has it ass backwards.
I tend to want to agree, except proving beyond reasonable doubt that someone wasn't insane seems pretty impossible... they just need to poke any hole to raise any amount of reasonable doubt and then you're stuck.
It's pretty much what Clancy's lawyer was going for when he said the 1 juror didn't listen to the judge's orders.
Completely disagree. If the plea is that they did it but were not mentally capable of being criminally responsible, I dont think the assumption should be insane unless proven otherwise. The defense is then making a positive claim. Burden of proof is on them. Furthermore, that means the prosecution has to prove they were not in a temporary state of psychosis. Thats like proving a negative. How would anyone ever get beyond reasonable doubt? That's basically a gift for any decent lawyer
But if the burden of proof for being insane is higher, then the best strategy for the defendant is to always plead insanity when facing significant jail time, as it's impoasible to disprove, and if you do as you're told, you're out much sooner.
To me, it sounds only logical that each positive (as in, an assertion on the state of something) claim should be corroborated with evidence. If someone asserts that you did something, they should provide evidence. If they prove it but then you claim you were actually insane at that moment, then you should provide evidence.
then the best strategy for the defendant is to always plead insanity when facing significant jail time
That's absolutely not true. Insanity defense are very rare and they have a abysmal success rate. It's basically a desperate hail marry. Do you know why?
Because first in order to raise insanity defense you need to admit you did it. It lowers to burden on prosecution not raises it. That's why no one in their right mind uses it unless prosecution has overwhelming evidence against you.
Second of all jury almost never buys it. All prosecution has to do is go out there show you were functioning fine until you committed those crimes and suddenly you claim to be insane.
Also you should be consoled with the fact that in most states it functions like you describe. In Florida for example defense needs to prove the accused was insane by "clear and convincing evidence". It's a lower burden than "beyond reasonable doubt" but still burden is on the defense.
This was just in a state prosecution need to prove she wasn't insane. And yet still she wasn't found not guilty. In the end if you were fallowing this topic more closely you'd have found it much less sensational than you have now.
Across the US, such pleas are rare (1% cases) and usually fail (25% success). Massachusetts is no exception in being very hard to win on it...and Clancy just got a mistrial, despite all the evidence offered around mental illness, so if her case ends in obtaining not guilty by reason of insanity, it already won't have been easy.
The standard is 'reasonable doubt', not 'no doubt'. The burden of proof in Mass. doesn't mean it's just automatically accepted, evidence is being provided by the defence, which is only logical if they want the jury to have any reason to accept it.
I agree. It's so ridiculous that the defense has to prove she was not insane and all she has to say is that she conveniently had hallucinations that only took place for 20 minutes when she was alone and never at any other point. How can they even prove that? She answered a call lucidly, had never mentioned psychosis to the many doctors she interacted with, googled and planned out things step by step and that's still not enough apparently. Pretty ridiculous in my opinion
The person you're responding to is misstating it IMO
In Massachusetts, if someone claims they are not guilty because of insanity (lack of criminal responsibility is the claim), it's the state's burden to prove the defendant was sane
This is a special case not only in terms of facts but also public perception. Not sequestering the jury is pretty wild given the publicity and issues involved.
The Massachusetts law is incredibly non-sensicle, because youre no longer talking about the criminal matter at hand. Its an affirmative defense, like self-defense.
You're not actually debating whether you did the alleged event, nor whether the alleged event would be a crime in normal circumstances. You're asserting that yes you did the thing, and yes the thing would normally be a crime, but I have a specific exemption due to this specific reason for why I can not be held liable for the criminal act.
Its the same with self-defense. Yes, I shot this guy, and yes he died, and normally that would be murder, but he broke into my house, where I shot him, and I feared for my safety.
Considering you can walk free after killing 3 people I agree . If one is truly insane then I would say they are even more dangerous than a criminal. Yet she claims she went insane for 1 hour and now she is good .
It makes sense to me too. I mean, let's say the prosecution can show without reasonable doubt that you did something, and the only thing that could exonerate you is a solid alibi. It makes sense that you would have to prove your alibi was valid. You can't say to the jury, "Well you can't prove that I wasn't going for a walk deep in the woods by myself at 3am, so you have to find me innocent."
Along the same lines, if your only defense is that you were "crazy at the time," it seems like it would be on you to prove that. You shouldn't be able to say "Well you can't prove that I wasn't insane when I killed my kids, so you have to find me innocent."
Just a thought, the act of murdering your 3 children has a high probability of inducing insanity if it wasn't already present, do you not see the massive loop hole here?
If you murdered someone, you should be guilty for murder. If you want different treatment in the penal system because you are insane, that should come afterwards, it shouldn't have any possibility of absolving you of the murder.
That's actually not how it works in the US when it comes to affirmative defenses (including insanity). The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that it is legally permissible for states to put the burden on the defense. See Patterson v. New York, 432 U.S. 197 (1977); Leland v. Oregon, 343 U.S. 790 (1952).
That’s a fine argument IF it’s about if they did something or not, but this case everyone agrees she did it but the defence is she was insane. It’s the defence stating she was insane then they should have to prove she was otherwise everyone person who commits a crime can claim they were insane as a defense and force the prosecution to prove it.
Honestly an insane person is probably their own best attorney at proving they are truly insane. I would bet more than half of Pro Se plaintiffs on the civil side meet some definition of insanity.
Back when Colin Ferguson represented himself in court he was super articulate but there was a point where he tried to prove a conspiracy by saying he was charged with 93 counts only because the shooting happened in 1993. Had it happened in 1994 he would be charged with 94 counts and his attorney just sat there with his head in his hands.
I don't care if someone is sane or not. They committed a crime, they are guilty of that crime. The victim(s) is/are still dead. Insanity is not an excuse.
And I'm curious who his lawyer was, she has the best in the business. Sick and tired of this BS comparing men to women and trying to make it about gender to add to misogyny. This is about different laws, different states, and better lawyers. And it's a tragedy if a mentally ill father kills his kids and gets the death sentence, what, you want her to get it, too? I hate this timeline so much. ETA: thanks for the award! Also, apparently this particular dad referenced is a piece of garbage-- thought still stands.
There's a difference between "mentally ill" and "insane." Not everyone who is mentally ill is insane. Someone who is legally insane is not in control of their faculties, they do not understand the consequences of their actions. Their crimes are unplanned, "they just snapped" scenarios, they don't have the ability to plan their actions. They might not be aware that they're hurting people because they aren't living in reality.
Most serial killers were mentally ill, but also very aware of what they were doing. They know what they're doing is harming another person, they just don't care. Their actions usually take lots of premeditation. Even though their minds are sick, they still understand their actions.
When someone is found not guilty by reason of insanity they do not go free, they go to a mental health facility, where they stay until they are deemed to no longer be a threat to themselves or others. If you look into actual numbers, most people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity wind up doing more time than they would have done if they weren't found insane and were sent to prison.
Unplanned isnt necessarily a requirement, depending on jurisriction. Someone in a prolonged state of psychosis could make a plan that is detatched from reality or their normal state of mind.
Not really making a statement in defense as I do not care enough to litigate the case. But people can be not in their right mind and still "rational" to a degree without being considered legally competent. Such as for example someone who was involuntarily intoxicated by a substance and not in control of their actions. That could be considered covered by a similar defense.
It varies worldwide but generally, in most places, premeditation alone wouldn't disqualify this type of defence. (Not that your post suggests otherwise but seen it been the default argument a lot of people make).
Like if you had paranoid psychosis, you could put lots of planning into sourcing a weapon and opportunity to kill someone who you see as a threat. Your mind however won't understand the consequences that would come after and why it was wrong.
Insanity is a legal definition and mental illness is different. A serial killer probably has a personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder most likely. Which isn't the same as psychosis. Many states have "guilty but mentally ill" which would apply to psychosis. Every state has its own legal definition of insanity and how to approve it, which leads to hospitalization instead of prison. ETA: I volunteered at a prison for the criminally insane in Ypsilanti decades ago for school. It's not a fun place.
Complete off topic, but can you explain why, for the love of god, do people use "ETA:" instead of "Edit:"? It makes absolutely no sense, since the primary context where you'd write "Edit:" in would be one where you are editing the comment to add something. The "TA" was already implied. Unlike in "ETA" which also has multiple other meanings, including "Estimated Time of Arrival" and "Eat This Ass" than "Edit To Add" does.
I really don't get it, it was almost gone, almost nobody used it for over a decade, maybe even two. Did TikTok bring it back or something? Seriously, why add the complexity when "Edit:" is self explanatory, while "ETA:" requires you look it up.
Edit could be a change of words/fixing typos. ETA means added another part and it's to share w/ people who commented that you added something after they might have read it. On FB, someone may have liked a post w/o the add and should be made aware of the change for decorum's sake.
"Edit" COULD mean you add fixes to typos, but "Edit:" followed by a bunch of new text wouldn't. "Edit:" also works literally for everything you just spouted after the first point. Like
Edit: This is an example of using "edit" instead of the other. Is it really that much less clear? Besides, I've literally seen people use "ETA:" to say they fixed typos. So your point is moot, people misuse it even if you were right.
An insanity defense doesn’t mean that you bounce out the courtroom door and on to more killing; it usually means permanent residence at a mental institution.
She has been on suicide watch for three years. She is constantly trying to kill herself.
Even if she was magically better on the six-month checkup, the doctors wouldn't let her out, because they know there'd been something really fishy going on if she had recovered by then, and they'd probably shunt her back to law enforcement.
Not remotely true. Massachusetts requires a 180 day psychiatric hold after a NGRI verdict. Since Lindsay no longer has PPP she’d likely be home by February. And likely with a 7-figure GoFundMe.
Exactly. If was truly psychotic and had no control over her actions, but has now gained her sanity and realized the abhorrence of what she’s done, she should ask to be put away forever. The fact that she is trying to escape this with no consequence tells me she has no remorse.
What world are you living in? This ain't the 1950's anymore, bud. That ain't how psychiatric hospitals work in the modern world - nobody gets sentenced to life in psychiatric hospitals.
Today, people only get sent to psychiatric hospitals until their mental health has improved. Some people never improve and stay there for the rest of their lives. Others get released in under a year. NONE of them get sentenced to a certain amount of time - when their doctors clear them, they go back on the streets.
I could explain it to you if you want. It’s not enough to simply have a mental disorder. Also, a layman’s definition of insanity is not the same as the legal definition of insanity.
Yes! People are drawing all kinds of conclusions about the Clancy mistrial, but really the Prosecution did a bad job and the jury was following instructions. The holdout juror even expressed that there was reasonable doubt but he just couldn't bring himself to vote that way.
That's not right (and isn't the case almost anywhere in the common law world).
Battaglia pleaded not guilty and expressly didn't enter a plea of "insanity" (a shorthand expression for a largely similar legal test in most places). In fact he was asked directly and told the Court he wasn't going to. At sentencing he tried to run an argument that he was bipolar. That could have been a dumb tactical decision. More likely it was because the level of his mental disorder didn't reach the point where he could avoid criminal responsibility. But it might nevertheless be a mitigating factor on sentence.
The onus of proof always shifts when you plead insanity, to some extent. If it were otherwise the prosecution would need to establish every single accused was mentally sane. Generally speaking, the onus rests on the defendant to prove it - but to a lower standard of proof (e.g. on the balance of probabilities). Some places do it slightly differently. For example, by saying the prosecutor always has the burden, but they only have to negative it if the defendant adduces prima facie evidence they are bonkers. In effect it amounts to the same thing.
From a comment below- the two cases are massively different. The commentator below states:
“ Also, not surprisingly the facts are entirely different. Battaglia had a long history of DV, and when he killed his kids, he did it with his ex-wife on the phone and tormented his wife while making her listen to her kids get murdered while blaming it on her.
Also, Battaglia explicitly did NOT plead insanity. He only brought it up during the penalty phase of trial, saying he shouldn’t be killed because he had bipolar.
It’s literally nothing like Lindsay Clancy other than they both killed their kids “
Also, not surprisingly the facts are entirely different. Battaglia had a long history of DV, and when he killed his kids, he did it with his ex-wife on the phone and tormented his wife while making her listen to her kids get murdered while blaming it on her.
Also, Battaglia explicitly did NOT plead insanity. He only brought it up during the penalty phase of trial, saying he shouldn’t be killed because he had bipolar.
It’s literally nothing like Lindsay Clancy other than they both killed their kids
Don’t tell them that a father in Iowa named Matthew Schleier strangled his 5-year-old son, Jack, to death in October 2024. A judge ruled him not guilty due to insanity.
Travis Decker was a parallel to this one in my opinion. His mental health was struggling and his wife separated due to it. But he was a loving father to his kids and although separated, his wife felt very comfortable allowing the kids to see him because he was so good to them. He ended up killing all three of his kids and walked off into the forest to die alone in the woods.
If he hadn't died and was on trial I would think many people would struggle to sentence him as well.
Both Travis decker and Chris Benoit are great parallels to this. And both are reasons as to why I can’t seem to get over the blatant double standard by society right now. Chris Benoit barely had any brain left when he did what he did. There’s evidence his lack of brain literally made him go insane. Travis decker being PTSD was 100% experiencing some type of psychosis when he did what he did as well. Because they both committed suicide we can’t say the double standard was in the court, but as far as how society reacted to them? Blatantly obvious when we compare it to Lindsay today
Shitpost? I’m sorry shit posts are something that doesn’t really have bearing on the world. This is just riling up propaganda for the people inundated in these gender wars and culture war flashpoints, it very much has a point.
The whole environment around this case is being egged on by malicious actors, many of them working for foreign governments. The fact that people can't see that is on them.
Yeah. I just read about this case, and its not at ALL the same.
Long history of domestic abuse. Wife had finally made the split final. As is often the case, he opted to kill his kids in an act of revenge and openly said as much.
OP is just trying to make two completely crimes parallel in order to prove some kind of bias against men, and that's so disengenous.
Nice try.
Yep. There was actually a man in Iowa who was acquitted by reason of insanity for murdering his son in July of this year, but men on Reddit don't care.
Propaganda on a culture war flashpoint!? Thats preposterous! No one would lie, mislead, or leave out important information in a photo and two sentences for political/ social gain!
Culture war? Gender war. Shoeonhead actually did a pretty good video covering the whole thing. Very right wing women (Charlie Kirk fans and others) are also taking the side of women on the left to defend Lindsey and blame the man.
Repel the 19th was trending on Twitter. This is very much about gender and breaks the normal right/left.
Every post about this case, from this sub, that I've seen hit the front page was heavily pushing the "gender war" aspect of this case, either by just attacking her or posts like this with the comparison to how "men would be oppressed in this situation, but women can just emotionally manipulate people".
And for a daily reminder, most intelligence agencies in the western world have identified efforts to destablize the west by Russian, Chinese, and other foreign actors focusing heavily on pushing "gender war" and "culture war" type content. They do it from both ends of the spectrum, with efforts such as highlighting the craziest of voices (like for instance a women on tiktok saying that Patrick Clancy actually did it) and then pushing a "what about" propaganda response like we see in this post. I think this case would have blown up regardless, but it's worth remembering that the people pushing this shit aren't just your fellow countrymen that politically disagree with you, there are real, concerted, and well funded efforts by foreign adversaries seeking to weaken your country through internal division. And they're winning.
I have not followed the Clancy case closely and don't know how I would have voted on the jury, but I appreciate you introducing some facts to a vibefest.
What? Lol have you not heard of Andrea Yates who was tried in Texas and is now in a mental institution for drowning her 5 children?
It’s a lot more nuanced than “not believ[ing] in mental health exceptions.”
Texas is more difficult because the burden of proof is on the defendant rather than the prosecution for such a defense for one, meaning when the insanity defense has passed the threshold to be brought in by the defense in Texas, the jury is supposed to presume that the defendant is sane unless the defense can show by a preponderance of evidence that the defendant is not. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the burden is on the prosecution to show the defendant is sane, meaning the jury is supposed to presume the defendant is insane unless the prosecution can show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is sane.
Additionally for all sanity defenses regardless of jurisdiction, sanity is supposed to be determined at the time the crimes were committed. All other moments of insanity are just used as circumstantial evidence of the likelihood that this was the case.
Moreover, John Battaglia did NOT claim the insanity defense as part of his trial. His mental health claims only came up AFTER the jury reached a verdict on his guilt. Additionally, he had a record of arrests for violence prior to killing his 2 daughters which was determined to be out of revenge against his ex-wife.
These are not comparable cases and this meme making them sound as much is just a case of either deliberate propaganda or a complete misunderstanding of John Battaglia’s case and how the justice system operates. Or a combination of the two.
Huh? In not a part of these groups, but women definitely do not get the same sentences for these types of cases in America. That's just facts. Hell, especially when it's a fucking white woman. See Casey Fucking Anthony.
Well I mean if we're going to make that argument she knew she was doing wrong too why else would she have come up with an excuse for her husband to leave the house so that she could do it. If she thought it was okay to be doing it and her psychosis then why would she have him leave? She knew it was wrong she knew he would try to stop her.
People in psychosis can form plans, carry those plans out, and lie about/hide their intentions to accomplish their goal and still not know that what they are doing is wrong. A symptom of psychosis is paranoia, which can make someone in psychosis suspicious of others and worried that others will try to stop their plans. They lie and deceive to carry out their plans, not because they know what they’re doing is wrong.
Believing someone will stop you does not inherently mean you believe it’s wrong. If she truly believed ending her children’s lives was merciful, why would she not try to arrange to have someone she knew would stand in the way of that action out of the house?
This is not me defending the action. Your argument just doesn’t hold up to the level of scrutiny expected in an insanity plea case. By definition (legal definition in criminal cases), insanity means that person cannot reasonably tell the difference between right and wrong, not that they cannot tell if a person will stop them from doing what they irrationally believe to be right/correct.
People stop patents from running back into burning buildings to save their kids. Do those parents not still believe that it is right to run into the burning building in an attempt to save their kids?
If she irrationally believed that the killing was necessary, the same standard of logic applies. He could have simply been a bystander holding her back from the burning building in her eyes. That doesn’t make sense to you or me on a surface level, but that’s the basis of an insanity plea.
The psychosis part comes in w/ I have to plan b/c I have to send them to God. It's the delusions. I'm not saying whether Clancy deserves prison instead of a mental institution prison, but delusions and hallucinations are awful.
That guy is a pos. So is Lindsay. She asked her husband to get food and medication far away. She called him back while she was killing them. She tried to take her own life...except the experts involved said that they dont believe her attempt to kill herself was genuine.
1) people in psychosis can form plans, carry out plans, and lie to others to carry out their plans. One of the symptoms of psychosis is paranoia, which can actually make someone in psychosis more secretive and deceptive.
2) That’s not true. Zeizel and Resnick with the defense both said her suicide attempt was genuine. And two of the prosecution’s expert witnesses, Saathoff and Heilbrun, said her suicide attempt was serious.
I mean, yes, you can be considered innocent by reason of insanity in Texas too. That's what the Battaglia defense tried for the 15 years he spent in death row. The courts determined that he had read about bipolar disorders and that he was faking it, not that insanity can't make someone incompetent to stand trial.
He also was only executed in 2018. The actual crime itself dates back to 2001. As a country we have made significant progress regarding mental health, and even the death penalty more generally in the past 2-3 decades. This goes beyond just the differences between states, at that point.
Most of the shit people believe about Texas isn’t true. I say this as a liberal woman who lives in Texas. Things are can be backwards here for sure, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as people make it out to be. Texas isn’t any worse than the other red states.
I think Texas projects that image to keep liberals turned off from moving here.
I think it has to also do with how educated the general population is on mental health. He was convicted in 2001 and mental health is something more people are aware of. The older generations also didn't put much weight in mental health either.
51 really, because the Feds have their own system. And states like to think themselves of separate units and has been that way from the start, when each individual state considered themselves almost as separate countries (That’s where the 10th amendment comes in to play originally) and were treated as such in order to get the constitution signed. It wasn’t until the civil war that the union became more powerful. It’s politics all the way down.
Because our states are “supposed” to be essentially 50 different countries with a loose overarching federal government linking them, not unlike the EU or other loosely-gluing entities. It has changed pretty significantly since the country’s beginning, but there are still a good amount of remnants of this left over, with some laws and things like that varying quite a bit state to state.
And a different legal bar when someone takes the insanity plea. In Texas, it's the defense that has the provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt the person was/is insane. In Massachusetts, it's the prosecution that needs to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person isn't/wasn't insane.
Also, I I can't believe I have to keep saying this, her defense had a paper trail going on for months prior to the murders that showed she was suffering. She checkers herself into a inpatient mental health facility a month before the murders to try and get help. If she were tried in another state where the burden of proof of her insanity was on the defense, I think she at least gets another mistrial.
Also battaglia physically attacked and hospitalized his first wife and also physically attacked his second wife too. A violent felon with a history of specifically retaliatory violence killed his two daughters while on the phone with his ex wife and left a message on the answering machine saying he loved the two little girls he had just shot dead and disparaged his ex-wife.
It's also worth noting that different states have very different rules for what counts under an insanity plea, with Texas having a very narrow definition of the type of insanity that could be raised as a defense.
Not just political climate. The state laws in MA on a number of topics are ancient - literally just after the founding of the country-type ancient. And a lot have not been updated to account for our modern views on things. It makes for very weird framing of some crimes compared with other states.
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u/500rockin 15h ago
I mean it also helps that he was tried in Texas where they don’t believe in mental health exceptions. She’s being tried in Massachusetts, which has a very different political climate.