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The whole concept of being able to claim insanity as a defense comes from a time when people literally thought you could be possessed by demons.
Murdering children is an act of insanity. Always. That’s not a defense, it’s a given.
This is not about punishment. It’s about ethics: when evaluating the morality of an action, you must consider the causal and intentional facts.
Everything else, such as mental illness, either supervenes on these causal and intentional facts or it is irrelevant.
Whether that person subsumed alcohol or whether they are mentally ill simply does not matter except insofar as it relates to the two questions above.
If you disagree with any specific sentence above, please tell me which one. All of the replies are currently non-sequiturs and red herrings.
You are trying to attach rational arguments to a totally emotional opinion.
The law requires that the defendant had formed criminal intent when they committed their offense. Shooting someone in the head is murder, but if you killed that person to stop them from killing someone else, then there was no criminal intent, and it's not murder.
Yes, she killed her kids, and yes, she knew she was killing her kids, but she was also in the grip of a terrible psychosis, that prevented her from forming criminal intent.
And it was never about releasing her, it was always about the type of place she would reside. A prison, or a prison hospital. A person with your type of thinking overplayed their hand, and got her released instead.
So she says. I mean https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/post-partum-psychosis/ would suggest... probably not.
Also, drunk people or people on drugs... who aren't aware of their actions... is the implication there that they're not responsible because they were prevented from forming criminal intent? 3 children were hunted down and murdered. Then a staged suicide.
This isn't a "rational argument". The "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense has nothing to do with this case. That standard doesn't even exist in Massachusetts where this case was tried.
The law doesn’t matter ethically.
You’re making it sound like psychosis is some sort of demon that takes over your body and makes you do things against your will as if that matters.
Insanity isn't a get out of jail free card, she's going to be institutionalized for a long time, maybe even her whole life. It can be a fate worse than jail, but at least she has the proper medical attention needed
My problem isn’t with the punishment. From an ethics perspective, the framing of insanity as having any normative relevance is simply incorrect.
The relevant facts are causal and intentional.
But then again, the average person has the ethics of a baboon, so this is academic.
The US justice system is explicitly punitive and not habilitative. That is why questions of "insanity" as it relates to culpability are critically important, for better or (largely) worse. This means that the outcome kf the process is not victim or even a perpetrator oriented--it is intended to provide the general shitass public with adequate feelings of cathartic vindication. Whether a perpetrator is deemed "sane" or not factors into that heavily.
You’re completely off topic, since nothing you said has any rational or ethical bearing on anything I said.
I couldn't find a source on the possession thing, but maybe you're referring to the general way that mental health used to be explained by the supernatural when we didn't fully understand the involved conditions.
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-procedure/the-insanity-defense-history-and-background.html#%3A%7E%3Atext=Courts+in+ancient+Rome+and%2Cpardon+or+mitigate+a+sentence
This article was a fun read, and so was the wiki :)
Also, they're looking for specific, named conditions/diagnosis. Nobody is claiming she's insane because she killed her kids. They're pointing to the history of mental health issues/treatment, various prescribed psych meds, the immediate subsequent suicide attempt, etc. Mental health professionals testified for both sides. It isn't a vibes thing.
You don't know what that word means.
The point is she wasn't in a right state of mind when it happened. But I'm glad we have legal experts like you to serve on juries.
Again: “legal expertise” has nothing to do with ethics.
Massachusetts doesn't even have a "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense on the books at all, so this was a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing. It's amazing how many people are so confident to say extremely stupid things about this case.
Under Massachusetts state law (specifically known as the McHoul standard), a person is not criminally responsible if, at the moment of the offense, a mental disease or defect left them without the "substantial capacity" to do one of two things:
The McHoul standard was decided in 1967, and the law makes no mention of "possession by demons".
Yes, the McHoul standard is a joke that reflects the normative gulf between law and ethics by introducing double standards and morally irrelevant nuance, which results in obvious paradoxes.
Congratulations! You’ve graduated to having a consistent normative view.
Okay you have to understad that we are trying to have a civilisation here.
Your point of view is not consistent.
If you want a murderer punished like you would a "rabid animal" because we are just animals and don't need further understanding than there is no reason to object murder in general.
What kind of a civilization debates the legality of child slaughter to this extent? The fact that the law introduces morally irrelevant nuance into such a case is a reflection of our failure to be civilized.
My view of morality is consistent to the best of my knowledge. I literally research the subject academically.
I don’t “want” anyone punished in any specific fashion, nor have I discussed punishment. Your inability to read has made this conversation impossible.
A lot of crime is evidence of insanity, from narcissism, megalomania; really, all homicide is rooted in insanity.
We lock those people the hell up, though.
No one gets a cushy institutionalization unless their docs all agree. Into genpop until then.
Cushy institutionalization? You've got some wild misunderstandings of how any of this works. It's prison, with prison conditions. Nothing fucking cushy about it, but I'm guessing you're far more interested in punishment than rehabilitation.
I'm certainly not interested in rehabilitating child murderers. Just get them out of society forever.
And this is why the world thinks us US Americans are belligerent and cruel by nature.
I'm fine with being belligerent and cruel to people who harm children. If you have to be taught that that's wrong then there's no place for you in this world. We have more than enough people that need help as it is.
Hey, everybody! Look at this guy who can only be kind to one person at a time!
I can be kind to lots of people. I'm just not doing it for those who by their own actions have rendered themselves undeserving of it. That energy is better spent elsewhere.
In many, many significant ways, perpetual civil commitment (to an "institution") is far more horrific of a state than being in prison. People like you are incredibly fucking stupid.