Insanity defenses are usually very hard to successfully mount. The standard is typically being unable to understand, through disease or mental defect, the nature or wrongfulness of one’s actions. I don’t know if she met that standard: I haven’t been following the case very closely. I too have been appalled at the bits of rhetoric I’ve seen online. I remember the rhetoric being equally ugly with Andrea Yates but that was before social media. FWIW I think the jury ultimately came to the correct conclusion in that case.
I also struggled with intrusive postpartum thoughts of a very similar nature. I’m glad you got through it. And I agree that postpartum mood disorders are a different beast than psychosis. I pray that the jury is able to wisely weigh the evidence and come to the best verdict possible given this tragic situation.
And even when you get the insanity please granted you are going to be put in the darkest parts of the system. These are not good things and Insanity plea is not clemency like people think
The only possible verdict is the same a father would get. When a man kills his children nobody cares if he is mentally ill or something, so let it be here.
If a man has a mental disease or defect that causes him to be unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of his actions (for example active psychosis causing him to believe his family were actually demons sent to harm him) than he might be able successfully mount a similar defense. Here’s a recent example in which a man was able to successfully plead insanity after strangling his child: https://www.kcrg.com/2026/07/15/father-found-not-guilty-young-sons-death-remain-mental-health-facility/
How is that relevant to the question of criminal responsibility? It seems you’re annoyed that some people are rallying to her defense. I assure you that she may still be found guilty.
It isn’t that simple. There are no two people exactly alike. We are all uniquely made even men do not have the same hormones as women nor women men’s. We all have different life stories which carry unique consequences that affect our makeup. Minds, bodies and moral stability
Became a father a five days so this hits hard for me. Regarding the critique misconstructing this as gender politics you are completely right, this is solely in the purview of mental health. Previously I have had severe episodes of intrusive thoughts. The truly maddening thing about dealing with such incidents is that despite knowing exactly by what mechanism this occurs i.e the mind generates random thoughts and they have zero validity and does not reflect anything about your inner desires, is that the compulsion only gets worse when you engage it with reason.
The concept of lack cognitive penetration might only be analogous as here as it strictly applies to modularity of the mind, but it is truly as if the amygdala is impervious to any input from your higher faculties of thought. You simply have to experience events to the contrary.
Either way, the moment my daughter was born all of those thoughts lost their potency. Bonded instantly. They will be back but the mantra i learned in therapy ‘you are not your thoughts.
Your character is determined by how you react, your moral judgements and your actions’ helped.
Christians however have a much harder time dealing with it as their model of the mind, or soul if you will is based on the Sermon on the Mount which introduced the concept of a thought crime into western civilisation. This promotes intrusive thoughts but it might also explain the reaction from the conservative right to such incidents.
The modern left wing variant of this fallacy is how they misconstrue mere association in the mind, statistical stereotypes as an indication of bias or intent.
Dr. K said it best that I think a lot of women are rallying to the side of the lady on social media because they have been to that threshold. That they have seen the edge of that cliff.
Probably. If nothing else I hope this horrible event further raises awareness so women feel more empowered to advocate for themselves if they’re struggling. I know she tried to get care but it sounds like it wasn’t particularly helpful.
Or at least raises standard of care and awareness of something that is more common than I've ever thought possible. And not to mention the absolute internet crap storm that has been caused by all this of extreme sides. And of course people that get mixed up in the middle. It's stupefying and how this age of communication that we have everything except good communication
Well could have been a teaching moments and learning and morning for an accident has been people on Instagram and tiktok going after the guy because he looks mean or is using zodiac horoscopes to say he's evil. And then people saying the woman is evil without understanding postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis. Nobody learns a damn thing and that's sad
Aren't you annoyed, too? Apart mental health considerations, do you find normal rallying in her defense? In THAT way?
By the way, do you know that for the same crime women are already judged less harshly and get lighter sentences than men? So don't worry, the lady will manage to get by in some way.
Yes, Daniele. That’s the point of the essay. My fullest explanation of why I think this is wrong begins with the paragraph that starts,
“This is why I believe feminists who try to subsume this case into a vast category of any kind of psychological or practical difficulties women may experience after having a baby or when caring for a number of young children are also very wrong.”
The lady didn't have a stroke that made her kill her childre. The correct example would be "and if the driver saw God telling him to drive into the crowd?" Would he be consideted not guilty? Would you consider him (or her...) unable to understand his actions?
I don’t think that’s the correct example either. I think we can hold people responsible for obeying what they perceive as the voice of God. If it actually was God, they’ll get their reward in Heaven.
The stroke example was one in which a person genuinely has no control over their body. Psychosis can function similarly. A person cannot choose to accurately see reality. If they drove into the crowd because they could not see the crowd and thought it was a normal road or perceived a bunch of zombies trying to kill them, they did not do anything ethically wrong. It was their perception which was wrong.
Yes, this is specifically what I was trying to convey. I know it's counterintuitive and this is why I have this lengthy thought experiment in the middle to set out clearly what I am and am not talking about.
"Imagine a scenario in which a woman has just got her baby down to sleep in its nursery and she hears a terrible crash and snarling. She runs into the nursery and finds a wild animal of some kind in her baby’s crib mauling the child. She picks up a chair and repeatedly smashes it into the animal’s head until it goes limp. She snatches up her badly injured baby and runs downstairs to call an ambulance. The ambulance comes and takes her and the baby away. Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to see her and tells her that her baby is dead. With him are two police officers and they tell her there was no wild animal. The baby died from the blows she swung with the chair. She had been hallucinating.
Imagine that you could know this scenario were absolutely true. You had somehow been able to watch it from her perspective like it was a movie. Would you hold her responsible for behaving in the way she did or was her behaviour entirely morally justifiable based on what she saw with her own eyes? What else could she have done? Run into the room and seen the animal attack and thought, “I’d better not do anything about this in case it is a hallucination and I accidentally hurt the baby and am then charged with that.” Of course not. Nearly every time anybody sees such an attack, it is actually happening and the right thing to do is save the baby.
I would argue that because psychotic delusions, brought on through no fault of the sufferer’s own, really can be indistinguishable from reality and because there are occasions on which violence in self-defence is both morally and legally justifiable, there must logically be situations in which a violent crime can occur and the perpetrator of it should not be held morally or legally responsible. But this is how high the bar needs to be. There must be evidence that the individual did not know what they were doing or that they could not meaningfully comprehend that it was wrong or that they could not prevent themselves from doing it for them not to be morally responsible for their actions."
Psychosis lies to you. It tells you something is happening when it is not and makes you see or hear it as though it was totally real. This can cause people to behave in ways that would be morally justifiable if what they were perceiving was accurate.
I once dated a man with schizophrenia. When it was managed, he was a molecular biologist, but when it wasn't, he believed, saw and heard things that weren't real. I once came home to find him doing CPR on a body that wasn't there. He'd called an ambulance and although I cancelled it, the police came and almost broke the door down and insisted on searching the whole place. When we explained that Martin was schizophrenic and had hallucinated, he apologised to them for wasting their time and they said, "You did the right thing. We'd much rather you called us for something that wasn't real, that did not call us and it was." Another time, he was hit by a car because he saw a child wandering in a busy road and ran in to save her. There was no child.
He never harmed anyone but he could have. Imagine that he'd seen somebody trying to kidnap a child or someone coming at him with an axe and punched them but it was an entirely innocent person? He did once believe he was being hunted by a crime gang and hid in the forest. If someone had come walking at that time, he could have hit them with a branch and seriously injured them. When his delusions started, he went straight into hospital to protect himself and other people.
The majority of murders that are committed by a schizophrenic happen in their first ever experience of it. It comes on suddenly in the early twenties and the person has no way of knowing that what they are suddenly seeing, hearing or believing is not real. It always had been previously.
For this reason, saying "A lot of people have mental health issues and don't kill" does not work. Unless those people had psychosis and believed their life was in danger and were defending themselves, this is not comparable. It's like saying to a paraplegic "Other people have disabilities and they still walk" and pointing to someone with Down's Syndrome.
Obviously you are not convinced by this argument but this is how the western legal system distinguishes between actions committed during a psychosis versus a crime of passion. The latter the perpetrator is regarded as a individual in full possession of his mental faculties, those that regulate aggression and promote inhibition in the prefrontal cortex. It was an act of volition and powerful emotions motivated the action. Whereas someone that had a psychosis is not regarded as a competent legal subject at the time of the incident.
Emotional and mental illness is an illness Why does anyone have the right to decide that it is criminal and treat it as criminal? From my view I cannot image a motive that Clancy
I’m starting to think that people in general are stupid; perhaps that’s why politicians treat them as if they were talking to someone with cognitive deficits, because it seems that every discussion here always starts from scratch and one has to spell out the obvious – or rather, that under the law, everyone is responsible for their own actions.
But what you said is simply untrue: in the American justice system there are situations in which an individual is not (legally/criminally, at least) considered responsible for their own actions. The jury will decide if this is one of those cases.
If someone drives into a crowd of people because they were committing a terrorist attack, they are responsible for their actions. If they do so because they had a sudden stroke and lost control of their motor function, they are not. Likewise if they lose an accurate perception of reality through no fault of their own (brain tumour, psychosis, dementia - not drugs) and believe themselves to be acting in self-defence when actually they were not under threat. We just have to have a high bar for that.
Wait! Let’s make the necessary distinctions! Look, even in Italy there’s a difference between manslaughter (unplanned acts that lead to someone’s death) and murder. Just as there’s a difference between a murderer who is perfectly of sound mind and another who commits a serious offence because they suffer from some kind of mental illness. And here we’re dealing with the second case, not the first.
And as far as this second case is concerned, no one can spare you from prison. You may receive a longer or shorter sentence, but you’ll still have to serve it in prison.
In the US defendants who successfully use the insanity defense are typically committed to locked psychiatric facilities for extended periods of time. They are periodically evaluated for soundness (edit: as well as dangerousness and risk to the public), and can be released eventually, but they often serve comparative or longer “sentences” than they might have served if they’d simply have been convicted (https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2137&context=fac_articles_chapters). It’s by no means a “get out of jail free” card. John Hinckley Jr was only unconditionally released in 2022 for the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in which no one was actually killed (at the time, at least: James Brady’s death in 2014 was ruled a homicide 33 years after the shooting, I guess due to the many health effects he suffered afterwards). It would be interesting to compare various legal systems in terms of how criminal responsibility is considered in the context of mental illness. Edit: I should add that in the US different states use different standards and legal remedies in cases in which mental illness may have factored into the crime.
If the father was truly afflicted by psychosis, the father would be found criminally insane. Most men who annihilate their families (and they constitute 95% of those who commit this crime) are selfish weak men who found fatherhood not to their liking, men who had overinflated ideas about what life owed them and then became enraged when they found themselves living an average life.
The same for women. Ah yes, male murderers are always evil, no doubt, women... they can't be evil,so there must be something or someone driving them to kill.
Women who murder for malice or distemper are simply much rarer than men who do so. I’m sorry that facts are sad for you. And post natal psychosis is real and can have devastating consequences. It is up to the jury to decide if this woman had post natal psychosis or not. If not, then she’s malicious and should get the maximum sentence, as any man in her situation aught to.
Men plead guilty by reason of insanity for murder of the vulnerable all the time.
"Rarer" means that there are less cases, but there are (and not so less...), sorry if this fact is sad for you... But if it's a woman, there's always the race to find justifications outside personal responsibility. Always with women, never for men, that's the point, not which phenomenon is rarer. By the way, in this environment, and in a system where for the same crime a woman gets lighter sentence than y man, I suspect that such difference does exist, but is likely overestimated.
She genuinely might have PPD. If so she does actually deserve some grace. Even the bible made exceptions for those not sound of mind, this isn’t a woke concept.
And this has become another of the things completely hijacked online by the culture wars. While it is a tragedy, and one that cannot be reduced to the victimisation of women or the exculpation of women on the basis of alleged collective victimhood.
Nevertheless, justice is not simply a matter of the cold application of the law in measuring how exactly awareness and responsibility balance out. Our system is set up in adversarial fashion, but its goal, in Britain as well as across the ocean, is not to win but to serve justice.
Leave off the all encompassing culture wars. In this trial (I happen, from this side of the ocean where I now reside, to have been pushed to look into it by the reports of one of the journalists I follow) the prosecution has displayed the most appalling behaviour I ever saw.
Nothing to do with the sex of the defendant. Everything to do with the dogged determination to request the maximum punishment in spite of a flood of exculpatory evidence and none to support their thesis. Everything to do with the most reprehensible tactics employed to influence the jury not with rational arguments but with emotional appeals and the bombardment of horrible images and acts (they even re-enacted the strangulation of the children, with no other possible reason than making people recoil in abhorrence). The judge had to stop their theatrics several times, and very sternly.
Awful behaviour from the beginning to the end, including the closing argument with a volte-face on the refusal to admit that the defendant was mentally ill.
And their thesis was always that the defendant faked her suicide attempt, and that she killed the children simply because she did not want them any more. Only at the very end, with all evidence against them, they admitted that the suicide was not fake and shifted to a different way to hold the defendant maximally guilty, now through the suicide.
And this why? Because these attorneys are individually clearly unprincipled, but they are pushed to be even more so by a system that rewards, in the US more than anywhere else, the prosecution for the cases they win with maximum sentence.
Insanity defences may be hard to successfully mount in most cases, when there is a shred of other motives for the crime and no obvious evidence of a mental breakdown surrounding and during the crime. This one is not, pardon the redundancy, the case.
I do not often get invested emotionally and intellectually in trials -- I am inclined to trust the justice system and the corrections it applies in cases of mistrial. But here the mistrial seems to have happened during the trial rather than after the sentence. And little wonder at the screaming mobs, since everything in this age is a spectacle broadcasted and blared over and over and over.
I just hope that the jury is more sensible and humane that these purported representatives of the state.
Insanity defenses are usually very hard to successfully mount. The standard is typically being unable to understand, through disease or mental defect, the nature or wrongfulness of one’s actions. I don’t know if she met that standard: I haven’t been following the case very closely. I too have been appalled at the bits of rhetoric I’ve seen online. I remember the rhetoric being equally ugly with Andrea Yates but that was before social media. FWIW I think the jury ultimately came to the correct conclusion in that case.
I also struggled with intrusive postpartum thoughts of a very similar nature. I’m glad you got through it. And I agree that postpartum mood disorders are a different beast than psychosis. I pray that the jury is able to wisely weigh the evidence and come to the best verdict possible given this tragic situation.
And even when you get the insanity please granted you are going to be put in the darkest parts of the system. These are not good things and Insanity plea is not clemency like people think
The only possible verdict is the same a father would get. When a man kills his children nobody cares if he is mentally ill or something, so let it be here.
Men get off on insanity charges all the time lol
If a man has a mental disease or defect that causes him to be unable to appreciate the nature or wrongfulness of his actions (for example active psychosis causing him to believe his family were actually demons sent to harm him) than he might be able successfully mount a similar defense. Here’s a recent example in which a man was able to successfully plead insanity after strangling his child: https://www.kcrg.com/2026/07/15/father-found-not-guilty-young-sons-death-remain-mental-health-facility/
How much money did this father collect on GoFundMe by other men? How much solidarity did he receive from other men?
How is that relevant to the question of criminal responsibility? It seems you’re annoyed that some people are rallying to her defense. I assure you that she may still be found guilty.
It isn’t that simple. There are no two people exactly alike. We are all uniquely made even men do not have the same hormones as women nor women men’s. We all have different life stories which carry unique consequences that affect our makeup. Minds, bodies and moral stability
Became a father a five days so this hits hard for me. Regarding the critique misconstructing this as gender politics you are completely right, this is solely in the purview of mental health. Previously I have had severe episodes of intrusive thoughts. The truly maddening thing about dealing with such incidents is that despite knowing exactly by what mechanism this occurs i.e the mind generates random thoughts and they have zero validity and does not reflect anything about your inner desires, is that the compulsion only gets worse when you engage it with reason.
The concept of lack cognitive penetration might only be analogous as here as it strictly applies to modularity of the mind, but it is truly as if the amygdala is impervious to any input from your higher faculties of thought. You simply have to experience events to the contrary.
Either way, the moment my daughter was born all of those thoughts lost their potency. Bonded instantly. They will be back but the mantra i learned in therapy ‘you are not your thoughts.
Your character is determined by how you react, your moral judgements and your actions’ helped.
Christians however have a much harder time dealing with it as their model of the mind, or soul if you will is based on the Sermon on the Mount which introduced the concept of a thought crime into western civilisation. This promotes intrusive thoughts but it might also explain the reaction from the conservative right to such incidents.
The modern left wing variant of this fallacy is how they misconstrue mere association in the mind, statistical stereotypes as an indication of bias or intent.
Dr. K said it best that I think a lot of women are rallying to the side of the lady on social media because they have been to that threshold. That they have seen the edge of that cliff.
" but there for the grace of God, go I.
Probably. If nothing else I hope this horrible event further raises awareness so women feel more empowered to advocate for themselves if they’re struggling. I know she tried to get care but it sounds like it wasn’t particularly helpful.
Or at least raises standard of care and awareness of something that is more common than I've ever thought possible. And not to mention the absolute internet crap storm that has been caused by all this of extreme sides. And of course people that get mixed up in the middle. It's stupefying and how this age of communication that we have everything except good communication
Well could have been a teaching moments and learning and morning for an accident has been people on Instagram and tiktok going after the guy because he looks mean or is using zodiac horoscopes to say he's evil. And then people saying the woman is evil without understanding postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis. Nobody learns a damn thing and that's sad
Aren't you annoyed, too? Apart mental health considerations, do you find normal rallying in her defense? In THAT way?
By the way, do you know that for the same crime women are already judged less harshly and get lighter sentences than men? So don't worry, the lady will manage to get by in some way.
Yes, Daniele. That’s the point of the essay. My fullest explanation of why I think this is wrong begins with the paragraph that starts,
“This is why I believe feminists who try to subsume this case into a vast category of any kind of psychological or practical difficulties women may experience after having a baby or when caring for a number of young children are also very wrong.”
The lady didn't have a stroke that made her kill her childre. The correct example would be "and if the driver saw God telling him to drive into the crowd?" Would he be consideted not guilty? Would you consider him (or her...) unable to understand his actions?
Yes, I know. That was an analogy.
I don’t think that’s the correct example either. I think we can hold people responsible for obeying what they perceive as the voice of God. If it actually was God, they’ll get their reward in Heaven.
The stroke example was one in which a person genuinely has no control over their body. Psychosis can function similarly. A person cannot choose to accurately see reality. If they drove into the crowd because they could not see the crowd and thought it was a normal road or perceived a bunch of zombies trying to kill them, they did not do anything ethically wrong. It was their perception which was wrong.
So, we are back to "perceived reality"? Sorry, I strongly disagree. A lot of people has mental issues and don't kill.
Most variants of mental illness does not compromise your ability to take accountability for your actions, a psychosis does.
Yes, this is specifically what I was trying to convey. I know it's counterintuitive and this is why I have this lengthy thought experiment in the middle to set out clearly what I am and am not talking about.
"Imagine a scenario in which a woman has just got her baby down to sleep in its nursery and she hears a terrible crash and snarling. She runs into the nursery and finds a wild animal of some kind in her baby’s crib mauling the child. She picks up a chair and repeatedly smashes it into the animal’s head until it goes limp. She snatches up her badly injured baby and runs downstairs to call an ambulance. The ambulance comes and takes her and the baby away. Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to see her and tells her that her baby is dead. With him are two police officers and they tell her there was no wild animal. The baby died from the blows she swung with the chair. She had been hallucinating.
Imagine that you could know this scenario were absolutely true. You had somehow been able to watch it from her perspective like it was a movie. Would you hold her responsible for behaving in the way she did or was her behaviour entirely morally justifiable based on what she saw with her own eyes? What else could she have done? Run into the room and seen the animal attack and thought, “I’d better not do anything about this in case it is a hallucination and I accidentally hurt the baby and am then charged with that.” Of course not. Nearly every time anybody sees such an attack, it is actually happening and the right thing to do is save the baby.
I would argue that because psychotic delusions, brought on through no fault of the sufferer’s own, really can be indistinguishable from reality and because there are occasions on which violence in self-defence is both morally and legally justifiable, there must logically be situations in which a violent crime can occur and the perpetrator of it should not be held morally or legally responsible. But this is how high the bar needs to be. There must be evidence that the individual did not know what they were doing or that they could not meaningfully comprehend that it was wrong or that they could not prevent themselves from doing it for them not to be morally responsible for their actions."
Ok...
Psychosis lies to you. It tells you something is happening when it is not and makes you see or hear it as though it was totally real. This can cause people to behave in ways that would be morally justifiable if what they were perceiving was accurate.
I once dated a man with schizophrenia. When it was managed, he was a molecular biologist, but when it wasn't, he believed, saw and heard things that weren't real. I once came home to find him doing CPR on a body that wasn't there. He'd called an ambulance and although I cancelled it, the police came and almost broke the door down and insisted on searching the whole place. When we explained that Martin was schizophrenic and had hallucinated, he apologised to them for wasting their time and they said, "You did the right thing. We'd much rather you called us for something that wasn't real, that did not call us and it was." Another time, he was hit by a car because he saw a child wandering in a busy road and ran in to save her. There was no child.
He never harmed anyone but he could have. Imagine that he'd seen somebody trying to kidnap a child or someone coming at him with an axe and punched them but it was an entirely innocent person? He did once believe he was being hunted by a crime gang and hid in the forest. If someone had come walking at that time, he could have hit them with a branch and seriously injured them. When his delusions started, he went straight into hospital to protect himself and other people.
The majority of murders that are committed by a schizophrenic happen in their first ever experience of it. It comes on suddenly in the early twenties and the person has no way of knowing that what they are suddenly seeing, hearing or believing is not real. It always had been previously.
For this reason, saying "A lot of people have mental health issues and don't kill" does not work. Unless those people had psychosis and believed their life was in danger and were defending themselves, this is not comparable. It's like saying to a paraplegic "Other people have disabilities and they still walk" and pointing to someone with Down's Syndrome.
Obviously you are not convinced by this argument but this is how the western legal system distinguishes between actions committed during a psychosis versus a crime of passion. The latter the perpetrator is regarded as a individual in full possession of his mental faculties, those that regulate aggression and promote inhibition in the prefrontal cortex. It was an act of volition and powerful emotions motivated the action. Whereas someone that had a psychosis is not regarded as a competent legal subject at the time of the incident.
Continued That Clancy would have to kill what appears to be those she loved. Why not give the benefit of the doubt first until proven otherwise
Emotional and mental illness is an illness Why does anyone have the right to decide that it is criminal and treat it as criminal? From my view I cannot image a motive that Clancy
I’m starting to think that people in general are stupid; perhaps that’s why politicians treat them as if they were talking to someone with cognitive deficits, because it seems that every discussion here always starts from scratch and one has to spell out the obvious – or rather, that under the law, everyone is responsible for their own actions.
But what you said is simply untrue: in the American justice system there are situations in which an individual is not (legally/criminally, at least) considered responsible for their own actions. The jury will decide if this is one of those cases.
Yes, and that is as it should be.
If someone drives into a crowd of people because they were committing a terrorist attack, they are responsible for their actions. If they do so because they had a sudden stroke and lost control of their motor function, they are not. Likewise if they lose an accurate perception of reality through no fault of their own (brain tumour, psychosis, dementia - not drugs) and believe themselves to be acting in self-defence when actually they were not under threat. We just have to have a high bar for that.
Wait! Let’s make the necessary distinctions! Look, even in Italy there’s a difference between manslaughter (unplanned acts that lead to someone’s death) and murder. Just as there’s a difference between a murderer who is perfectly of sound mind and another who commits a serious offence because they suffer from some kind of mental illness. And here we’re dealing with the second case, not the first.
And as far as this second case is concerned, no one can spare you from prison. You may receive a longer or shorter sentence, but you’ll still have to serve it in prison.
In the US defendants who successfully use the insanity defense are typically committed to locked psychiatric facilities for extended periods of time. They are periodically evaluated for soundness (edit: as well as dangerousness and risk to the public), and can be released eventually, but they often serve comparative or longer “sentences” than they might have served if they’d simply have been convicted (https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2137&context=fac_articles_chapters). It’s by no means a “get out of jail free” card. John Hinckley Jr was only unconditionally released in 2022 for the 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in which no one was actually killed (at the time, at least: James Brady’s death in 2014 was ruled a homicide 33 years after the shooting, I guess due to the many health effects he suffered afterwards). It would be interesting to compare various legal systems in terms of how criminal responsibility is considered in the context of mental illness. Edit: I should add that in the US different states use different standards and legal remedies in cases in which mental illness may have factored into the crime.
Thank you for the thoughtful analysis and especially the personal insights. Partisan responses are unhelpful.
The same penalty a father would get, full stop.
If the father was truly afflicted by psychosis, the father would be found criminally insane. Most men who annihilate their families (and they constitute 95% of those who commit this crime) are selfish weak men who found fatherhood not to their liking, men who had overinflated ideas about what life owed them and then became enraged when they found themselves living an average life.
The same for women. Ah yes, male murderers are always evil, no doubt, women... they can't be evil,so there must be something or someone driving them to kill.
Women who murder for malice or distemper are simply much rarer than men who do so. I’m sorry that facts are sad for you. And post natal psychosis is real and can have devastating consequences. It is up to the jury to decide if this woman had post natal psychosis or not. If not, then she’s malicious and should get the maximum sentence, as any man in her situation aught to.
Men plead guilty by reason of insanity for murder of the vulnerable all the time.
"Rarer" means that there are less cases, but there are (and not so less...), sorry if this fact is sad for you... But if it's a woman, there's always the race to find justifications outside personal responsibility. Always with women, never for men, that's the point, not which phenomenon is rarer. By the way, in this environment, and in a system where for the same crime a woman gets lighter sentence than y man, I suspect that such difference does exist, but is likely overestimated.
She genuinely might have PPD. If so she does actually deserve some grace. Even the bible made exceptions for those not sound of mind, this isn’t a woke concept.
https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2023.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Surprise, mothers are the most frequent perpetrators of child homicides... All with som psychosis, of course...
Sorry if this fact is sad for you.
All you say is very true, Pluckrose.
And this has become another of the things completely hijacked online by the culture wars. While it is a tragedy, and one that cannot be reduced to the victimisation of women or the exculpation of women on the basis of alleged collective victimhood.
Nevertheless, justice is not simply a matter of the cold application of the law in measuring how exactly awareness and responsibility balance out. Our system is set up in adversarial fashion, but its goal, in Britain as well as across the ocean, is not to win but to serve justice.
Leave off the all encompassing culture wars. In this trial (I happen, from this side of the ocean where I now reside, to have been pushed to look into it by the reports of one of the journalists I follow) the prosecution has displayed the most appalling behaviour I ever saw.
Nothing to do with the sex of the defendant. Everything to do with the dogged determination to request the maximum punishment in spite of a flood of exculpatory evidence and none to support their thesis. Everything to do with the most reprehensible tactics employed to influence the jury not with rational arguments but with emotional appeals and the bombardment of horrible images and acts (they even re-enacted the strangulation of the children, with no other possible reason than making people recoil in abhorrence). The judge had to stop their theatrics several times, and very sternly.
Awful behaviour from the beginning to the end, including the closing argument with a volte-face on the refusal to admit that the defendant was mentally ill.
And their thesis was always that the defendant faked her suicide attempt, and that she killed the children simply because she did not want them any more. Only at the very end, with all evidence against them, they admitted that the suicide was not fake and shifted to a different way to hold the defendant maximally guilty, now through the suicide.
And this why? Because these attorneys are individually clearly unprincipled, but they are pushed to be even more so by a system that rewards, in the US more than anywhere else, the prosecution for the cases they win with maximum sentence.
Insanity defences may be hard to successfully mount in most cases, when there is a shred of other motives for the crime and no obvious evidence of a mental breakdown surrounding and during the crime. This one is not, pardon the redundancy, the case.
I do not often get invested emotionally and intellectually in trials -- I am inclined to trust the justice system and the corrections it applies in cases of mistrial. But here the mistrial seems to have happened during the trial rather than after the sentence. And little wonder at the screaming mobs, since everything in this age is a spectacle broadcasted and blared over and over and over.
I just hope that the jury is more sensible and humane that these purported representatives of the state.