"He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children. This is a woman who lived her full life and that was all he cared about"
"She went 40 years without murdering someone, why should 3 murders in a single day ruin her life"
The jurors were brain dead
Edit - i know what the argument for not guilty was. I'm saying if this was any other combination of gender/race/ethnicity, this would've been a slam dunk for the prosecution. Male? Guilty. Black/latino/asian/middle Eastern woman? Guilty.
The only reason this wasn't an open and shut case was because she was a white woman. This lady had access to therapy, was well supported financially, had a nanny, and was in a much better position to get the help she needed than a majority of people in America. There's no excuse for murdering 3 children, full stop.
The right wing media campaign that this was somehow about her doing life or going free is maddening. “not guilty by reason of insanity” is not an acquittal, she will spend the rest of her life in a state institution the question is just prison or mental institution. Nobody ever said “murdering your kids shouldn’t ruin your life” and pretending like they did is part of a fascist campaign to cast women as unworthy of political rights
Absolutely factual. Massachusetts law says the initial commitment is valid for six months, and after that she can only be recommitted in additional one-year periods. Every single year they would have to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that she's still mentally ill and that releasing her would cause serious harm.
Even the initial six months isn't guaranteed since the facility can attempt to discharge her before then, but the DA gets the opportunity to petition for continued commitment.
The defense's argument is that the murders were caused by a postpartum psychotic episode. If that episode has resolved, what exactly would justify long-term commitment beyond the initial six months?
Literally a case in the 50's where something like this happened. Woman killed her kids, went to the psych ward, out in 3 years. After some time she has more kids and kills them too.
You're trying to make a point somehow? This is terrifying. If you murder someone because of your insanity, you should be locked up for life. Fact! Mental illness is handled so badly so good luck with the insanity not surfacing up again later. I get it you want your hero free to roam the streets but get a better argument.
Exactly, you can hack a sleeping man’s head off with a machete on a greyhound bus before eating the corpse in front of the other passengers and you can get out in under 5 years. With a name change as a bonus so long as you pinky promise the review board (who are incentivized to prove their system works to rehabilitate) that you’ll take your pills every day.
You're right, it's not guaranteed, as the case above (and all of the cases where men have killed children and were able to argue insanity successfully) makes clear. Why is it we just have a problem with that fact now that a woman is using the same defense men have used for years?
Men shouldn’t be “getting away” with this defense either. If this was a classic male family annihilation we should be singing the same tune. This isn’t singling her out by gender
Ummm. I'm a lefty and believe she would be out relatively quickly based on the fact that the mental illness she was suffering from is temporary. Not sure how that's a right wing thing. In MA they would have to continually prove she is a danger to keep her.
And to be clear, I think she should be out if her mental health allows it.
Show me an example of when redditors specifically have more information on a topic than almost anybody else in the world and 11/12 of them agree. And if you could, are you saying you wouldn't agree with the 11/12? They'd probably be right...
Cool, well, we're talking about a hypothetical future where she's successfully treated and deemed by medical professionals to no longer be a threat to others. You're saying that she should remain locked up after that point, which seems kinda pointless.
Because that’s highly unlikely to happen. There are strict, exhaustive psychiatric evaluations she will have to go through to determine her mental state - and it’s intense. To think she’ll be out in a year takes the stance she wasn’t in psychosis in the first place.
It's a right wing thing because that's highly unlikely to happen? I don't follow.
Also, certainly disagree that it takes the stance that she wasn't in psychosis. It was nearly 3 years ago, for a condition that doesn't usually last more than a few months.
She would get reviewed every year, and if she could prove that she 1) is no longer suffering from psychosis, and 2) is no longer suicidal, she'd be a free woman
If Lindsay Clancy were found not guilty by reason of insanity, she would NOT face a guaranteed life sentence in a mental institution, but she could remain confined indefinitely if she is still considered mentally ill and dangerous.
How Commitment Works in Massachusetts
Initial Confinement: An acquittal by reason of lack of criminal responsibility leads to an immediate civil commitment order to a secure psychiatric facility (likely back to Tewksbury, where she’s been.)
The court reviews the commitment status annually.
Potential for Release: If doctors and the court determine that the mental disease or defect has resolved and she is no longer a danger to herself or others, the judge can order her discharge after a formal hearing.
If I were on that jury, there’d be two votes to convict.
When someone is found not criminally responsible for reasons of insanity, they are sent to a mental institution yes, but then they are fairly quickly assessed.
If they are found not to be a danger to the public or themselves, they are released.
Rightly or wrongly, those are the two choices society gives us at this time.
There is no "nice jail but for people who are mentally unwell" option.
There is only jail, which is punishment, or a mental hospital, whose only concern is whether today and into the future they are a danger to themselves or society.
If they are found to be neither or those things, they are released.
What do you believe should happen if you disregard the person's gender, color, political agenda, socio-economic status, and anything else that may identify or humanize them?
Except that this person was desperately trying to get help from medical professionals and was admitted to a psych ward twice. Her husband knew how much she was struggling, and so did her friends and family. None of this is in question. No one on either side disputes that her mental health issues were legit.
The only question is: did she fake the delusion (which means she is guilty and goes to prison), or did she have delusions (which means she is innocent not guilty by means of insanity and gets put in a psych ward). She was never going free. It was just a question as to what facility she'd go to at the end of the trial.
In very sharp contrast, Brock Allen Turner was a opportunity rapist who randomly attacked a woman, raped her, and had to be physically dragged off of her by passers-by. He has never taken any responsibility, and faced next to zero consequences (and what little he did was because of the public's outrage) because "as a swimmer, he had a bright future". How in the fucking world can anyone compare the two situations?
I mean. Yea. Brock didn’t kill anyone but it’s still fucking heinous what he did and it’s an utter injustice that hr was only given a light sentence. Thankfully no one will ever let him forget it
there's no excuse for murdering 3 children, full stop
I mean, if you believe the testimony, being driven by command hallucinations and a delusion that you are saving those 3 children is, in fact, a legal excuse.
This is reddit so I gotta stress the if you believe part
Saw a man with a history of psychosis on TikTok explain how during an episode he had voices in his head telling him his cat was going to kill him in his sleep and then only option he had was to kill it first; he stayed up for like 3 nights to try and avoid the situation, then he grabbed a knife and went into the room to kill the cat; the moment he saw the cat he decided he’d rather die, rather let the cat kill him.
You're right on the statistics giving weight to our expectations, but your hypothetical racism and hypothetical misandry isn't accounting for the fact that the defense had the person who literally wrote the book on post-partum psychosis and filicide to state she was not aware of right or wrong. The prosecution only had general forensic psychologist expert that was unable to do anything other than say she performed basic daily errands, completely failing to disprove her psychotic break beyond a reasonable doubt under Massachusetts law.
No. But 1 in 5 women suffer from post partum depression, and that doesnt mean they all go kill their children as a result. This bitch killed 3 children methodically.
All the resources in the world, a supportive family. Yet the only response she can come up with is murder? She could have surrendered her kids to the state, saw different doctors, asked her husband for support, given the kids to her parents or in-laws, put herself in a mental health facility, gotten a nanny. This isn't some poor innocent victim waiting months and months for a referral or some single mom fleeing DV.
Nobody reasonable are saying she didn’t. Everybody that saw the trial and the jurors all admit it happened. The issue is Mental health and her state of mind during those actions. The prosecutors made their best attempt at establishing prior intent to dismiss any mental health concerns. 11 jurors felt those concerns were not dismissed beyond a reasonable doubt. 1 did. It wasn’t because he was black and they were white. It was from different beliefs in mental health issues and concerns. That woman will be lucky to see an unmedicated free view of the world regardless of the outcome of the trial for decades, don’t forget that.
As soon as there is a budget issue in the facility where she is being kept, she will be declared cured. I'd be surprised if she is under controlled supervision for more than five years.
Didn't another (female if that makes a difference) juror admit she initially voted guilty but just went with the crowd in the end because the rest of them were so aggressively arguing?
The women interviewed admitted they were screaming at the remaining guy so loud people outside the room could hear it.
I don't see any sense of justice in just being intimidated in to going against your decision
The act is not something one can do easily while insane. Insane people do not act rationally and he is pointing out the rationality necessary to commit such an act.
A level of intentionality is required to take the actions she took that requires you to be sane.
This was not something easy to do like putting poison in food or driving off a cliff.
Ive worked in a psych ward as security watching psychotic patients
I literally have hundreds of hours of experience just sitting and watching over people with varying degrees of psychosis
(Edit: it’s literally my job to assess when they will be a danger to themselves or others. I also teach the classes on intervention in crisis scenarios and know the escalation signs. I like to think that makes me amenable mental health professional)
I dont say this lightly. I have to deal with manipulative sane people playing the system as well.
The biggest is self interest in my experience. Someone in a full break down doesnt start trying to make plans to do bad shit. They just do it….
The manipulators will be the ones to plan and come up with stories. The manipulators can also have psychosis but they can tell right from wrong
Clancy clearly could tell right from wrong. People are being manipulated but the mental health angle. I see it alot in how patients talk to their families versus the actual events thats occures
I mean just cause you're a security guard in a psych ward that does not give you a degree in either psychiatry or psychology, if anything it biases you against the mentally unwell because it's your entire job to see them at their worst without necessarily understanding the intricacies of their brain chemistry.
Their was a documented history of her seeking our help from mental health professional and instead receiving a variety of different medications with contra-indications.
There's more than enough reasonable doubt surrounding whether she was compos mentis.
This is a jury of peers, correct? Isn't it the job of the LAYMAN to decide whether or not what they feel constitutes insanity under their own reasonable doubt? You can't sit here and tell someone they aren't qualified and then ask 12 people who couldn't get out of jury duty to be any smarter.
Our qualifications for insanity and the processes of our legal system are two separate things with their own histories.
At the end of the day, that lone juror has the power her has to do what he did and those who doxx and buly him have committed far greater offenses that need to be addressed.
I literally teach 8 hour classes to all incoming staff on reading and understanding psych ward patients. I teach the doctors and the nurses….
We literally focus like 50% of our class on working through our own biases and the biases that mental health patients face. Like our main focus is on deescalation and using empathy…
We teach about the mechanics of the escalation of violence, both emotional and physical.
Buddy its literally my job to assess the violence of the mentally unwell…..
I have to make the call about safety situations as well as asses the motivation for violence. I have to write formal reports whenever a situation gets serious….
I have full power of a situation when it comes to safety meaning i can override a doctors orders when the situation arrises….
Trust me those doctors and nurses are not as well read or experienced as you think and get themselves into trouble all the time because they dismiss me as you have done now.
I constantly go out of my way to learn about various mental illnesses and take in others experiences as well
You are selling me short so you can continue this narrative of the mentally unwell never being responsible for their actions……
Your lack of empathy is either because you have not read the facts of the case or because you genuinely believe you can 'read the body language' of the woman under trial.
Again body language reading is not a scientifically accepted methodology.
Again you don't have a degree, you don't have published articles, you are not qualified to diagnose this woman or anyone else.
To be clear neither am I because I'm just a neurobiologist, but I am not the one advocating that she is criminally liable here.
You, believe it or not, have a set of biases because of the nature of your claimed job.
By your own statement you see more people on their worst then their best day, have you considered that it might influence how you perceive people?
Not saying your immoral or a bad person, I don't know you from Adam, but consider how you parse the idea of compos mentis and how the order in which one parses information changes how one contextualizes it.
I did not diagnose this woman nor is it necessary to determine whether or both she was capable of understanding the morality of the situation.
You are projecting hard. Take a step back and breathe bro/sis. Dont make up things instead ask me about what i do or do not know or believe….
You are unironically treating me the way you think i treat patients based on a stereotypes…
Check your bias at the door, as i would say.
Example: you seem to think i put a lot of stock into body language when that makes up one or 80 slides and requires that you have already built rapport with patients to know what their baseline behavior is like….
Another example: you seem to think i am biased because of my job yet i literally said that a significant portion of our job is making ourselves aware of those biases and acting accordingly
Another example: you believe i only see patients at their worst when in fact the best part of the job is seeing someone in full blown stomach lurching psychosis become happy and healed and getting their loves back on track. I literally told you that i teach others to see the mentally as fully developed humans and you assume i do the opposite
Like i said you have a narrative you want to push and are ignoring the facts or making them up based on feelings
I base all of my opinions on her actions alone. Like i said i have seen many plans and plots from large variety of folks with varying degrees of psychosis.
Its my job to detect and prevent those plots as well as study attempted plots which means understanding the person i am dealing with comes first.
You can have psychosis and still know right from wrong. Having psychosis is not a free pass to do what you want. Thats the misconception that the manipulators operate on.
When a schizophrenic hears voices telling them that everyone wants to kill them 99.9999% dont start killing….that is a stereotype. The mentally are the group most likely to face violence not cause it…..(well akchully the most violent group are the mentally ill who are on illegal drugs so lets say sober mentally ill are the most victimized)
Everything she did was premeditated as fuck. She is claiming temporary insanity that begins with sending her husband away and ends when she kills her kids. She went out of her way to research places she could send her husband sonshe could get enough time to do the deed. She chose to kill the most problematic child who might signal for help first. Then lied to her husband in between the killings.
This is the only instance of a full on insanity being claimed. Full on insanity plea psychosis is obvious and would have been detected by others including her husband
That level of planning requires that you understand the gravity of your actions…
body language reading is not a scientifically accepted methodology
I mean, it's not exactly a validated biomarker, but observing someone's movements etc is definitely a major part of mental state assessment. With good reason.
But whether someone looks abnormally unreactive or agitated in a courtroom, on trial for triple murder, with a lawyer whispering instructions in their ear about what their appearance should be...is completely worthless for guessing at their moral judgement capabilities years earlier when they did something wrong.
Fortunately that's why we get qualified professionals in to testify.
Unfortunately that often seems to result in prosecution and defence each finding their own amenable expert witness to duel with the other side. If you were a juror listening to hours of professorial disagreement, I would think that places you in a rather difficult position. No idea what the answer is, maybe this is the best system possible.
There has to be thousands, of not millions of people that are over prescribed whatever anti pysch, depression, anxiety meds that still wouldn't have come to such a point and would long since before have checked themselves in if they fear they are a danger to themselves or others...
If you have really been in a locked psych ward then you should have some idea that compulsive command hallucinations are thought to be extremely uncommon, even in that highly selective patient population.
I've even seen it listed as a red flag that a person is probably making up symptoms.
Agreed those are the scariest in terms of recovery and theyre rare.
Thats why it all seems like bullshit. Its all perfectly convenient with no meaningful outside evidence to suggest she was in full blown psychosis at other times
That’s not how psychosis works tho. You can do something methodically and rationally while being in psychosis. The psychosis leads to your understanding of reality being distorted but it doesn’t prevent you from creating plans or following through on ones plans.
This is wholly inaccurate. I'm a criminal defense attorney in a major metropolitan area (lots of very unwell folks) and there is literally a l w a y s logic and a rational through line, even when someone is deeply unwell, psychotic, or delusional. Psychosis does not necessarily mean irrational.
I think you are proving my point. Psychosis does not automatically make you irrational.
The case is about whether or not the psychosis made them aware of the morality of their actions.
We are looking at the degree of psychosis not whether or not psychosis was present. A schizophrenic can still be found guilty, people with psychosis can still commit crimes.
I am saying her actions were too consistent with reality for her insanity plea to be believed.
We are talking about rationality relative to reality not perception. An insane person has a warped perception of reality thus they act irrationally thats the definition of psychosis.
Even the most insane person thinks they are acting rationally. What decides their rationality is how they respond to reality
Did you just mansplain NGRI to a criminal defense attorney? Psychosis absolutely isn't "a warped perception of reality this they act irrationally." Like even a little. Psychosis means a marked departure from reality or difficulty determining what's real due to consistent auditory or visual hallucinations or delusions. People with psychosis can still think rationally to act out on their delusions or beliefs.
Ahh typical
Expounding and adding to someones point is now mansplaining
Cant build off of someone else’s comment if they’re a woman otherwise you being no sexist
It shows where you mind is at in this case. The facts dont matter gender is what matters most to you.
You are literally denying the textbook definition of psychosis. Thats how biased you are…of course the person denying basic facts wont agree with the person stating facts
“Psychosis is a mental state marked by a disconnection or loss of contact with reality, where a person has trouble telling what is real from what is not real.”
Didn’t she deliberately send her husband to a location that was further away than necessary in order to give her more time?
Clearly she was very very sick and PPD is certainly real and awful BUT based on all the evidence I’ve seen a “not guilty by reason of insanity” in this case would be a dramatic departure from the typical way this is exercised.
It seems clear that she knew right from wrong if she deliberately sent her husband away so she could do it.
But doesn’t that imply “he would stop me because this is wrong?”
The whole thing is complicated and sad.
I guess the big dif for Mass is they still basically use the M’Naghten rule but the def don’t have to prove insanity, and the pros must instead prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
If the husband was doing his normal routine like he went to work and let's say the thought/voices told her to kill the kids and she did it, I can totally see temporary insanity. But to lure your husband out of the house? That alludes to you having enough sense to get rid of someone who could stop you from doing the act.
It was a responsibility request for anyone who wasn't planning to kill their kids or who wasn't allegedly hearing voices telling them to kill their kids.
But it appears she purposely sent him on the quest so she could have the time needed to kill the kids.
Wait, he had a hard time getting off the fact that 3 children were strangled to death?? Insanity plea or not that sounds pretty fucking normal to me considering 1. it’s a heartbreaking thing to happen and 2. it’s the central premise of this entire case
Isn't that the whole point of the case though? That she viciously killed them? And admitted it and never denied it. Like why ia he suppoaed to get off that point?
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u/nobleone8876 21h ago
That puts all the stuff the others juror's said about him in a new light honestly.