A juror in the trial of Lindsay Clancy is sharing new details about what he said happened inside the jury room that led to a mistrial in the case of the Massachusetts woman facing first-degree murder charges for the 2023 deaths of her three young children.
Nick Dargie, one of the three men on the 12-person jury, told ABC News’ Aaron Katersky that the lone holdout juror who prevented a unanimous verdict did not show any evidence explaining his vote.
“There was several times I would ask him to show us evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and … he couldn’t,” Dargie, 25, said in an interview Wednesday.
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.
EDIT: 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.
I want to stress that anyone downvoting these rudimentary facts is a total goddamned moron.
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”.
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.
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.
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~%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.
Literally none of this is ethically relevant.
You don’t know what that word means.
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.
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.
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.
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.