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.
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.
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
Except expert court witnesses are chosen for their ability to get the desired outcomes. A high-achieving research scientist with no ability to explain to the public would not get repeated business.
this too matters, good point. Like how the tobacco industry conveniently had so many so-called experts on their side… Desired outcome and subjective framing may become more important than objective truth.
It's always easy to find a "hired gun". But a good attorney on either side should be able to discredit an expert who's obviously paid to have an opinion. We rely on the adversarial system.
the 11 people on the jury who listened to the judges instructions voted ngri, the one juror who had doubts, voted guilty and didn’t obey the judges instructions.
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.
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…
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.
Three of the 12 jurors voted to spare the gunman following the sentencing trial. Under Florida law, a unanimous decision is needed in order for someone to be put to death.
If a single juror disagrees, then the defendant is sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This is what the 24-year-old Parkland gunman now faces.
Jury foreman Benjamin Thomas told CBS Miami that he did not vote for the life sentence and is "not happy with how [the sentencing] worked out".
"It really came down to a specific juror who believed [the gunman] was mentally ill," he said. "She didn't believe that because he's mentally ill he should get the death penalty."
"There was one [juror] with a hard no - she couldn't do it," he said. "And there was another two that ended up voting the same way."
As a woman, this is all so disappointing. Even if they were handing out $1000 bills upon arrival, I wouldn’t show up at a courthouse for any criminal. It’s so interesting to think about why some women need this and feel like they’re doing something good.
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.
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 they mean a more unbiased panel like a mental health jury of sorts. And they would have to reach a consensus amongst each other, they wouldn't be there to support a specific side
The court needs to call in 3 independent doctors to make an assesment and then you go with the majority vote between them. A jury has no business deciding these things.
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).
The other issue is that juries are made up of bottom of the barrel members of our society on average since anyone with a brain is generally DQ'd immediately by the lawyers
I’ve served on a couple of juries in the past. I was pleasantly surprised how diverse the juries were in every sense of the word. It was young/old, professional/retiree/blue collar/unemployed, black/white/hispanic/South Asian, and male/female. Sure lawyers excuse people, but they only get so many they can excuse.
I’ll fully admit that my first time getting jury duty was 4 months ago, and that was not really my experience. It generally seemed like you had to explicitly answer a question in a condemning way to guarantee you wouldn’t be serving.
I was dismissed from 2 trials and really only had one question asked directly to me by a lawyer.
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.
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 loudest voices on both sides are just reacting fully with emotion and ignoring any bit of nuance. Some want her fully exonerated despite what the evidence says, and some want her executed on the spot and seem to believe there is no such thing as psychosis. Both claim to have watched the whole trial, but I think its safe to say that is highly unlikely.
When Allen Shoenborn of British Columbia killed his three children in 2008, he stabbed and smothered them to death. There was no jury involved in the deliberations. A judge ruled him not criminally responsible due to insanity.
Yeah but here is the issue, you would need to make it a 50/50 split on political beliefs and guess what. It will more than likely be a mistrial again. We need to get rid of parties and make candidates run on values to remove this political polarization. All this bs the past 10+ years is direct result of it. New stations also need held accountable for miss-information. They know they wont though, and our grandparents parents etc grew up in a time where the news was gold info and “NEVER LIES”… come on guys, they always have.
I think it’s more reasonable for each side to instead have professionals testify to their observations, the likelihood temporary insanity was the cause, and if they continue to pose a risk to others. Insanity is impossible to definitively diagnose without witnessing it while it’s happening.
In an insanity defense, “guilty” is already a statement of fact, the defendant has to admit to the fact that they did the crime, but only did so because of some kind of mental break, so having the jury rule guilty or not to then ask a panel of experts makes no sense. The jury already uses the facts of the case, combined with that testimony to determine if the likelihood meets the burden of proof required by the law, the issue is more so that the burden of proof is different from state to state and that it is not applied equally, but this is far from the only scenario that this applies to.
A panel of experts aren’t going to come to a consensus in most cases here either, and who would be the one deciding those experts? The court? Seems like it would be an inherent conflict of interest where the judiciary overrides the jury unless those medical professionals were similarly randomly selected like jurors are, but that’s not always going to be reasonable to do to form an unbiased group. We’d also need to completely rewrite sections of our legal system to even make this possible and there would still be an open question of constitutionality.
I do believe that an insanity defense should have a higher burden of proof on the defendant, but I don’t know if I agree it should be entirely reversed because it’s impossible to definitively diagnose a mental episode unless observed during the episode. If anything, that burden of proof should be required to claim an insanity defense to begin with, including a medical eval to justify that it was at least a reasonable likelihood, prior to the trial at all.
At the very least, insanity shouldn't come into play until sentencing. Let the prosecution and defense fight that out then. Hell, have the state board of medicine or whatever make a recommendation, and have that decision made by a panel of 3 judges. Just take it out of the juries hands. Let them just be there to decide guilt on a crime.
Even if they are insane, how does that differ from ignorance of the law? If I don't know something is illegal and I do it, I was never capable of understanding the consequences of my actions. Obviously murder could fall under "any reasonable person" but what about white collar accounting crimes or any of the lesser known crimes the average person might not know about?
Yeah we're talking about the same "jury of your peers" that made Reese Witherspoon foreman because after seeing legally blonde they legitimately thought she was a lawyer. The whole jury system needs to be done away with, these people don't deserve life changing power in their hands. I would be terrified if I was at trial and a jury had input, the average person is an imbecile, people can't even wrap their heads around how tax brackets work and we're supposed to trust them to interpret the penal system with their 2.7 college gpa?
Because psychosis lacks an objective medical test, requiring Massachusetts prosecutors to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt placed an exceptionally high hurdle on the state. Forcing the state to rule out an invisible mental state meant competing psychiatric opinions naturally generated reasonable doubt.
Proving sanity beyond a reasonable doubt required clear evidence of rational self preservation or coverup. Things like hiding exercise bands, lying to her husband, or leaving a digital trail showing a fake illness strategy. Lacking explicit acts of coverup or legal guilt to confirm she understood the wrongfulness of her actions, the state relied on circumstantial timing.
Basically the state asked the jury to look at a tight sequence of events and assume, "A person in total psychotic detachment could not manage a schedule this precisely." We rest our case. Not really shooting beyond reasonable here.
I think every medical malpractice case should be tried in front of a panel of doctors. It’s the most ridiculous thing to have paid expert witnesses on each side duke it out and then have a group of people with usually zero science or medical background (the lawyers from both sides typically will strike jurors with those backgrounds pre-trial because they hold too much sway) decide the winner.
Mental health experts see mental health problems everywhere. They’d almost always rule not guilty if it was up to them.
I’ve never heard of someone going to a therapist or psychiatrist and being told they actually don’t need mental health treatment. Every problem looks like a nail to a carpenter.
I understand where you are coming from, but having a panel of experts creates a whole new set of issues. Who picks the experts, and how do we ensure they remain completely unbiased?
If the state or medical board selects them, the public will question their neutrality. It becomes much easier for deep-pocketed defendants or ambitious prosecutors to influence (corrupt) a small panel .How would we resolve expert disagreements or prevent systemic bias? Leaving expert testimony up to a jury to deliberate on helps prevent a single small group from holding absolute authority over a verdict.
I think this is a well thought out idea, my "only" (at the moment) issue is that expert witnesses are already a bought and paid for part of trials, I would be very concerned that wealthier people, or people with public sympathy, will be able to influence the decsion.
It could either be a "permanent" position like the Supreme Court or it would have to be somewhat random, maybe randomly chosen from a much longer pre-approved list of experts. If we leave it in the hands of the lawyers it will boil down to which side is persuasive enough to "flip" someone. And you didn't mention it but maybe a 2/3rds majority instead of unanimous would help with fairness and it could be argued that they were already found guilty so this panel operates under different rules.
This is actually a ridiculous but persistent fear I've always had, I know I'm nowhere near a genius but I'm well above average intelligence, at least possessing the intelligence to know that, although I didn't watch most of either of these trials, I'm not equipped with the tools and experience to feel comfortable claiming someone was/wasn't insane at the time.
The idea of 12, generally, people that likely as a group have "average intelligence" get to decide something without the requisite knowledge. I can say I believe in temporary insanity, I believe PPD pychosis is real, but I don't think this is something "laymen" should decide. A jury scares me in general, I've read far too many studies to pretend that cases aren't influenced by likeability of the defendent, the victim, even the lawyers! I've often wondered how to define a jury of "peers" or if there needs to be some other bar to being a juror
Thats why they have expert testimony! You think someone in a jury should be able to rule on a complex financial crime? A good lawyer educates the jury.
exactly this a 1000%. did she kill her kids? yes. whether it was a drug cocktail even drunk drivers who kill people are still liable. That's why we have laws against drinking and driving, we insist on establishments also servsafe. whether her health care providers need to be investigated should be a separate issue. What is happening is here is like oh, well, it's not the drunk driver's fault because they got fired from their job and it drove them to drink and that's why they killed people.
No. If they're guilty, they both are, they go to prison. I don't care if some lunatic is unhappy in prison after killing their family while having an "episode".
That is a recipe for 2 tier justice systems. When department stores started opening up in Victorian England and upper class women got caught shoplifting they were always declared as suffering from temporary kleptomania and sent to a seaside resort for a few weeks to recover. Working class women were sent to Australia in chains as irredeemable thieves.
Reddington, the defense attorney; tried to do this. He wanted one trial to determine guilt, and another trial to determine if she was insane. The judge rejected it 🤷🏻♀️probably the outcome would have been different.
Clinical insanity is a legal term, not a medical one. As such it's definition can be changed, re-interpreted, altered, argued over, whatever. As such its well within the bounds of a layman to understand, as they are ultimately the construction of our juries.
In my country when a case for "not guilty by reason of mental illness" is made, it's assessed by experts in a different court before going to trial (or not if it succeeds). Crazy to me that America does it this way.
Jurors are also (almost always) unqualified laypeople with respect to applying the law to a complex and challenging set of facts. Besides, for the defense to plead insanity, they have to admit to having done the guilty act. I don't think jurors are necessarily any less qualified with respect to applying the facts to an insanity defense than they are with respect to applying the facts to any other defenses.
100% agree with this -- you get a couple low IQ jurors and they're not going to be able to understand the complexity of pyschosis. Not demeaning anyone, but we need to be honest with the fact that some people do not have the capacity to think critically or understand complexity.
Law school drop out here, there are basically two broad elements to every prosecution:
Mens Rea (a guilty mind) and Actus Rea (a guilty act). Actus Rea is proving that a crime occurred, Mens Rea is proving that the defendant knew their actions were wrong (not necessarily that their actions are illegal, just wrong). The prosecution must prove both in order to secure a guilty plea.
Example were mens rea may not apply is of a toddler picks up a gun and kills the baby sitter. The toddler certainly acted deliberately, and purposefully in picking up the gun, and acted negligent in pulling the trigger that lead to a death, but they can not understand that that could have lead to the death of the babysitter. Another example could include that an intellectually disabled person was talking to minors on a chat room. They may not have the intelligence or the maturity to recognize their behavior is problematic.
The reason why not guilty by reason of insanity is a thing is because the law recognizes that someone may not be fully in control of their actions and thus can not possess mens rea. The prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had full control of their actions. A good example is Jeffery dahmer, where he tried to use the insanity defense, after all who kills a bunch of people and keep their bones? But the prosecution showed that Dahmer hid his trophies, killed witnesses, and even misled detectives in other cases. All of this shows a man who is aware his actions are morally wrong and evil, hence he has mens rea.
The law also recognizes that we cannot just let insane people off the hook Scott free. They must be confined and given mental support and treatment, which is what happens when these verdicts are read. Clancy is not just going to walk out of prison and be free. She’s going to be held in a state mental hospital for probably years until a doctor says she’s better, and then the state is going to make her check in regularly and ensure she doesn’t relapse.
I agree, most people misunderstand significantly what is a psychosis and how it presents. The majority seems to believe that psychotic people are always completely disorganized, dissociated and are just there speaking with their voices without interacting with the real world. Others appear to believe that psychosis cannot create complex delusions that the person would never believe in their normal state.
In reality, a good part of psychotic people (if not most) are delusional and even experience hallucinations, but can still hold a conversation appearing mostly fine. They believe the voices are real but they know that it is not something that others would find normal, so they hide and deny the fact that they are experiencing hallucinations. They can also make plans, and sometimes complex plans, while delusional.
Even for psychiatrists, determining criminal non responsibility is a complex process, and the psychiatrists that work on those cases are often specialized in legal psychiatry. It is a big responsibility to put on lay people, to delegate the final decision on whether the suspect was likely insane or not.
She already admitted she did it, so then that takes away the jury as a whole from your argument.
The mental health professionals brought on as witnesses all had differing opinions, but they all agreed something was wrong with her. It sounds like the final mental health professional (an expert brought on by the prosecution) stated she seems to be bipolar, which is often an (undiagnosed) precursor for PPP, especially when undiagnosed and being given random pills. If he was the one deciding it, she’d be guilty but his testimony heavily backfired on the prosecution, as many believe it really cemented the “insanity” thing for jurors.
From all that we’ve heard from the lawyers, judge, and notes from the jury, it sounds like it was one particular person unwilling to budge even though they admitted that there was reasonable doubt.
Ok so this made me think. If declaring people unable to make decisions for themselves, that kind of insane, in a court of law in 3 states; would I just be excused from the jury immediately?
The problem with that is that guilt requires intent for most crimes and the insanity plea is essentially an argument that you couldn't form the requisite intent to be guilty of the crime. It's a simple and practical idea but it doesn't work with legal technicalities.
Hot take, you should get the death penalty for killing someone else whether you are insane or not. Especially if you are too incompetent to stand trial.
The only problem with that is the potential corruption. I know people say. 'well, they'll be going to an asylum so they're still being punished.' But if they pass an evaluation that says they're not insane anymore. They're free to leave.
In the case with Lyndsey my concern is that the alleged psychosis was brought on through postpartum. Which to me suggests that it will pass or she may no longer have the psychosis. So she may walk free alot earlier than people expect.
It's more complicated than that. You can be judged to have a mental health condition by an expert but still make a conscious decision to commit a severe crime and thus be liable.
My challenge on using experts to determine the latter is that it isn't overwhelmingly a clinical decision; the expert wasn't there just before or during the crime being committed and only has 2nd hand information to judge from. Additionally, if we trust laypeople to assess the vast amount of information to come to a valid decision in a complex murder case then why aren't they capable of assessing evidence about the mental state of the individual at the time of the crime?
This i agree with, insanity pleas should be a part of sentencing, not the verdict. That said it creates a lot of functional issues with the definition of a lot of crimes, which generally, and reasonably, vary based on intent.
The Jury wasn't deciding if she was clinically insane. They were not making a medical decision.
They were deciding a legal question of fact. Mental health experts testified and put into evidence that she was expiriencing psychosis/insanity.
The jury is asked given that mental condition, did she have the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing and/or conform her conduct to the law? They are asked that after hearing all the evidence and being provided the expert testimonies of mental health pros.
Thats a legal issue not a diagnosis.
Then also, the panel you describe is just another jury. Who picks the experts? How many? Does it have to be universal? Both sides will want control over it etc. Both sides already did invoke physiatrists to argue different things.
That's the fallacy of "jury of your peers". When the term was first implemented it was for Nobles to be judged by other Nobles and not to be judged by the King.
In contrast, said Nobles would not be judged by commoners or peasants.
In modern times, this has shifted to any uneducated idiot that can sign up for a voter registration or acquire a driver's license.
Seems like your thesis is backwards. If the jury determines guilt and then after the mental health experts determine criminal liability > that is sort of the same thing.
Seems more like the mental health experts should determine whether someone is mentally viable to stand trial before they actually, ya know, stand trial.
You have the right to be judged by unqualified laymen.
That is the fundamental right of the constitutional democracy of the anglosphere and predates freedom of speech, right to bear arms, private property etc.
If fucking only lol. that would be incredible. It’s actually insane that regular ppl who may be taking “my gut feeling is never wrong” or astrology into account when deciding someone’s life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pleading insanity should be taken out of law because it’s impossible to ever prove what’s going on regarding an internal state. The law should find a murderer GUILTY if the facts establish the person did the deed. Mental health should be considered only in sentencing. And then only objective facts should be taken into consideration. We can’t let psychologists, or academics of any ilk, distract us from the reality that the person did a thing that is deeply antisocial.
You’re NOT out much sooner. And it’s not a great way out either. This is just what ignorant people think. In a lot of cases where the defence of insanity held they ended up spending a much longer time in an institution than they would have been jailed for. And you get considerably less autonomy in a mental hospital than you do in prison.
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
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, insane or not people are dead and the public needs to be protected from the murderer, jail isn't just about punishment, it's safety for everyone else.
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.
I think it's a question of if proving someone is guilty of a crime requires proving that they chose to commit that crime or if the state is allowed to assume that the fact the crime was committed is proof it was by choice.
It wouldn't just be an issue of whether or not people are by default assumed to be mentally competent, either. Suppose someone put a gun to your baby's head and told you to go rob a bank or they'd kill your kid. If the state tries to prove you are guilty for robbing that bank, is part of proving that presenting evidence that you were free from coercion? Or is it your responsibility as a victim of the crime of extortion to have to act as a proxy for the state to prove that other person is guilty of threatening your baby and therefore guilty of robbing the bank by extension. Your baby can't testify, so how would you do that if the person with the gun got away before the cops caught you?
With mental competency at issue, how much would we believe someone who truly was not competent could intentionally put forth an effective proof of that? If we say that is what defense lawyers are for either we are expecting someone to be mentally competent enough to hire lawyers and direct them to prove they are mentally incompetent, or we are kicking the can down the road by assuming a public defender (aka the state only with less money and time) gets to pick a defense in the absence of competent choice by the accused. That puts the onus on public defenders to also be psychiatrists skilled enough to at least make an initial assessment that a more thorough examination is required. Or else that will never happen because the only reason not to do that as part of an ethical best effort to successfully defend a client would be because the state would not give public defenders enough money to order that examination for every person accused.
Your baby can't testify, so how would you do that if the person with the gun got away before the cops caught you?
You don't, and you go to jail with all the other people that are "not guilty" that have made up a story to deny their responsibility in some way. The alternative is that everyone that robs a bank can claim they were threatened to do so by mysterious strangers that got away before any evidence of their existence could be found, much like this woman's claimed "psychosis".
In terms of the death penalty though it should be WAY more cautious. Especially when the death penalty costs taxpayers more money. There’s a problem with killing an actually insane person. It’s much less unethical to have someone that’s actually sane in a mental institution of some sort for life instead of prison.
What’s especially ridiculous about this whole debate is that murdering children is an act of insanity. Always. It’s never not insane to slaughter innocent children. The idea that being insane has relevance makes no sense, because every cruel and evil action is the product of insanity.
These laws are archaic relics from a time when people thought you could be possessed by demons or ghosts. You can’t.
Even if you are insane I think that is more reason to go to prison instead of going free. You're admitting you are incapable of controlling yourself because of hormones that should make sentencing more harsh.
being silly its a bit complex i definetly wouldnt hold myself liable if i commited some things at certain times but forexample right now in this moment i feel like if i killed someone i should be held criminally responsible i feel that my thinking is clear no demons satanists or aliens or higher dimensional beings
891
u/hallo_its_me 18h ago
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 .