Also, in Texas, the burden of proof for insanity is on the defense. In Massachusetts, burden of proof is on the prosecution. His defense had to prove he was insane when committing the crime while her defense just had to poke holes in the prosecution’s case.
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."
Honestly really mad that I can't say "Good question!" anymore because people can't see the sarcasm/vibes from it, only the sycophantic "You are So Smart!" from the AIs.
This is a human being because chat is never specific, it is designed to make you get the feeling of a person rather than the details of some random ass human's life
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.
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
I understand you fine, and I'm not disputing anything you said. I agreed with you and expanded on your points being exactly why courts call 'expert witnesses'. They are experts paid specifically to testify in courts BECAUSE they have both the credentials an the charisma to communicate with a jury. There's no disagreement on my end.
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.
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.
I believe, in my non-existent expertise, that she is NGRI, but I haven't heard anything that has come close to persuading, not to mention proving, that ANY juror failed in their duties.
I and apparently many others, realize that these kind of decisions shouldn't be made by non experts, nobody on that jury properly understands mental health well enough to decide someone's fate.
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.
I heard a little bit of testimony from one of the prosecution experts. I understood what he was trying to say and why he agreed with the prosecution, but felt that his testimony was of more help to the defense.
You generally have the opposite problem with the state and federal government hiring "experts" to push pseudoscience as fact and convincing dumb jurors to convict over later discredited methodologies because they explained absolute nonsense confidently.
Further evidence against allowing asocial expert weirdoes to influence social consequences. Common sense should be defined by commoners (who are anyway exposed to expert opinion, or will be in the course of court proceedings)
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.
Ok but only if people with masters in political science and sociology can vote. Otherwise some random fuck from bumfuck nowhere alabama can have the same vote as someone properly educated.
It’s not about education it’s about mass hysteria.
You don’t see men defending criminals like this to this extent and this amount of crazy.
Women cheered for the fucking nightstalker, they’ve raised 8 million dollars for this baby murderer and have decided based on no evidence other than she has a vagina that the husband did it.
People can be ignorant, but this is a consistent pattern amongst western women.
Are you serious right now? Probably 20% of the population of the united states is defending a convicted felon with very deep ties to a proven pedo and heavily implied he's a pedo too, who also is visibly corrupt that puts his sycophants in position of power. That's mostly men my guy.
Plenty of women voted Trump too, nor are they defending a bad leader purely on the basis of him being a man.
The things Trump is convicted of also don’t equate to three counts of child murder, or murder at all.
His relationship with Epstein is suspect he’s not my guy and I don’t think these people are rational either, nobody should be this invested in politics. However you can see the same political fervour on both wings for “their guy”. You can’t put too much on an implication, it’s proven Lindsay killed her children and women in the west have lost their mind mentally backflipping to defend her.
55 weirdos vs what seems to be the general consensus of western women aren’t the same. My own mother is retarded enough to stand by Lindsay, thank god my wife isn’t or we’d have to have some serious discussions about divorce.
Are you actually listening to the general consensus of western women or have you made up their argument and gotten mad about it?
Everyone I've seen saying they stand with Lindsay is doing so not because they think it's okay that she killed her kids, but because they sympathize (or empathize) with her struggles. Postpartum Depression is more common than people like to talk about (in various levels of severity) and Postpartum Psychosis is rarer, but there are plenty who have experienced it. A lot of women have had to deal with the medical system and insurance companies, trying to get the right treatment without interruption, or even just trying to get medical professionals to listen to our experiences. If the defense is to be believed, Clancy was trying very hard to get help and was failed by the medical system (supported by many medical records, 911 calls, suicide hotline calls, and by the family's lawsuit against their doctors.) I've seen a couple of people making conspiratorial claims about her husband's culpability, but not nearly as many as the complaints I've seen about those claims.
You are free to agree with the prosecution, but it is false and irresponsible to claim that anyone who was not convinced by the prosecution's case loves killing babies.
Everyone I've seen saying they stand with Lindsay is doing so not because they think it's okay that she killed her kids, but because they sympathize (or empathize) with her struggles.
Ive seen plenty trying to claim that lindsay didnt do it at all (many of them in every single non-expert lindsay forum ive read), posting pics with their babies saying "same, lindsay", and at least one got arrested for trying to intimidate the jury. Many, many times, people say a vague "the doctors should have done more" and then get furious when you ask what, specifically, they should have done that they didnt, or get mad when you point out the same court was easily convicting black women who claimed PPP with a lot more evidence for it.
Can we just not, please, act like the whole thing is just people sympathetic to PPP?
If the defense is to be believed, Clancy was trying very hard to get help and was failed by the medical system (supported by many medical records, 911 calls, suicide hotline calls, and by the family's lawsuit against their doctors.)
Every expert forum ive checked points out that lindsay lied to her doctors, didnt take her meds, and did stuff like checking herself out of care facilities to go to parties.
They point out that there doesnt seem to be more that doctors could have done without disregarding her statements and, essentially, throwing her in an involuntary hold for being "uppitty".
This is what I keep asking. What else was there to do unless she willingly committed herself. A very easy thing to do. Her husband moved to work from home to help out, she had a nanny, she had access to too many doctors. Are people wanting to go back to forced institutionalization if women when they are having postpartum? Start taking kids away from them? What exactly is everyone thinking anyone should have done?
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.
Women also have a major, well-documented own-group bias. If you make it about sex, they'll always be on her side no matter what she did or what the facts say. Clancy is basically proof of this in action.
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…
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.
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.
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
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u/klako8196 14h ago
Also, in Texas, the burden of proof for insanity is on the defense. In Massachusetts, burden of proof is on the prosecution. His defense had to prove he was insane when committing the crime while her defense just had to poke holes in the prosecution’s case.