Lindsay Clancy -Mother of 3 kills her kids during psychotic episode

[Joshe]

Schizophrenic patients 

[Joshe]

1 hour ago, Emerald said:

I watched an expert testifying earlier today who was talking about why he didn't suspect that she was experiencing a command hallucination.

And he said that, with people who experience command hallucinations there's a tendency to use coping mechanisms to drown them out... like praying. And Lindsay Clancy wasn't doing that.

There's also a tendency for people with these hallucinations to experience them periodically. And it would be uncommon for someone to experience them once and then not again.

He also found it unlikely because she had said that she was experiencing these hallucinations all the way throughout the duration of the 20 minutes, with the external voice repeating the same phrase over and over the entire time.

He may have brought up another point, as well. But those are the ones that I'm recalling.

But he was suspecting that she was committing suicide and filicide... killing her children out of love and because she didn't want to be separated from them when she commits suicide. And I don't know about that explanation.

To me, it seems like that's a reach to assume her motive was to kill her children out of love.

But in that case, she'd still be criminally responsible for their deaths. So, he was in favor of her being seen as guilty. But his reasoning about the motive seemed very speculative.

I just wonder if a certain combo of meds could have produced her particular claimed psychosis. I'm just trying to steelman her position. Either way though, that evidence you highlighted earlier regarding the voices only appearing during that 20 minute window is too suspicious for me to not lean towards lucid intent. Given that, I'm not sure if there's any evidence at all that could be presented to make me lean the other way. It's just too suspicious. 

Edited August 27 by Joshe

[Joshe]

But then again, if it was premeditated, you would think she would have faked command hallucinations more than just in that 20-min window. 

Most people don't drop a con before it's been bought. If it was planned, she probably would have looked into what the standard pattern looked like, you'd think. So, this is something to consider.

Why didn't she just fake the commands later so that they would be consistent with the pattern? 

Also, I'm assuming there was no digital evidence hinting at premeditation. If no, that cuts further in her favor.

I'd like to know what her knowledge of schizophrenia was prior to the act.

Edited August 27 by Joshe

[Joshe]

Holy shit:

This is why we need to know her level of cognitive sophistication or whatever. It could answer if she's even capable of this fake. This seems like it would be a pretty sophisticated fake, so if she or her husband isn't cognitively capable of that, then I'd learn her way, I think. 

Edited August 27 by Joshe

[Emerald]

40 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Holy shit:

This is why we need to know her level of cognitive sophistication or whatever. It could answer if she's even capable of this fake. This seems like it would be a pretty sophisticated fake, so if she or her husband isn't cognitively capable of that, then I'd learn her way, I think. 

Wow! I hadn't even thought through the fact that she would know a lot about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis as a delivery nurse. AND she's looking up extra information too.

I get the steel manning perspective... and I think that's important to keep in mind. Maybe she was looking up that information to ask questions about herself.

But that seems to fit quite well with the setting up evidence to fake it perspective, very strongly.

And if she's very sophisticated, she may even think to vary the pattern a bit to create doubt about her faking it through expert knowledge... but getting close enough to where it looks like she has something going on that looks like postpartum psychosis, auditory hallucinations, and some other diagnosis that's unclear.

Truthfully, she just needs to know how to answer most of the questions correctly. So, it's honestly not that sophisticated of a ruse. And any decent liar could pull it off, if she knows how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave.

[Joshe]

21 minutes ago, Emerald said:

Truthfully, she just needs to know how to answer most of the questions correctly. So, it's honestly not that sophisticated of a ruse. And any decent liar could pull it off, if she knows how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave.

But she's not performing the standard script of how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave. That's what would require sophistication if this were a ruse. Sophistication or either just be dim-witted or maybe lacking knowledge. Or maybe she thought blaming it all on the meds would be sufficient. 

If she actually has in-depth knowledge of how psychosis presents and looks over time, and if she was faking psychosis, why wouldn't she just run the standard script? She spent 3 years under psychiatric supervision and never once decided to claim hearing voices. That's odd. So if it is a ruse, it seems like a sophisticated one. That, or it's not a ruse. 

 

Edited August 27 by Joshe

[Joshe]

Shit, I didn't even think about sincere confabulation.

"Heilbrun's version isn't a three-year performance; it's a one-time reframing: a devastated survivor, waking paralyzed in a world where she killed her children, reaching once for the culturally legible explanation — and possibly believing it now."

The no-recurrence problem that Heilbrun called "very unusual" for real psychosis: fully explained — confabulated voices don't recur because they were never generated by a psychotic process, only by a meaning-making one, and the meaning only needed making once. Every piece of evidence that the fake theory couldn't absorb, confabulation absorbs frictionlessly.

There's no test that separates "sincerely misremembered voice" from "real voice" three years later. The confabulation is stored as a memory of a real event. Even she can't audit it — that's the whole phenomenon."

Edited August 27 by Joshe

[Emerald]

41 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Shit, I didn't even think about sincere confabulation.

"Heilbrun's version isn't a three-year performance; it's a one-time reframing: a devastated survivor, waking paralyzed in a world where she killed her children, reaching once for the culturally legible explanation — and possibly believing it now."

The no-recurrence problem that Heilbrun called "very unusual" for real psychosis: fully explained — confabulated voices don't recur because they were never generated by a psychotic process, only by a meaning-making one, and the meaning only needed making once. Every piece of evidence that the fake theory couldn't absorb, confabulation absorbs frictionlessly.

There's no test that separates "sincerely misremembered voice" from "real voice" three years later. The confabulation is stored as a memory of a real event. Even she can't audit it — that's the whole phenomenon."

Interesting. 

It's a little bit like the plot-line for the movie Memento, if you're familiar with it.

There's a kind of sincere confabulation going on in the movie where the main character and the audience is fully within the confabulated context and true believers of the confabulation in the moment.

But the original decision to confabulate was done with full knowledge and intent to confabulate.... but then immediately forgotten that the confabulation took place, such that he can immerse himself back in his own confabulation without being aware that he confabulated it.

[Stick]

8 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

I was simply testing your position that you should be punished for things you did in a psychosis.

Why is an exogenous cause more forgivable than an endogenous cause? Let's assume she got a brain hemorrhage instead (no seeming external cause) and that seemed to cause her behavior. Would that change anything for you?

 

The point of an insanity defense in the case of claimed acute psychosis is that the intentions and actions in the psychotic state do not represent the intentions of the person in the normal state. And that if we assume the person will not become psychotic in the future (which may or may not be likely), we should expect the person would not have such intentions or act on them.

And if we think they are likely to enter such a psychotic state in the future (or they are currently psychotic), then we've decided that it's best to try to treat the problem with psychiatry (meanwhile non-psychotic anti-social behavior is notoriously hard to "treat" if they even are treatable).

fair

[Basman]

Closing statements

 

[LordFall]

Lmao I hadn't even heard of the chicken nuggets 

[Basman]

The whole case boils down to whether or not she was psychosic during the killing, which basically we only have her word for. There's no conclusive evidence of psychosis.

Massachusetts law is rather binary when it comes to insanity as culpability has to be proven beyound a reasonable doubt and that you can be aqcuited just on doubt of one's sanity. Your either guilty or not. Ideally, a sort of compromise would be ideal in my opinion, like guilty but insane, but that's not on the table.

This article discusses how Massachusetts law is outdated: https://www.thefp.com/p/law-inadequate-lindsay-clancy-trial

Quote

The jury is now deliberating in the five-week trial of Lindsay Clancy, the “loving mother” (to quote her former nanny) who brought her three young children down to the basement of her home and strangled each of them to death, one at a time, slowly, horrifically, painfully.

Laws are inadequate in a case like this. Human judgment is inadequate. It is impossible to reason with the unthinkable.

Such a case becomes instead a lightning rod for people’s deepest feelings about motherhood, womanhood and, perhaps unconsciously, their own life circumstances.

But if you’re wondering what the law actually says about Clancy’s case, well, let me cut to the punch line: Because the case is being tried in Massachusetts state court, the law offers surprisingly little help in arriving at a just response to what Clancy did.

In fact, due to peculiarities of Massachusetts law, the Clancy jury is almost certain to come out the wrong way—no matter what the jurors decide.

The initial problem—and it’s a big one—is that Massachusetts law is weird when it comes to cases in which the defendant pleads insanity. In most of the country—and in federal prosecutions as well—when criminal defendants plead insanity, it’s up to them to prove it. But in Massachusetts, the state has to prove that Clancy was not insane, and it must do so beyond a reasonable doubt.

Think about that: If there’s any reasonable doubt about her sanity, Clancy must be acquitted. And how could there not be reasonable doubt about Clancy’s sanity? The psychiatric “experts” who are testifying sharply disagree about it. All across the country, Americans sharply disagree about it.

What’s more, Massachusetts’ definition of insanity is barely comprehensible. Under the law, Clancy must be considered insane if, due to a mental disease or defect, she could not distinguish right from wrong or lacked a substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the law when she killed her children. The meaning of every significant term in that definition can be (and has been) prolifically argued about. I’m a law professor who has taught criminal law for decades, and I have my doubts about how to apply that definition to a case like Clancy’s.

As a result, a complete acquittal is quite possible, simply on the ground that the jurors have doubts about her sanity. Which would be a travesty.

People may suppose that killing one’s children is so unimaginable that anyone who does it must be out of their mind. But filicide is not as uncommon as you might think. According to FBI statistics, some 500 people are arrested for committing filicide annually in America—men and women equally. They can’t all be insane; the law’s concept of insanity cannot be that capacious.

So when is insanity a proper defense to a criminal charge?

The insanity defense is appropriate when a defendant’s psychotic delusions prevent him from understanding what he’s doing. If a person actually believes his neighbors are space aliens who are plotting against humankind, he’s not guilty of murder if, in his derangement, he kills them. Murder is the intentional killing of another human being, and he doesn’t know that he is killing a human being.

Similarly, some mentally ill people uncontrollably attack anyone who comes near them; that’s why they’re put in straitjackets. Those people too—the “stark, raving mad”—should be acquitted when they injure or kill, because they have no control over their actions.

But Clancy’s case is not like either of those. It seems indisputable that she knew she was killing her children, and she demonstrated very considerable control over her situation, including by persuading her husband to get takeout food from a restaurant far enough away that she would have time to do the terrible deed.

No matter how horrifically depressed and troubled Clancy was, she deliberately took the most innocent of lives—with at least one of her three children having to watch as she killed the first one. There must be criminal consequences for that.

But simply convicting Clancy of murder—on a par with, say, a rapist-murderer or a drug-cartel murderer or even a Luigi Mangione—would also be wrong. Not all murders are alike.

Clancy was obviously suffering mentally. She repeatedly sought help. She tried to check herself into a mental-health facility. And she apparently tried to kill herself immediately after the event, leaving herself paralyzed from the waist down.

There is a crime that fits this dreadful bill. It’s not murder. It’s called voluntary manslaughter. As Massachusetts courts themselves have put it, voluntary manslaughter is an “unlawful homicide arising not from malice, but ‘from the frailty of human nature.’ ” No phrase in criminal law better captures a case like Clancy’s. If convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Clancy could serve up to 20 years.

But under Massachusetts law, the jury doesn’t have the option of convicting Clancy of this crime.

Last week, as has been widely reported, Judge William Sullivan issued a surprise ruling in the Clancy case, saying he would instruct the jury that they can convict her of manslaughter as a lesser offense. And that’s exactly what he did.

But what has not been widely reported is that there are two different crimes that go by the name of manslaughter—voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. Judge Sullivan only instructed the jury about one of those two crimes—involuntary manslaughter—which happens to be the wrong one.

Voluntary manslaughter is the crime I referred to a moment ago—an intentional homicide slightly mitigated “by the frailty of human nature.” The jury was not given the option of finding Clancy guilty of that crime.

Involuntary manslaughter is an unintentional killing in circumstances where the perpetrator didn’t know, but should have known, that death could or would result. That’s the crime of manslaughter the judge instructed the jury about. But Clancy didn’t commit that crime. She knew she was killing her children. She killed intentionally. If the jury convicts Clancy of involuntary manslaughter, it will be convicting her of a crime she did not commit.

Why didn’t the judge instruct the jury about voluntary manslaughter? The reason has to do with another of those quirks of Massachusetts law

Massachusetts law adheres to a set of old common law rules for voluntary manslaughter. These rules recognize voluntary manslaughter only in a few, limited settings of “provocation”—settings, as it happens, where men, not women, are typically the perpetrators. A person can have his murder charge reduced to manslaughter if he killed after getting into physical “combat” (like a fistfight) with someone else, or if he killed his wife (or paramour) after discovering her infidelity, or if he responded excessively in self-defense. Under Massachusetts law, a mother who kills her children is not eligible for the voluntary manslaughter reduction.

Most states have adopted a new way of defining manslaughter, instructing juries that murder may be reduced to manslaughter if the defendant was suffering from an “extreme emotional disturbance” for which there was a reasonable explanation or excuse. Clancy is the kind of defendant for whom that rule is intended. But Massachusetts has not adopted that rule.

So Judge Sullivan was correct not to tell jurors they could find Clancy guilty of voluntary manslaughter. Massachusetts law does not permit it. As a result, the Clancy jury is left with a menu of bad options.

They can convict Clancy of first-degree murder, as if her case were no different from a drug-cartel murder, heedless of the bizarre and profoundly troubled mental state Clancy must have been in.

Or they can convict her of involuntary manslaughter, a crime she did not commit. The same is true of second-degree murder, which is also on the table. Like involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder (in Massachusetts) is an unintentional or unpremeditated killing—a crime Clancy did not commit.

Or, finally, based on doubts about her sanity, they can acquit Clancy completely, which her supporters evidently champion, but which would be a travesty of justice. If acquitted on grounds of insanity, Clancy will suffer no punishment at all for her heinous crimes. She will likely be confined, perhaps for a very substantial period of time, in a mental-health facility—which is care, not punishment—but even that much is not guaranteed.

Someday, perhaps, we’ll finally unlock the mysteries of the human brain and heart. But until that day, the best the law can do in a case like Clancy’s is an uncomprehending compromise. Voluntary manslaughter would have been the right such compromise, but sadly, the jury doesn’t know that.

 

[aurum]

Speculation seems to be that things are heading for a mistrial.

[Raze]

 

[Basman]

Jury left basically guessing at Lindsay's mental state during the killing. And there are no good options for a verdict. Probably why insanity should be proved as opposed to vice versa.