A woman who was juror No. 5 spoke to WBZ-TV’s Kristina Rex Tuesday, though she asked to remain anonymous.
“At the end of the day, there was so much doubt,” the woman said. “The prosecution didn’t have a figurative smoking gun. There was not a single moment throughout the presentation of that case where you could say ‘Yup, 100% I’m certain she did it’ or that she didn’t do it. There was too much gray area.”
It is my understanding that she contacted a doctor, a nurse and a crisis hotline on multiple occasions expressing concern for her deteriorating mental condition, at one point telling that nurse she was afraid “something terrible was going to happen” but answered no to “do you think you’re going to hurt yourself or your children?”
So the question I would have for the woman who shortly thereafter murdered three children and jumped out a window paralyzing herself from the chest down: what kind of “something terrible” was she afraid of if not hurting herself or her children? Star Trek: Strange New Worlds getting renewed for another season?
We’re talking about a woman who called the doctor back saying “I think these medications are making me worse” and made more than one call to a crisis hotline, and yet made no effective move to secure the safety of her children. I want some lesser conviction and sentence, something like involuntary manslaughter, time served, and bar her from unsupervised contact with minors. I want to hit the doctors and nurses and crisis hotline workers, and the insurance companies holding their leashes, a LOT harder.
If postpartum psychosis is so unpredictable, maybe women who have recently given birth shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised access to minors before a thorough psych exam. Sounds like something we need to routinely screen for and provide services to prevent tragedies rather than dumping newborns on women with a “Probably don’t twist its neck but lol you do you.”
What the FUCK are we doing here?
I’m so glad we have Dr. Captain Aggravated here to educate us on how to treat women after they give birth. Whatever would we have done without your expertise in this subject?
Or maybe just have doctors who listen to the women who come to them for help? She didn’t need a psyche screen, she knew something was up.
As for the “whether you will hurt yourself or others” question, it’s loaded. In my experience with psychosis, if you actually admit to it they threaten to have you arrested, so you try to convince yourself you can keep it together until you find help. No, that’s not a hyperbole. It’s well known in mental health circles that you never admit to it because doctors, even ones who practice in mental health, are assholes. I have gone to the doctor convinced I would hurt someone if I didn’t get help, I even asked to be held in a facility, and they threatened to call the cops, but sent me on my way when I retracted it.
Screening all new mothers would mean we had well funded, well trained medical establishment. If we had that we wouldn’t need the screening in the first place because people who need help could actually get it.
Furthermore, the people most likely to kill and abuse their partners and children are men, and I don’t see any suggestions that all men need a psychological screening.
It should be noted that women are much more likely to kill children in their first year of life. With the seriousness of postpartum mental health issues maybe we really shouldn’t be leaving mothers alone with their children? I mean this in multiple ways, including that recent parents should have far more support including visits by a nurse or midwife, social services, etc. to make sure parents know what to do and have what they need to do it. Our society leaves people to fend for themselves far too often.
We should improve prenatal and postpartum care before suggesting something like the government have a babysitter assigned to each mother after birth. How absurd to treat every mother like a child incapable of caring for an infant.
Do you have the stats on that? I can’t find anything to support it.
Reading the wikipedia article of the case, she apparently expressed thoughts of harming her children to her husband and mother in December, but declined to be separated from them. Before and after that, she was allowed to refuse or terminate inpatient treatment, so she was deemed mentally competent to make her own decisions, and yet she failed to secure the children from what she believed was a dangerous environment. I’ll hold both parents legally responsible for that. That’s not a murder charge, that’s something like child endangerment. It doesn’t take a doctor’s orders to have your parents take the kids for a little while because you’re afraid something bad might happen.
The medical community also needs some consequences, and some changes. Their current move set is pretty limited, they 1. hand the patient their car keys and their pistol and tell them to go get 'em tiger, 2. Prescribe the brand name medication your exam room is wallpapered in ads for, 3. Wait for them to hurt someone and throw them in the hospital’s brig.
Yes, she could have done plenty to save the kids and herself if her brain were working properly, which it was not. You’re ascribing a level of logic and critical thinking to someone who was warning everyone around her that she wasn’t capable of either.
If she was mentally ill enough to where she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions, why was she allowed to refuse or check herself out of at least two inpatient care programs?
So she’s sane enough to be let out of the hospital into her own custody but not sane enough to be held criminally responsible for murdering three children.
That is literally why she is on trial. That’s why her doctors were called to testify. You seem to think psychosis only happens at certain times or can be predictable or something which is very far from the truth.
How is it unpredictable when she herself foresaw it? Lindsay Clancy said she thought she was going to hurt herself and/or her children. So everyone including herself decided to leave her unsupervised with her children. She killed them and paralyzed herself. Yeah, who could have fucking guessed that was gonna happen?
But she didn’t want to hurt herself or her children. She was losing control of herself. She reached out for help to everyone in her circles. She told everyone she was losing grasp on reality.
So the question for the trial - Was Lyndsey Clancy in her right mind when she killed her children?
That’s clearly a divisive question that even a jury made up of her peers couldn’t completely agree on, though 11 of the 12 believe that there was enough reasonable doubt of that.
You might want to read up on psychosis to better understand that someone suffering from psychosis is not in control of themselves.
This specific hearing is about whether she was in her right mind during the fifteen or so minutes she was strangling her toddlers to death one by one, cutting herself and jumping out a window.
It’s likely she’ll be found insane for that. MY POINT IS she wasn’t psychotic for eight solid months. There’s plenty of criminal negligence here to do around.
That’s… that’s what we’re discussing. That the medical establishment failed her.
Yeah no. What we’re discussing is the reluctance or refusal to hold women accountable for violent crime.
Why are you taking one woman, Lyndsey Clancy, and extrapolating that out to all women?
Because court proceedings establish legal precedent to be applied in the future.
No no no, we’re discussing why a person might not be criminally liable for their actions on the basis of an altered mental state.
When wasn’t she in that altered mental state?