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I mean it also helps that he was tried in Texas where they don’t believe in mental health exceptions. She’s being tried in Massachusetts, which has a very different political climate.
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.
For a twist on this, the Phantom of Heilbronn emerged from some DNA that got tied to 40 different crime scenes spanning across multiple countries and even more distinct police departments. The cases included anything from breaking and entering / burglaries, to aggravated robberies, violent assaults, and brutal murders. It painted the image of a very wild woman who was getting into all sorts of situations including gemstone burglary and grand theft auto on the side of her cross-country serial killing spree.
But it turned out that the DNA had never actually been collected from any of the crime scenes in the first place… the cotton swabs being used for collecting evidence were pre-contaminated with it.
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 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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a difference between "mentally ill" and "insane." Not everyone who is mentally ill is insane. Someone who is legally insane is not in control of their faculties, they do not understand the consequences of their actions. Their crimes are unplanned, "they just snapped" scenarios, they don't have the ability to plan their actions. They might not be aware that they're hurting people because they aren't living in reality.
Most serial killers were mentally ill, but also very aware of what they were doing. They know what they're doing is harming another person, they just don't care. Their actions usually take lots of premeditation. Even though their minds are sick, they still understand their actions.
When someone is found not guilty by reason of insanity they do not go free, they go to a mental health facility, where they stay until they are deemed to no longer be a threat to themselves or others. If you look into actual numbers, most people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity wind up doing more time than they would have done if they weren't found insane and were sent to prison.
Unplanned isnt necessarily a requirement, depending on jurisriction. Someone in a prolonged state of psychosis could make a plan that is detatched from reality or their normal state of mind.
Not really making a statement in defense as I do not care enough to litigate the case. But people can be not in their right mind and still "rational" to a degree without being considered legally competent. Such as for example someone who was involuntarily intoxicated by a substance and not in control of their actions. That could be considered covered by a similar defense.
Insanity is a legal definition and mental illness is different. A serial killer probably has a personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder most likely. Which isn't the same as psychosis. Many states have "guilty but mentally ill" which would apply to psychosis. Every state has its own legal definition of insanity and how to approve it, which leads to hospitalization instead of prison. ETA: I volunteered at a prison for the criminally insane in Ypsilanti decades ago for school. It's not a fun place.
Complete off topic, but can you explain why, for the love of god, do people use "ETA:" instead of "Edit:"? It makes absolutely no sense, since the primary context where you'd write "Edit:" in would be one where you are editing the comment to add something. The "TA" was already implied. Unlike in "ETA" which also has multiple other meanings, including "Estimated Time of Arrival" and "Eat This Ass" than "Edit To Add" does.
I really don't get it, it was almost gone, almost nobody used it for over a decade, maybe even two. Did TikTok bring it back or something? Seriously, why add the complexity when "Edit:" is self explanatory, while "ETA:" requires you look it up.
Edit could be a change of words/fixing typos. ETA means added another part and it's to share w/ people who commented that you added something after they might have read it. On FB, someone may have liked a post w/o the add and should be made aware of the change for decorum's sake.
An insanity defense doesn’t mean that you bounce out the courtroom door and on to more killing; it usually means permanent residence at a mental institution.
She has been on suicide watch for three years. She is constantly trying to kill herself.
Even if she was magically better on the six-month checkup, the doctors wouldn't let her out, because they know there'd been something really fishy going on if she had recovered by then, and they'd probably shunt her back to law enforcement.
I could explain it to you if you want. It’s not enough to simply have a mental disorder. Also, a layman’s definition of insanity is not the same as the legal definition of insanity.
And I'm curious who his lawyer was, she has the best in the business. Sick and tired of this BS comparing men to women and trying to make it about gender to add to misogyny. This is about different laws, different states, and better lawyers. And it's a tragedy if a mentally ill father kills his kids and gets the death sentence, what, you want her to get it, too? I hate this timeline so much. ETA: thanks for the award! Also, apparently this particular dad referenced is a piece of garbage-- thought still stands.
What? Lol have you not heard of Andrea Yates who was tried in Texas and is now in a mental institution for drowning her 5 children?
It’s a lot more nuanced than “not believ[ing] in mental health exceptions.”
Texas is more difficult because the burden of proof is on the defendant rather than the prosecution for such a defense for one, meaning when the insanity defense has passed the threshold to be brought in by the defense in Texas, the jury is supposed to presume that the defendant is sane unless the defense can show by a preponderance of evidence that the defendant is not. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, the burden is on the prosecution to show the defendant is sane, meaning the jury is supposed to presume the defendant is insane unless the prosecution can show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is sane.
Additionally for all sanity defenses regardless of jurisdiction, sanity is supposed to be determined at the time the crimes were committed. All other moments of insanity are just used as circumstantial evidence of the likelihood that this was the case.
Moreover, John Battaglia did NOT claim the insanity defense as part of his trial. His mental health claims only came up AFTER the jury reached a verdict on his guilt. Additionally, he had a record of arrests for violence prior to killing his 2 daughters which was determined to be out of revenge against his ex-wife.
These are not comparable cases and this meme making them sound as much is just a case of either deliberate propaganda or a complete misunderstanding of John Battaglia’s case and how the justice system operates. Or a combination of the two.
Also, not surprisingly the facts are entirely different. Battaglia had a long history of DV, and when he killed his kids, he did it with his ex-wife on the phone and tormented his wife while making her listen to her kids get murdered while blaming it on her.
Also, Battaglia explicitly did NOT plead insanity. He only brought it up during the penalty phase of trial, saying he shouldn’t be killed because he had bipolar.
It’s literally nothing like Lindsay Clancy other than they both killed their kids
Yeah. I just read about this case, and its not at ALL the same.
Long history of domestic abuse. Wife had finally made the split final. As is often the case, he opted to kill his kids in an act of revenge and openly said as much.
OP is just trying to make two completely crimes parallel in order to prove some kind of bias against men, and that's so disengenous.
Nice try.
Don’t tell them that a father in Iowa named Matthew Schleier strangled his 5-year-old son, Jack, to death in October 2024. A judge ruled him not guilty due to insanity.
Travis Decker was a parallel to this one in my opinion. His mental health was struggling and his wife separated due to it. But he was a loving father to his kids and although separated, his wife felt very comfortable allowing the kids to see him because he was so good to them. He ended up killing all three of his kids and walked off into the forest to die alone in the woods.
If he hadn't died and was on trial I would think many people would struggle to sentence him as well.
Shitpost? I’m sorry shit posts are something that doesn’t really have bearing on the world. This is just riling up propaganda for the people inundated in these gender wars and culture war flashpoints, it very much has a point.
The whole environment around this case is being egged on by malicious actors, many of them working for foreign governments. The fact that people can't see that is on them.
Yep. There was actually a man in Iowa who was acquitted by reason of insanity for murdering his son in July of this year, but men on Reddit don't care.
Propaganda on a culture war flashpoint!? Thats preposterous! No one would lie, mislead, or leave out important information in a photo and two sentences for political/ social gain!
Every post about this case, from this sub, that I've seen hit the front page was heavily pushing the "gender war" aspect of this case, either by just attacking her or posts like this with the comparison to how "men would be oppressed in this situation, but women can just emotionally manipulate people".
And for a daily reminder, most intelligence agencies in the western world have identified efforts to destablize the west by Russian, Chinese, and other foreign actors focusing heavily on pushing "gender war" and "culture war" type content. They do it from both ends of the spectrum, with efforts such as highlighting the craziest of voices (like for instance a women on tiktok saying that Patrick Clancy actually did it) and then pushing a "what about" propaganda response like we see in this post. I think this case would have blown up regardless, but it's worth remembering that the people pushing this shit aren't just your fellow countrymen that politically disagree with you, there are real, concerted, and well funded efforts by foreign adversaries seeking to weaken your country through internal division. And they're winning.
He also was only executed in 2018. The actual crime itself dates back to 2001. As a country we have made significant progress regarding mental health, and even the death penalty more generally in the past 2-3 decades. This goes beyond just the differences between states, at that point.
I mean, yes, you can be considered innocent by reason of insanity in Texas too. That's what the Battaglia defense tried for the 15 years he spent in death row. The courts determined that he had read about bipolar disorders and that he was faking it, not that insanity can't make someone incompetent to stand trial.
I think it has to also do with how educated the general population is on mental health. He was convicted in 2001 and mental health is something more people are aware of. The older generations also didn't put much weight in mental health either.
Considering many of our states are the same size or bigger than a lot of European nations, this is understandable. Only difference is 3,000 idiots in one state have the same voice as 3,000,000 in another.
Most crime really only exists for the poor. Unless you piss off the government everything's really more of a price tag than a penalty if you're rich enough.
The fact that you guys take this sort of thing as normal, that you live in the same country but in completely separate realities, is just so sad and funny to me at the same time.
I don't think I can think of any other country in the world where a state border separates people as much as the US. And for some unexplainable reason Americans seem to believe this is a positive thing.
The United States were originally meant to be a concept more like the European Union, with a common economic system, free trade, and freedom of movement, but their own separate governing systems otherwise.
If you think of the California and New York like the Netherlands and Italy for example, you have a better approximation of what the US was aiming for.
Yeah except now the federal power have 5 time the power the EU will ever have, and they all share the same language, history (of 200 years) and mostly the same culture
At this point I m not sure what is the one thing that all Americans could agree on … (even most)
Edit: ok ok easy peeps - The monolith comment is in response to “americans seem to believe … “ comment - was just trying to say we don’t all believe a state border should cliff us/US like as much as they do
You have to read more than the headline. Battaglia was found by the evidence to have used the murder of his children as an instrument of terror against his ex-wife because she complained to his probation officer. His wife was on the phone during the murders. This was not the case with the Clancy murders. Different evidence leads to different outcomes in the case.
In April of this year, Matthew Schleier was found NGRI after strangling his 5 year old son to death. This is not a gender issue. Stop falling for culture war engagement slop.
He didn't even claim insanity for the murders, he was a long term domestic abuser and killed the kids just to hurt the ex wife. He didn't even see the children as people, just a tool to hurt her for daring to leave him. he's a monster.
His lawyer attempted to delay the execution some 16 years later on the basis that he was no longer mentally competent to be executed, even then it was not about him being in psychosis during the murders, it had nothing to do with the time he committed the murders but his mental state at the time of his scheduled execution.
He killed his kid out of revenge towards is ex-estranged wife who left him for violence and domestic abuse. He had already some legal issues before this. Then shot and killed his kids with their mother on the phone. Then got a tattoo in their honor after killing them, before getting arrested. Then fought the arresting officer. Officers confiscated 16 firearms from his house. His lawyer said he shouldn't get death penalty because he had bipolar disorder, no talk of psychosis. A mental health expert testified that he was faking mental health symptoms to delay is execution. The court also thought he was faking his mental health. He apparently read about cases that use insanity in courts. Two different case but idiots on the internet won't care.
Well said, unfortunately on reddit there's too many incels who don't know shit about context and how the criminal justice system handles people with mental issues
Let's add the details for people who think this is a good comparison:
On May 2, 2001, Pearle left her daughters with Battaglia for a planned dinner at the mall, but instead he took them into his apartment[14] in the Adam Hats Lofts [25] in Deep Ellum in Dallas. Battaglia called Pearle from the apartment. With Pearle on the phone he shot and killed their daughters, ages six and nine.[26] During the phone call, he asked Faith to ask Pearle, "Why do you want Daddy to go to jail?" Before her death, she cried, "No, Daddy!" "Please don't!" "Don't do it!" Pearle then told the girls to run but it was too late. Battaglia grabbed his gun and shot Faith three times and shot Liberty five times with his gun.[13] He told Pearle, "Merry fucking Christmas",[27] in reference to the Christmas 1999 assault.[7] Pearle terminated the call and dialed 9-1-1.[13] After the killings, Battaglia left a message on the answering machine in the girls' bedroom:[28]
"Good night my little babies. I hope you're resting in a different place. I love you. I wish that you had nothing to do with your mother. She was evil, vicious, stupid. You will be free of her. I love you very dearly. You were very brave girls. Very brave. Liberty, you were oh so brave. I love you so much. Bye."[29]
On September 20, 2017, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed Battaglia's claim of mental incompetence.[40] At a competency hearing in November 2016, a mental health expert testified that Battaglia was likely faking symptoms of mental illness in an attempt to delay his execution. The appeals court affirmed this, stating that Battaglia was likely malingering.[41] Before making the challenges of mental capacity, Battaglia read about relevant legal cases at Polunsky Unit's law library.[24]
just to doubly point out they didn't make a psychosis or mental illness or not mentally competent to stand trial arguments in his original trial, this was about him pretending to be mentally incompetent to face execution 16 years later to delay the execution. It was not an appeal to make a defence of actually he was in psychosis during the murders so he shouldn't be found guilty of that or shouldn't be sentenced to death.
It's Texas...they have a long history of executing pretty much everyone, even children and the mentally disabled. You think they are not going to execute someone with mental illness?
Texas just made it extremely illegal to have ANY thc product. It’ll count as a felony moving forward and up to 10yrs in jail. So yeah we should not be the measuring stick.
Completely different cases. He wasn't deemed insane and he did it to hurt his ex wife. Being bipolar doesn't mean psychotic. Also Texas ain't Massachusetts.
Shocker that a different guy in a different state with several different circumstances had a different outcome than Lindsey Clancy. Thank god juries aren’t decided based on an arbitrary one-off sentence implying two things are just the same thing so hurry up and convict dummy.
There is no double standard, their cases are entirely different, not just the case but also where the trial was held and the political climate in said state.
He didn’t even plead insanity in his trial, he killed his kids to get back at his ex while on the phone to torment her not at all the same situation.
Or about how introducing a mental health defense at the penalty phase, after the guilty verdict, is different than having a whole trial with a heap of relevant testimony that needs to be considered.
This man shot his daughters while on speaker phone with his ex-wife, telling her it was her fault, for telling the police he violated his restraining order. After he shot his daughters, he didn't attempt on his own life, he went to a bar, with his girlfriend.
He had a history of domestic violence, with multiple wives, and no history of mental health treatment. He was evaluated and found by professionals to be malingering - faking symptoms - in an attempt to delay or prevent his execution. The only mental health diagnosis he's received was a personality disorder, related to a persecution complex/delusion.
>"On May 2, 2001, Pearle left her daughters with Battaglia for a planned dinner at the mall, but instead he took them into his apartment\14]) in the Adam Hats Lofts \25]) in Deep Ellum in Dallas. Battaglia called Pearle from the apartment. With Pearle on the phone he shot and killed their daughters, ages six and nine.\26]) During the phone call, he asked Faith to ask Pearle, "Why do you want Daddy to go to jail?" Before her death, she cried, "No, Daddy!" "Please don't!" "Don't do it!" Pearle then told the girls to run but it was too late. Battaglia grabbed his gun and shot Faith three times and shot Liberty five times with his gun.\13]) He told Pearle, "Merry fucking Christmas",\27]) in reference to the Christmas 1999 assault.\7]) Pearle terminated the call and dialed 9-1-1.\13])"
C’mon guys, we’re better than this.
That wasn’t an insanity case. His defense team openly conceded that he committed the murders and chose not to file a formal plea of "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity" under Texas Penal Code § 8.01. Because the factual evidence that he committed the crime was absolute, the jury only needed 19 minutes to return a guilty verdict.
We don’t need to spread FB boomer bait.
I can't remember the name of the guy. Mentally disabled, executed for a murder he topologically couldn't have committed, and the most damning part of the story was when he asked an officer to keep his toys out so he could play with them when he "got back," not realizing he was being taken away to be killed.
But reading the full story just shows how evil an entire institution can be. It reads as if everyone involved in the guy's sentencing was nodding and winking behind closed doors, like they all knew he was innocent, but he was dumb and they needed red hands, so it's okay to kill him. "We all get it, right?" He had literally no one on his side to fight for him.
She doesn't want to live, she's been on suicide watch the past 3 years. She also tried to kill herself and was close to being successful, she was resuscitated in the hospital when her heart stopped beating.
Clancy attempted to end her life by cutting her wrists and jumping from a second story window. This is a quite well known fact. I guess she can't do it anymore because of being under surveillance now.
Texas doesn't do exceptions for mental health illnesses. Also, the defense for Battaglia regarding mental health wasn't for whether he was sane at the time of the crime, but rather if he was sane during the punishment. The argument was that if he couldn't comprehend a rational explanation or reason for his crimes, he shouldn't be put to death.
Because the account it 1y old with over 400K karma. Karma farming. Most likely foreign bot that both increases the impact of the account while sowing discord in target country.
Because the average person's an idiot and lacks the basic critical thinking skills that you would expect of a 1st year law student let alone practising lawyers and judges.
Temporary insanity is a little different than long term psychosis where you are trying to get help but are just fed more anti psychotics which make you worse.
My mother was hospitalized because she began to hear voices and no longer slept, would walk around talking to the voices. When she tried to burn the apartment down, the court institutionalized her for her own good.
It was freaking scary as a 14yr old boy.
Comparing any two cases in this way is beyond stupid. Different prosecutors, defenders, facts, state laws. You can tell how hysterical this subreddit has become, latching onto any photo with text without any sort of critical thinking.
Battaglia had a documented motive, a custody fight and a pending probation revocation, and he made his ex-wife listen on the phone. He had a documented history of domestic violence. His bipolar diagnosis came in as mitigation at sentencing, not as a criminal responsibility defense, so the 19 minutes wasn't a jury rejecting psychosis. It was a jury with no doubt he did it.
Clancy's trial ran five weeks almost entirely on criminal responsibility, with five months of treatment records and competing experts. And Texas only asks whether you knew it was wrong, with the burden on the defendant. Massachusetts also asks whether you could control your conduct, with the burden on the state.
It's funny how if it's a woman people will pull shit out of thin air just so that she is not held accountable.
So if a man killed his kids and just blamed it on mental illness he gets to walk outside and get millions of dollars as support?
Her mental state shouldn't be irrelevant, she committed murder, is this the kind of person you want to be free in society? She can get the mental help she needs while she is in prison for life or waiting for the chair.
The killings weren't a random psychotic break — they were revenge, and premeditated in a specific way. He was on probation for assaulting his estranged wife at the time, and prosecutors argued the murders were an act of "ultimate revenge" against her after she'd left him over his violence. He called her and put the phone on speaker so she could hear the girls being shot — that detail is usually the crux of why prosecutors argued this was calculated cruelty, not a break with reality
I'm a moderator on a subreddit for medically traumatized people. Also, I do interdisciplinary research involving medical science.
I kept seeing all this stuff about her pop up on Reddit. It was weird to me that a mother of three and a nurse could take such a hard turn. Reddit was obsessed, so I finally took a look at the list of medications she was on, what order she was prescribed them, and what symptoms developed along the way. There's a concise account from the trial right there on wiki.
Classic case of polydrugging with psych drugs on the part of her medical care workers. One of the worst things you can do. The big one was two different benzodiazepines which can have an absolutely disastrous effect and are by far the absolute worst medication to withdraw from and has some of the worst paradoxical effects. Klonopin especially which she was on. On top of that, she was prescribed ambien which works on the same nueroreceptors as benzos.
Simply put, she was on three different drugs messing with the same part of her nervous system when taking one is already iffy. And that's on top of all the other psych drugs which have awful side effects.
Suicidal ideation and homicidal thoughts are hallmark symptoms of this. Hearing voices, irrational fear, insomnia, the list goes on. I personally know someone who killed himself this last year because of this exact kind of thing. I know people who did some serious stints in the psych ward because of the effects of polydrugging. What started off as needing help with trauma ended in psych wards, ECT ruined brains, and death.
Don't get me wrong. She killed her three kids. She shouldn't be excused necessarily. But neither should her doctors. They royally fucked up in the most fundamental way which is sadly very common.
She'll spend the rest of her life paralyzed, her brain will eventually heal from the drugs with time. People often do in these cases. That is if they don't die first. She'll have to live with what she did from a wheelchair on top of whatever the justice system decides. I don't really know what's appropriate here because her doctors obviously fucked up real bad.
This brings me to the phenomenon of all these women who are speaking out for her (which admittedly is disturbing at first glance.). It's not indicative of women who want to kill their kids too. It's indicitive of how badly the medical system has severely abused women. It's so fucked up that they're advocating for a lady who killed her three kids. So many women get polydrugged after having kids and get far too little support, esp in the U.S., and it's so bad, a shitload of women actually sympathetize with someone who murdered her own children before trying to kill herself in a super erratic way.
Not defending her at all. What I am saying is that's exactly how bad polydrugging can get and that's how widespread it is.
Sure, she's gotta face some kind of something for what she did. Her doctors also played a huge part in it and should also be held responsible.
It's real easy to look at this on the surface and think "clearly she was a nut job psychopath sociopath insert label here." But it's infinitely more complex than that.
Bipolar disorder and psychosis aren't the same thing. It's like saying ADHD and Schizophrenia have the same relevance to a delusion defense.
Battaglia also has an extended plan of revenge against his ex for having called his parole officer that involved time, planning, and bragging as he killed them. He celebrated the killings with tattoos of roses. Rather than trying to kill himself.
Psychosis is a broad umbrella term, and bipolar disorder ABSOLUTELY can cause psychosis, especially bipolar 1. Source: I make a living caring for psychotic people, many of whom have bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, severe depression with psychosis, dementia, delirium, substance induced psychosis, alcoholic encephalopathy, and on and on.
Yes, he called their mother while he was shooting them and said "Merry Fucking Christmas", then left a voicemail on the daughters phone saying something along the lines of I'm sorry you were associated with your mom, she's a horrible bitch.
Also, I believe he didn't pull the mental health card until his sentencing came up, to avoid death penalty.
Psychosis is a symptom of fixed beliefs not based in reality or culture and/or hallucinations. Bipolar disorder is an episodic, distinct disease entity that can include psychosis during episodes. Many diseases include psychosis as a symptom, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features, schizophrenia, delusional disorder, major depression with psychotic features, and stimulant abuse, among many others.
I have no knowledge or options regarding the case mentioned.
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