A juror in the trial of Lindsay Clancy is sharing new details about what he said happened inside the jury room that led to a mistrial in the case of the Massachusetts woman facing first-degree murder charges for the 2023 deaths of her three young children.

Nick Dargie, one of the three men on the 12-person jury, told ABC News' Aaron Katersky that the lone holdout juror who prevented a unanimous verdict did not show any evidence explaining his vote.

"There was several times I would ask him to show us evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and ... he couldn't," Dargie, 25, said in an interview Wednesday.

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[+] -20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (29 children)

The whole concept of being able to claim insanity as a defense comes from a time when people literally thought you could be possessed by demons.

Murdering children is an act of insanity. Always. That’s not a defense, it’s a given.

This is not about punishment. It’s about ethics: when evaluating the morality of an action, you must consider the causal and intentional facts.

Everything else, such as mental illness, either supervenes on these causal and intentional facts or it is irrelevant.

  1. Did the person kill innocent children? Yes.
  2. Did they intend to do so? Also yes.

Whether that person subsumed alcohol or whether they are mentally ill simply does not matter except insofar as it relates to the two questions above.

If you disagree with any specific sentence above, please tell me which one. All of the replies are currently non-sequiturs and red herrings.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago (7 children)

    You are trying to attach rational arguments to a totally emotional opinion.

    The law requires that the defendant had formed criminal intent when they committed their offense. Shooting someone in the head is murder, but if you killed that person to stop them from killing someone else, then there was no criminal intent, and it's not murder.

    Yes, she killed her kids, and yes, she knew she was killing her kids, but she was also in the grip of a terrible psychosis, that prevented her from forming criminal intent.

    And it was never about releasing her, it was always about the type of place she would reside. A prison, or a prison hospital. A person with your type of thinking overplayed their hand, and got her released instead.

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  • she was also in the grip of a terrible psychosis

    So she says. I mean https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/post-partum-psychosis/ would suggest... probably not.

    Also, drunk people or people on drugs... who aren't aware of their actions... is the implication there that they're not responsible because they were prevented from forming criminal intent? 3 children were hunted down and murdered. Then a staged suicide.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

    The law doesn’t matter ethically.

    You’re making it sound like psychosis is some sort of demon that takes over your body and makes you do things against your will as if that matters.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    You've clearly never been around a person deep in the throes of postpartum psychosis. I have, and it was fucking terrifying. There is no demon possession....so stop going on about that like its some gotcha. It is a condition where the mother can have a full mental break and fully believe things are happening that in no way, shape or form are happening. And the reactions to then are wildly intense

    This is a legal case, not an ethics case. Though that debate has it's merits; just not here, talking about the legal ramifications of the killings.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    I didn’t make any legal claims. What exactly does any of what you wrote have to do with any of what I wrote? Or are you just ranting.

    Intentionally killing children is wrong. You could be a rabid dog or a psychotic homo sapien. The rules don’t change depending on your species or flavor of crazy. The laws should reflect this fact.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    You've been walking in circles on this in every reply. No one thinks what happened is right. No one is defending her actions.

    The debate you've been dancing around is whether or not she was criminally insane at the time. Not whether or not she was innocent. And going off about how insane derives from demonic possession is not relevant, not pertinent, and a bad faith argument

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  • [–] -4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    I’m not debating how the law is (or the details of this case), my claim is about how it should be, which is written in enormous letters and you still somehow missed it.

    “Demonic possession” indicates the approximate level of ignorance required to think that “criminal insanity” should be a legal option for a defendant in a case about killing children.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    Insanity isn't a get out of jail free card, she's going to be institutionalized for a long time, maybe even her whole life. It can be a fate worse than jail, but at least she has the proper medical attention needed

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  • [+] -6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

    My problem isn’t with the punishment. From an ethics perspective, the framing of insanity as having any normative relevance is simply incorrect.

    The relevant facts are causal and intentional.

    But then again, the average person has the ethics of a baboon, so this is academic.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    The US justice system is explicitly punitive and not habilitative. That is why questions of "insanity" as it relates to culpability are critically important, for better or (largely) worse. This means that the outcome kf the process is not victim or even a perpetrator oriented--it is intended to provide the general shitass public with adequate feelings of cathartic vindication. Whether a perpetrator is deemed "sane" or not factors into that heavily.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    I couldn't find a source on the possession thing, but maybe you're referring to the general way that mental health used to be explained by the supernatural when we didn't fully understand the involved conditions.

    https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-procedure/the-insanity-defense-history-and-background.html#%3A%7E%3Atext=Courts+in+ancient+Rome+and%2Cpardon+or+mitigate+a+sentence

    This article was a fun read, and so was the wiki :)

    Also, they're looking for specific, named conditions/diagnosis. Nobody is claiming she's insane because she killed her kids. They're pointing to the history of mental health issues/treatment, various prescribed psych meds, the immediate subsequent suicide attempt, etc. Mental health professionals testified for both sides. It isn't a vibes thing.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Massachusetts doesn't even have a "not guilty by reason of insanity" defense on the books at all, so this was a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing. It's amazing how many people are so confident to say extremely stupid things about this case.

    Under Massachusetts state law (specifically known as the McHoul standard), a person is not criminally responsible if, at the moment of the offense, a mental disease or defect left them without the "substantial capacity" to do one of two things:

    • Appreciate wrongfulness: Understand that what they were doing was morally or legally wrong.
    • Conform conduct: Control their actions to align with the law, even if they recognized the act was wrong.

    The McHoul standard was decided in 1967, and the law makes no mention of "possession by demons".

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  • [–] -5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)
    • Do rabid animals understand the wrongness of biting children? So what?
    • Are human beings animals?

    Congratulations! You’ve graduated to having a consistent normative view.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    Okay you have to understad that we are trying to have a civilisation here.

    Your point of view is not consistent.

    If you want a murderer punished like you would a "rabid animal" because we are just animals and don't need further understanding than there is no reason to object murder in general.

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  • [+] -10 points 2 days ago (7 children)

    A lot of crime is evidence of insanity, from narcissism, megalomania; really, all homicide is rooted in insanity.

    We lock those people the hell up, though.

    No one gets a cushy institutionalization unless their docs all agree. Into genpop until then.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    In many, many significant ways, perpetual civil commitment (to an "institution") is far more horrific of a state than being in prison. People like you are incredibly fucking stupid.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago (5 children)

    Cushy institutionalization? You've got some wild misunderstandings of how any of this works. It's prison, with prison conditions. Nothing fucking cushy about it, but I'm guessing you're far more interested in punishment than rehabilitation.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    I'm certainly not interested in rehabilitating child murderers. Just get them out of society forever.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (3 children)

    And this is why the world thinks us US Americans are belligerent and cruel by nature.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I'm fine with being belligerent and cruel to people who harm children. If you have to be taught that that's wrong then there's no place for you in this world. We have more than enough people that need help as it is.

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