Jury Deadlocked and Can't Decide if It's a Crime for a Mother to Murder Her Children

I'm half-joking with that headline because I know the issue is whether she is guilty, or not guilty by reason of insanity. She did do some insane things --beyond bringing her children into the basement to strangle them one by one. She slashed her wrists and jumped out a window to kill herself or, perhaps, to pretend to kill herself.

On the other hand she both planned the crime -- googling how to murder children, and sending her husband out on an errand so she could kill them undisturbed -- and took actions after the murders to conceal them.

Just the News:

The judge in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has ordered the jury to return to deliberations after it informed him that they could not reach a unanimous verdict.

"I brought you back out because I know that this was a long trial," the judge said. "Because of this, I'm going to ask you to go back out, keeping in mind all the instructions that I gave you, to go out and continue your deliberations."

Jonathan Turley
@JonathanTurley

The Clancy jury has told the court that it is deadlocked. As expected, Judge Sullivan is now sending them back. That is a common response to push a jury further. Not surprising given the intense divisions in the country, the jury appears to be manifesting those same divisions...

...The prosecution finished strongly with a narrative that emphasized the timeline and the actions taken by Clancy to carry out the murders. Some jurors may find the "not guilty" part of a "by reason of insanity" verdict to be too high a hurdle, given the death of three young children by strangulation...

Legal insanity is -- or is supposed to be -- a difficult thing to prove. To be legally insane and not culpable of a crime, you have to be so disturbed that you cannot tell right from wrong. An age-old way of disproving such inability to tell right from wrong is to show the criminal planned the crime in secret and then took steps to cover it up.

So we may be talking about the unofficial, non-legal "definition" of insanity, which is just that the criminal has some mental illness and so poof, all culpability is out the window. Almost all killers have something wrong in their brains, from having no moral compass at all, to having low impulse control, to being actual psychopaths. This is not supposed to excuse them, but juries can be persuaded to ignore the law if they feel sympathy for the murderer.

Or murderess -- women get the benefit of this fake definition of insanity more than men do.

So what do you think: Mistrial where the jury never delivers a verdict, in which case we have to do this all again, or let off the hook on the fake definition of inanity? I doubt the jurors in favor of conviction can persuade the pro-Lindsay jurors to flip. As you know, she's become quite the Misunderstood Hero to some.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 12:15 PM

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