She has a psychosis, you say. We know this how? Well, the definition in use in the courtroom is “doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong”. (Actually, the courtroom doesn’t use the term “psychosis”, it uses the term “insane”). Let us not equivocate, or at least not do so without a pause and a moment to point to the bridge between world-views that we’re walking across.
If we’re going to walk across a bridge to mainstream psychiatry, a “psychosis” is a brain disorder, a “mental illness”. We don’t know that she’s got one of those simply because of her unorthodox beliefs, do we? Or even as a consequence of the emotional stresses put upon her by the shitty way her husband (and his church?) treated her? Nope, no reason to assume that traumatic life events or circumstances make your neurotransmitter chemistry go awry.
Shall we walk across a different bridge, then? The bridge to classical psychoanalysis and the pop psychologies that sprung from it? Here we have the general understanding that traumatic life events can indeed make you a person not acting under your own control, but as the puppet of compulsions, traumatic reaction-formation, stress disorders, and neuroses. Lots of room over here to point to Andrea Yates and say “Don’t blame her, her environment and situation killed those kids”. But from over here you could also say similar things about a great number of folk accused of violent crime. Poverty and lack of equal opportunity turned him into a robber and a killer. A domineering Dad and a weak clingy Mom turned her into someone who would do anything to get approval from someone whom she loved.
Nope, better get back onto the courtroom side of these bridges. Insanity defense = she doesn’t know right from wrong. If she thought she was saving the kids from Satan and not killing them but instead putting them on a Divine Airplane to Godsville or something, then yeah, not guilty by reason of insanity.
But if she thought that by killing the kids she was saving them from Satan, she knew she was killing the kids. Did she know that, generally speaking, killing one’s kids is against the law? String 'er up.
A note here that it appears the meltdown of the server yesterday has made the posts after AHunter’s disappear into the ether. At least mine did… sigh.
Does anyone know if these posts are just gone gone gone, or do they resurface later? My post showed up on the thread last night, and I logged off before there was any noticeable problem.
badchad, I agree with you that Rusty has been treated as if he could have foreseen the consequences of his actions. He exercised poor judgment and has paid a tragic consequence beyond anything we can imagine. But it’s not as if we knew what we all know now. And at one time his wife was as normal as any of us. When someone degenerates into madness, it’s harder to accept as truly dangerous.
But keep in mind that we are very much who our brains determine we will be. And that can change. Brain chemistry and hormones affect our perceptions of reality to the extreme. Some mental illnesses also affect the part of the brain responsible for judgment and decision-making. PPD is one and I assume that PP psychosis is another.
Mental illness can be horribly painful. Someone who is ill should be treated in a hospital.
From what I have read and seen, hospitals are usually much safer than prisons because every measure is taken to keep the patients from being able to hurt themselves. And it’s difficult to hurt others. Patients are more closely monitored. The more violent patients are restrained.
The difference is in not knowing the juice was connected, and knowing full well that putting your kids head underwater will in fact kill them. How could you reason that you’re doing the right thing by drowing your kids? Where as the electric chair scenario, well, how could you know that the juice was hooked up? You were told that this is a movie, and the assumption is a disconnected chair. You can’t be at fault for that. But you can be for knowing that putting a human head underwater for a certain amount of time, will in fact kill them. And the fact that it was successful shouldn’t matter weather you thought you were doing good or not. You did it, you’re guilty. Your mental state shouldn’t figure into it. You’re guilty regardless.
I don’t see the contradiction, maybe you can explain how you see it.
Are you saying that she didn’t know that drowning her kids would kill them, or that she didn’t know it was illegal to do? Either way, I still don’t see how your mental state should dictate punishment.
Just MHO, and IANAD or L, but I think her mental state did figure into it, in that she knew she was ending her kids’ physical lives, but, thought that she was saving them from a far worse fate. She knew what she was doing, but did not know it was wrong. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that’s in the M’Naughton Rules.
And by wrong, I meant morally wrong. As in, she may still have taken into account that murder is illegal, but thought she had more of an obligation to a higher law than that of the USA.
I agree with you that our brains determine much of what we will be. In fact, I will go so far as to say that our biology and environment determines all that we will be. I’m a hard determinist. Taking that line of thought, it becomes irrational to say that this person acted with malice to commit a crime, while this other person is innocent of a crime because given factors caused her to do what she did. All crimes are caused by a slew of factors that are outside the individual’s control. However, as a society, we decide that some acts are good, and therefore encouraged, while others are bad and subsequently discouraged. Based on that, her acts were of such a heinous nature that they should be discouraged to the maximum.
It’s really not fair to hospitalize this person for a given period of time for drowning 5 children, while sending some guy named Pablo up the river, to be sodomized in prison, because he shook a baby hoping that would make it stop crying.
I am very glad that the American justice system has finally done the right thing. Anyone that doesn’t understand why Andrea Yates should not have spent a day in jail hasn’t ever met anyone suffering from that condition. I have, two women in fact: both had her kids taken away from them, one is long dead from events related to mental problems. The husband, although not legally guilty is morally guilty of what happened, he was the only sane adult in that house and he failed his family miserably.
I think that to Andrea Yates receiving mental care and being sane and fully understanding what she did is a worst fate than she deserves. If I were her I’d rather be out of my mind forever.
I don’t think that believing you’re going to ‘save the kids from Satan’ while still knowing that drowning will kill them and that killing them is illegal should excuse murder.
I could go for guilty but insane, but can’t see not guilty.
We seem to be dancing around the meaning of “guilty.” To me “guilty” means you did the crime. That’s why I said I would accept the verdict of “guilty, but insane.” There is no question that the act was done by the accused, but there need not be punishment if it is understood that the party didn’t know he/she had done wrong. In Andrea Yeats’ case, however, she admitted in the first trial that she had killed her children, and that she knew it was wrong to kill, but that the devil made her do it. I think I said earlier that punishment may not be needed if treatment would make her same again (or words to that effect). But a person who kills children believing that it is right should be kept away from other people. If you call that punishment, so be it. The society has the right to protect itself from “innocent” people who do terrible things they don’t know are terrible, doesn’t it?
In my first post I made some crack about your being “uncharacteristically fair.” I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, probably just in a foul mood, but I apologize for the crack. If we get into an argument down the line and I have an actual reason to be snarky it could happen again. But there wasn’t a reason that time and I’m sorry for being a jerk.