Okay, just noticed that “cut-throat defence” is not the most sensitive wording in this particular case… 
I think we can make a pretty damn good guess. I’d say there’s about a 99% chance of sexual abuse (which would explain the adult “boyfriend” as well).
Psychopathic pedophile. I don’t think the motivations are that complex for either of them.
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark.
I’m sure we’ll here more on the kid’s background from the defense. Something had to go terribly wrong in that family for a child to want to inflict that kind of horror on the people who are supposed to love and protect her.
Either they weren’t loving or protecting her, or she’s way cuckoo. What a horrible story.
I’m sure a good lawyer can make anyone be/not be insane when they need to.
Here is the rub though: Common sense tells us that something is wrong upstairs when a 12 year old girl is drawing about gruesome, painful deaths- regardless whether she shove the knife or not. My question is more what should happen, not what will. I couldn’t in good concience put a kid away for life- At the same time, I don’t really see any other choice.
Common misperception, but not at all accurate in my opinion. I’ve seen articles that suggest a succsssful defence of “not guilty by reason of mental disorder” is one of the most difficult defences to put forward. You need solid medical evidence, not just “this is so bizarre she must be mental.”
That combined with the fact that the legal definition of insanity goes beyond just mental illness – even profound mental illness. Legally, you’re not “insane” unless a jury thinks you were incapable of knowing right from wrong, and it’s hard to convince a jury of that even in cases of clear cut psychosis (like the lady who drowned her kids in the tub to save them from Satan). Like you said, the popular perception (as abetted by television and movies) that it’s easy to get off on an insanity plea are not much grounded in reality. It’s an extraordinarily hard defense to win on even when it’s true.
I agree. In this case, this kid may have somehow been abused to the point that she couldn’t tell “good” adult direction and “bad” adult direction (possibly no good adult relationships at all). I can’t help but think that a kid that young must’ve been severely fucked with or ignored or neglected or something! I’m not placing any bets yet, but I’m very interested in the details of her defense.
Don’t…let…The Boy…get…behind you…<AAAAHGGGGGG…>
It’s all that constant snow and ice, 24/7/365.25, and all those endless dark winters without a blessed ray of sunshine, and the blinding white of summer, and the poor girl’s only friends were her huskies and her mukluks. I know what I’m talking about, cause I’ve been to Canada. Well, Niagara Falls anyway, and lemme tell you, I durn near froze my bejesus off, it was below zero in July. If my family was there I’d have butchered them too, and burned their bodies just to stay warm.
Not necessarily. I’ve known tween and teen girls who are so selfish, shallow, stupid and materialistic in their immaturity that if they had a shot at the status that a boyfriend in his twenties will get you, they’d be all over a “relationship” like that. Not all kids are good kids. In fact, my experience with teenaged girls has been the opposite. These days half of them are tube-top wearing hellions with no respect for anyone, and little, if any, for themselves.
In a culture that tells men that Kate Moss is hot and makes 14 year olds into supermodels, I don’t think men are sick for finding childlike women and bodies attractive - I think they’re following the trend. I have heard men talk about “TILFs” (the t stands for “teenager”) almost daily for months now. From what I see around me in this world, wanting to do someone under 17 is “the dream” for a lot of guys in their 20s.
If she does not plead insanity, she faces a max of 10 years in kiddie jail if she loses. If she does plead insanity, she risks being locked up in a nut house for who knows how long if she succeeds.
So three brutal murders is only worth ten years in the slammer? Scary.
It’s sad that this kid was messed up so badly (whoever or whatever it is that damaged her so profoundly), but I can’t say that I have enough faith in the whole “prison as rehabilitation” thing to want to see someone this disturbed and dangerous back on the streets in 10 years.
Could be worse – at least she wasn’t 11 when the deeds were done. She could not have been charged at all if she had been 11 (although she could still be locked up in the nut house).
From everything I’ve heard about this girl and this case, my gut reaction is that this is not an abused girl; like kung fu lola says, she sounds like a spoiled brat who got told that she couldn’t have a 22 year old boyfriend, and that was enough to make her decide that her parents were getting in the way of her good time. Painting a picture of her as an innocent victim strikes me as inaccurate. For what it’s worth; like I said earlier, we’ll probably never know why all of this happened like it did.
Spoiled little girls don’t gut their families with a knife. A 12 year old girl only gets this way through some kind of profound abuse. Kids are not just born this way.
Agreed. The odds that her and her boyfriend’s lives weren’t awful is exceedingly low. I mean, certainly, the Holocaust shows that normal people can be goaded into pretty extreme things, but that’s a relatively unlikely scenario for a case like this. Most likely both her and her boyfriend were raped/beaten/etc. by some family member or another.
I’m more inclined to classify the 23-year-old as a molester than as a “boyfriend.” And I’m wondering about a familial environment that would lead a 12-year-old to having a 23-year-old “boyfriend.”
I would view it as being entirely possible that her and her boyfriend haven’t had sex, without knowing more. If so, that would pretty easily toss “molester” out the window.
Really? There’s no possibility of a natural psychosis?
I knew a kid who was raised with every kind of parental dotage in the world, two older parents who never thought they could get pregnant practically worshiping their IVF success story baby. Kid ends up beating his best friend to death with a baseball bat before decapitating him then running over his body with a car.
I think, occasionally, living beings are just wired wrong. We’re not perfect machines.
Yes.
There is no indication of psychosis in this case. No delusions or hallucinations. No misapprehension of reality. Just extreme attachment disorder, lack of empathy, extraordinary rage against her parents (rage which goes far beyond what could be expected from a spoiled child), and obvious signs of sexual abuse (like having an adult, sociopathic child molester for a boyfriend).
Did he fillet his own family when he was 12 years old? There is a far different level of disorder going on in this case than what you describe in yours. Nobody said that parents are always responsible for the behavior of their kids, but 12 year olds don’t carve up their families with knives unless something extremely traumatic has happened to them developmentally.
For mental illness, yes. People can be born with messed up brain chemistries, but most mentally ill people are not sociopaths. Sociopaths are created, not born.