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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2026
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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.
EDIT: 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.
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.
I want to stress that anyone downvoting these rudimentary facts is a total goddamned moron.
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.
Literally none of this is ethically relevant.
You don't know what that word means.
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
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.
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.
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.
I'm certainly not interested in rehabilitating child murderers. Just get them out of society forever.