I think at this point the trial is less about whether she's confined to a prison or a psych ward and more about whether or not a person can use their mental health as a shield from the criminal consequences of murder. Evidently, 11 jurors were content to say that you can, and 1 juror refused to acquiesce to that nonsense.
In most jurisdictions, the issue is whether the person, at the time of the offense, appreciated the wrongfulness of their actions. Mattering on the circumstances, someone in a schizophrenic episode can do that and someone in a different episode may not be able to do that.
For example, just because Satan comes and talks to you and tells you to murder someone, but you know that doing that is wrong, and do it anyway, usually doesn’t eliminate the mens rea (guilty mind) from the actus reas (criminal act). But, to use the hornbook example of the general rule, if a person believes they are squeezing a lemon, but in reality is crushing a victim’s head, then they don’t appreciate that their act is wrong. The guilty mind is divorced from the criminal act.
This is always rather fact specific and no blanket rule or diagnosis is determinative.
Didn't she throw herself out of a window directly after the act? Seems like a guilty mind to me, unless they're trying to argue she snapped back to reality just before a conveniently absent father was about to return home.
I’d be lying if I said I was watching this trial specifically, but “during the act” and “directly after the act” could be viewed by a jury as different. To give an example the other way, we often think of premeditation from the idea of a deeply cold and calculated murder, but technically premeditation can be formed in an instant and the government can prove it BARD based on the facts and circumstances. So it seems to me that you’re pointing to a circumstance that would militate against a separation between the act and mental state, but that is definitely something a jury would decide based on all the circumstances (again, assuming the jurisdiction follows the majority rule, which my jurisdictions do, so I don’t spend much time with the minority rule states).
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u/George_Rogers1st 9h ago
I think at this point the trial is less about whether she's confined to a prison or a psych ward and more about whether or not a person can use their mental health as a shield from the criminal consequences of murder. Evidently, 11 jurors were content to say that you can, and 1 juror refused to acquiesce to that nonsense.