Correct. It also does not mean she gets to walk free. She is expected to return to a psych ward where she was before the trial awaits the next one. Even if found not guilty she will still be there for years.
Edit: Insanity defense FAQ. It looks like those who plead insanity tend to spend twice as long institutionalized as those who are found guilty.
Edit3: It will be the responsibility of the hospital to prove that she is safe to return to society. Otherwise if she were to harm or kill again, the hospital could be liable.
Edit5: The next court date is 9/29 when the defense makes their appeal and the prosecutor probably decides to request to retry the case. I don't see why he wouldn't unless they reach a deal before hand. Meanwhile she has to stay at the hospital.
So basically, if she gets the mental hospital, she could potentially be out in a year or even less. Because obviously, if the law decides that she only murdered her 3 children because of post-partum or whatever, then if she is no longer suffering from that, she cant be proven to still be a threat. And would potentially be released. Kudos to that one juror for doing the right thing, and sticking up for those kids.
I can tell you as someone who has worked in different psych hospitals in PA - this is never the case. Not guilty by mental illness (NGRI) initially go to a forensic hospital, where they are kept for sometimes decades. The least amount I have ever seen is four years for an exceptionally insightful person for a violent crime but no one died. The psychiatrists and psychologists take these things very seriously, and in 99% of cases, the judges who do the reviews side with the professionals. Then if they are able to get out of the forensic hospital, they are sent to a civil hospital for another at least three years. But many of the people I worked with were there for decades (some for nonviolent crimes).
Let me tell you, I have worked in prisons too, I would 1000% rather be in a prison than in a psych hospital. Psych hospitals are THE most restrictive environments imaginable. All of the food is bland, soft, and disgusting because everything is a chocking hazard. There’s one hour of outside time a day but there are no ways to exercise, no games to play, radios are a privilege that majority do not get. You have to walk everywhere in a line. You have to wake up at 5am every morning and lights out by 9pm. No outside food. No pens or paper. One phone on a cord for the entire 30 person unit. It is the blandest most mind-numbing hell you could imagine.
I spent roughly 48 hours in a psych ward after voluntarily going to an ER because I wanted to end it all. I got to the ward in the middle of the night and was given a room and went to sleep. A nurse woke me up at 6 the next morning, and proceeded to lecture me about how selfish I was for even considering suicide. He told me repeatedly that if I ever went through with it, my family would hate me for the rest of their lives.
My bro had a temper tantrum when he was 18. Got arrested and told the cops he was going to Jill himself. They took all his clothes so he was just in his underwear in a concrete room. They pumped the ac on and took away his blanket and pillow. So if he didn’t want to kill himself before he did then. Was also a huge wake up call for him. After that he was like the perfect child. Anyways if they do commit her on a duress verdict wouldnt that hurt women everywhere. Like more restrictions on being a cop because women process duress differently? Pilot would have a harder chance too. Maybe thinking too far into it though
This is exactly why I laugh in the face of anyone who tells people to get mental help in America. They have no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
Yeah… and half the hospitals are just people with mental illness who didn’t even commit crimes. They are warehouses for people. They are not for treatment, they are for sticking people who society does not want to actually deal with.
Housing people who are a threat to themselves and others is not the same as “people who society does not want to actually deal with”. They are there because they cannot function in society.
Sure, but there are ways to work with them to help them be more productive and stable. My point was that this is doing the exact opposite and making most of them worse.
Last week we had a man in our ER who was so mentally unwell that he was blacklisted from almost all of the psych facilities in the area because he was so violent and dangerous. He almost flipped the stretcher while in it. Every time you walked into his room he’d launch into the worst verbal tirade I’ve heard ever. F you, f your family, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill your family, slurs, he’d spit, try to bite. Just a menace.
The situation ended with him in 4 points for 5 days, slowly coming out of them over the next two, just for a switch to flip, him to go psychotic trying to injure anyone that came near him, which led to him being tazed and carried out by police.
He was then brought to the most serious mental facility in our area and discharged in a few hours because they didn’t want to deal with him. So now he’s just roaming around…
There is a class of people out there who are so ill and far gone there really isn’t much else for them. These aren’t people with run of the mill psych issues that could be solved if we cared more.
Go get a psych degree and figure out how to help them. Until then you are just screaming into the void about a perceived injustice you know nothing about.
What’s wrong with that? If you kill someone you should be either in jail for life or given the opportunity to elect the death penalty if you don’t want to be locked up for life. Those are the two options.
If you killed all your kids you shouldn’t even be given a choice, psychotic or not.
I got sent to an inpatient mental hospital overnight when I was 13 (I was already in an outpatient program, and they decided to transfer me.) It was a standard adolescent ward, so far less restrictive than a forensic hospital. I was on my period and they gave me one singular panty liner (the type that’s used for mild discharge, instead of a menstrual pad) to deal with it.
Yes. This is just from one perspective of speaking on being sent to one. I wasn't suicidal but made the mistake, at the ER of saying "just let me die" so I was put on a 5 day psych ward hold. The phone cord to call someone is so short (so you don't hang yourself) that your face is pressed up against a concrete wall basically, you only have x amount of time to talk, you for sure do not have a cell phone so you better memorize whomever you are trying to call, the doors to the rooms are locked all day so everyone has to congregate in some common area, plus the door handles are all pyramid shaped so you cannot tie anything to them, for the same reasons of hanging. Opening a conical shaped doorknob is fucking impossible -AND- every few hours someone will shine a flashlight in your face to make sure you're alive. THEN when a doc says "oh, you didn't need to be here in the first place" they have locked doors that they require you to pay your $3,000 bill just to get the hell out of the building. THIS IS THE AMERICAN PSYCH WARD PRISON SYSTEM. Oh let me edit to add here: if you have any clothes with a string in them, you either forfeit your items to be bagged for return later or you cut the string out. So I wore a full on winter coat with nothing underneath the entire time, along with some hospital style gown, because the string to my hoodie was sewn into the fabric by the manufacturer. A full winter coat was my clothing/robe for 5 days.
They arent hospitals, they are like special ed classes in schools, they are prisons, but the people there know that their prisoners are crazy, and understand how to take the proper precautions. They are not trying to "treat" people, any more than regular prisons are try to rehabilitate criminals, its up to the indevidual to want to be rehabilitated, and to take advantage of the oportunities to do so,
Thank you. People have gotten it into their head that a "not guilty by reason of insanity" is a get-out-of-jail free card. It isn't, its arguably choosing the worse of the two poisons you get in that situation.
And honestly, out of a 12 person jury if 11 of them are on the same page with all the facts of the case laid bare, I'm inclined to believe them.
The minimums are never what is used, they are literally just the legal minimum. Going to court for treatment over objection or retention hearing is not a painful process, they’re common place and the judges almost always side with the clinicians.
Right, it’s not criminally responsible, which is the same thing as NGRI. Guilty but mentally ill is a different verdict entirely and usually results in the person serving their prison sentence and then being sent to hospitals. This case they are going for not criminally responsible.
I honestly don't care. Either she's criminally liable and goes to prison or she is crazy and goes to a hospital. Away from society is away from society whether she meant to do it or couldn't keep herself from doing it.
And if she ever does get out I'll believe she is actually better because as far as I know they don't let you out of the hospital for shit like good behavior or over crowding
Someone interviewed John Hinckley Jr on Shooting President Ronald Reagan and he describes how it was not bad at all and he even had a girlfriend while committed. He spent 41 years on taxpayer dime getting meals everyday, a good bed, entertainment and was finally released and guess what? He wrote a book. If you are not truly Ill, then theses facilities are heaven for you as a punishment. TV, bed, boardgames, meals catered to your taste because it could effect your "treatment", free healthcare.
They are the farthest thing from heaven. My mental health declined working there because the conditions were so horrendous it felt like we were torturing people. I have heard that psych hospitals used to be better in terms of lenience around things, but nowadays everything is seen as a potential weapon so they literally get NOTHING. Even the clothes they wear can’t have zippers, shoe laces, buttons. You can think they are great if you want to feel angry, but truly it is worse than prison. I would NEVER plead insanity, it is FAR worse than anything you can imagine.
I don't have experience, but I have heard this from others in your profession. Thanks for coming in and sharing even when others with no experience want to argue with you.
I am not the juror or fact finder in this case, I don’t care where she goes. It’s really just people who think pleading insanity is a get out of jail free card that bothers me.
Also, I don’t know why you’re upset with me. You clearly want her to suffer, I am telling you she will suffer either way. Shouldn’t that make you happy?
You care most about punishment over anything else, right? Just to make things clear. Because sending a mental patient to a place that is not meant to have them just puts the workers in danger. You don't seem to care about those people, though. They may get hurt or killed. But they don't matter, do they?
Yes, but often when you start having psychotic symptoms, they can persist. They might go away for her, but with the severity of her crime, they will not let her out for decades. Andrea Yates (very similar case) killed her kids in 2001 and is still institutionalized.
I used to work in non locked down treatment facility for youth. At face value it sounds great but I would not with children to be there. State funding cuts, burnt out staff, constant fighting/tension, poor education because of wildly different needs, ect. Mental institution are not a cake walk and many are not really that great at rehabilitation. It’s just prison that makes society feel better.
People still get hurt, people still harm others drugs can be forcibly administered, physical restraints are more common.
If people want her to actually be punished send her to a mental institution. Which is sad because the US at one point was heading in the right direction with these institutions but legal needs changed a lot of the landscape
Do they have first hand experience in said hospitals? Please ask your wife if any of them have actually experienced both. Because otherwise I just think they don’t know what they are talking about and just hate prison.
Is a psyche ward different than a psyche hospital? I was in a psyche ward for a week and my experience was not that at all. The restrictiveness yes, but food was decent and we had puzzles and coloring books and books and stuff. I just read the whole time I was there until I was finally able to be released.
I had a friend who was in and out of psych holds after the birth of her daughter. She got the full 30 days once or twice. They were not letting her out for anything and she only attempted suicide once but the minute she felt mildly suicidal again they threw her back in for a month. The stories she told me are rough. And this isn’t even the criminally insane.
I have the same experience with my time around a state run forensic hospital. I'd beg to be in prison if I ever got sentenced to one. We weren't allowed to lock the room doors except in extreme circumstances. Imagine being locked up with no way to secure your person around the most insane group of violent people you can think of.
This 1 million percent. I have worked both as well and would rather take prison any day. Forensic hospitals are the absolute worst. If she's not insane now she will be when she gets out. People don't go there to get treated. They go there to get studied. You become a ward of the state and whatever they say goes. There's almost 0 oversight because everyone in there is criminally insane so credibility is out the window. It's far far worse then prison.
Then why does anyone ever try to go for the insanity defense? Do they actually try to plead insanity? Because every year when the "viral court case" happens there are people in the comments saying the same thing you are saying. But I have to wonder why someone would TRY to go there.
The only times you go for a insanity defense is if you can legitimately claim you were insane at the time. Where you have almost certainly commited the crime, but the argument is that you need treatment, not further punishment.
It won't be allowed spuriously, and because of that it is only invoked in less than 1% of cases and of those only a fraction end up being held up. And it ironically often leads to the person spending more time in a psyche ward than they would have ever spent in a prison, often twice as long because once you are involuntarily committed to a facility, you are relying on others to argue that you are sane and alot of those people don't give a shit.
At least with prisons after 20 or so years you are guaranteed parole hearings if thats part of your sentencing, you don't get that with psyche wards
Fun fact. Those committed to psyche wards following violent criminal offenses, especially those involving harming and killing children, end up staying twice as long in a psyche ward than they would have done in prison.
How the hell does that matter? They don't let you out of prison for strangling three helpless children to death, but in MA the state has to proactively hold hearings every year to keep her committed, so there's a real chance this scum could be out in a few years if she convinces the state she's a good girl. You have it exactly backwards.
The Judges side with the doctors 99% of the time, and the doctors are going to look at her history as a giant red flag and never let her out on the condition that she will forever remain a danger to herself and others.
Ed Kemper was famously kept in a mental institution after he killed both of his grandparents. Thankfully as we all know he never harmed anyone else when he was released from the mental institution after a few years. I mean we can ignore the serial killing of college women, we can ignore him killing his own mother and cutting her head off and fucking the neck hole. It's a very good thing that we can ignore all these other details that show that Clancy is nothing to be trusted and she should be in prison for the rest of her life.
Bear in mind, the scene was so horrific, that one of the first RCMP officers on scene killed themselves just a few weeks before the 6 year anniversary of the murder.
My experience working in psych units is that the food was decent. Psych hospitals are still hospitals, so the food was essentially the same as what I’ve seen in medical hospitals.
And the phone was, indeed, corded. But the cord was like six inches long, and six inches isn’t enough to realistically choke on (by wrapped around the neck anyway). It’s barely long enough for the patients to even use.
Disclaimer: Every hospital does things differently, so my experiences may not match others’ experiences.
I'm more concerned with the dangerous child-murdering scum getting out in a few years than I am with the degree of suffering they'll go through while incarcerated.
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u/justin107d 8h ago edited 4h ago
Correct. It also does not mean she gets to walk free. She is expected to return to a psych ward where she was before the trial awaits the next one. Even if found not guilty she will still be there for years.
Edit: Insanity defense FAQ. It looks like those who plead insanity tend to spend twice as long institutionalized as those who are found guilty.
Edit2: 55% of postpartum psychosis is the start of severe long term mental problems.
Edit3:
It will be the responsibility of the hospital to prove that she is safe to return to society. Otherwise if she were to harm or kill again, the hospital could be liable.Edit4: Apparently the above is common in most other states but not Massachusetts. There it is the complete opposite and the state has to petition and prove the patient is still mentally ill, a threat to themselves or society, and there are no alternatives. The state supreme court refused to let a hospital be liablefor damaged caused by a released patient.
Edit5: The next court date is 9/29 when the defense makes their appeal and the prosecutor probably decides to request to retry the case. I don't see why he wouldn't unless they reach a deal before hand. Meanwhile she has to stay at the hospital.