When my daughter was between two and a half and three years old, she went through a tantrum stage. The way she organized her tantrums was hilarious. She would look around, scout a location where she would be visible to me but be in no danger of hitting any furniture, lower herself very carefully to the ground, arrange her clothing so that it wouldn’t get crumpled, and proceed with the tantrum. I would get up and go to another room. She would stop the tantrum, get up, follow me to wherever I was, and repeat the procedure.
What conclusion did I draw when observing this? The same one that you drew when reading my description. This was not a real tantrum. A real tantrum happens when a child is so overcome by a powerful emotion that he is unable to complete these hyper-rational steps and most definitely is incapable of caring about the convenience of the exercise and the state of his clothing.
This is how I know that Lindsay Clancy did not experience postpartum psychosis. Postpartum psychosis is real. It is a terrible and extremely rare affliction. It is incompatible with planning, scheduling, and calculation. You cannot choose to put off a psychotic episode to a convenient time that fits your schedule. The reason why psychotic people are found not guilty by reason of mental defect in court is because they have no control over their actions. A real psychotic break is a physiological event. In this sense, it’s like a heart attack. You cannot say, “OK, it’s inconvenient for me to have a heart attack on Tuesday, so I’ll put it off until Wednesday afternoon.”
The capacity of creating and executing a plan is evidence of rationality. The plan can be despicable, but the evil nature of your actions in pursuit of executing this plan is not evidence of irrationality.
That Clancy “asked for help” or was on a cocktail of strong meds is irrelevant to the issue of whether she was in control of her faculties during the murder. She did not flow off the handle and start hacking at strong adults who could physically overpower her. To the contrary, she schemed to get such a strong adult out of the house and attacked people who could not defend themselves. That she attempted to commit suicide after the murders is also not evidence of psychosis unless we decide that all suicidal people are psychotic.
It’s the same thing with Decarlos Brown. He targeted a small, skinny woman. He explained that he targeted her because of her race. He positioned himself behind her to be able to attack her successfully. None of this is psychotic or irrational. It’s evil. But it’s not a foundation for a not guilty verdict.
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