Here’s an excerpt from Netanyahu’s speech that I think encapsulates the irony of the situation:

Devastating Iran’s nuclear facilities was hard. It was very hard to do. But for me, it was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make as prime minister. Because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.
Now, you want to hear the ultimate irony?

In defending itself, Israel is also defending many of the countries whose delegates just left this hall!

In fact, I want you to know that many of their leaders even thank us privately for taking out Iran’s nukes.

There is a great deal of charade in the Middle East, and a great deal of destructive maneuvering at the UN. Netanyahu is telling the truth, but it won’t matter.

The UN has been an anti-Israel force for a long long time, which is also ironic because it was a UN vote that helped establish the modern state of Israel. For the history-challenged (which is an ever-increasing number of people), see this:

Throughout 1947, the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine examined the Palestinian question and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end.

Other ironies: it is Hamas and other terrorist groups who would dearly love to genocide the Israelis/Jews if they could, and 10/7 was a step in that direction with greater ambitions than it achieved. It is Israel that has neither wanted to commit genocide nor taken steps to do so, and yet it is Israel that is widely accused of genocide. It is Hamas and other terrorists groups that purposely kill babies and other children in Israel as well as purposely putting their own children in harm’s way, whereas Israel tries not to kill children but sometimes does so as collateral damage, and yet it is the Israelis who are accused of targeting children.

The latest salvo in the “child-killer” rhetoric is this pernicious propaganda film:

Israel’s culture minister has called for the Oscar-winning Israeli co-directors of Naza, a documentary that accuses the Israeli army of mass civilian killings in Gaza, to be stripped of their citizenship over “treason against the state”.

Named for the Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage, the film speaks to 24 unidentified Israeli military and intelligence officers who outlined the AI-powered targeting systems used by the Israeli army to bombard Gaza in the war triggered by the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023.

Twenty-four unidentified Israeli military and intelligence officers. Hey, can I be one, too?

More:

How does a film reliant on masked “witnesses,” unverified testimonials, and zero cross-examination command instant international acclaim?

You know how – it fits the preferred agenda of the Israel-haters and Jew-haters and Netanyahu-haters around the world, and in particular the left but hardly limited to it.

Co-director Yuval Abraham claimed the film was created to “spark a public discussion about the Israeli government’s actions.” But if the genuine goal is to spark a meaningful, honest conversation, you must present full context and transparent information. You must give people the complete picture so they can make an informed judgment. True dialogue requires context, nuanced expert analysis, and an honest acknowledgment of the existential security threats Israel faces. …

Much of the Western public exhibits an insatiable appetite for any narrative that delegitimizes or criminalizes the State of Israel, or its IDF. We see this cycle play out constantly: initial, unverified claims or inflated casualty figures following an Israeli strike make front-page headlines and send thousands into the streets in protest. Days later, when independent reviews reveal the original reporting was false or misleading, the retraction is buried in quiet, footnote-sized corrections that nobody reads. The damage is already done. Without verifiable identity, specific context, or cross-examination, some audiences trust and applaud the authors’ narrative on faith.

None of this is to claim that any military, including the IDF, operates flawlessly or above critique. Evaluating military ethics in asymmetric warfare is agonizingly complex.

How do you calculate proportionality when fighting an enemy that deliberately embeds itself behind its own civilian population? When terrorist cells operate out of homes, schools, and hospitals, using human shields, every military response carries tragic potential costs. But judging operations strictly by their heartbreaking outcomes—while entirely ignoring the explicit strategy of human shielding that causes them—presents a fundamentally distorted view of reality.

Distorting reality in the interests of a narrative is the point. What’s more, it has been very very successful.

The post Mamdani didn’t stop Netanyahu from speaking at the UN after all appeared first on The New Neo.

In a way, it’s understandable. It must seem like forever to them that he’s been in office. Not only does he tweak and poke and tease them, but he was first elected ten years ago. I suspect that those four years of Biden between Trump’s two terms has only served to make it seem as though Trump’s been in charge much longer than he actually has.

They would dearly like it to end ASAP:

We polled five routes for Trump to leave office before the end of his term. A plurality of Dems support four of them, including a military coup and death by natural causes. The only one underwater, an assassination, is still supported by 29%. pic.twitter.com/C3qb2H0R8j

— Center for Strategic Politics (@StratPolitics) September 21, 2026

That 29% for the assassination seems a trifle low, by the way – I get 32% when I add the figures up.

If you can’t access X and can’t see the chart, the five routes are the following:

(1) Impeached and convicted, which draws 87%, 75% of them very strongly. For what would he be impeached? Who cares, really?

(2) Declared unfit under the 25th Amendment, which draws 84%, 70% of them very strongly.

(3) Died overnight in his sleep, which draws 55%, 45% of them very strongly. Well, at least they don’t want him to suffer.

(4) Removed by military coup, which draws 59%, 43% of them very strongly. Nothing like a little “our democracy” action.

(5) Assassinated while speaking at a rally, which draws 32%, 23% of them very strongly. That’s about a third of respondents. What’s more, another 25% would be indifferent/neutral if that happened.

Rather astounding, except for the fact that I’ve known many people to voice a wish that Trump would die. They seem otherwise normal, living normal and even kindly lives. TDS is very very real.

The post Nevertheless, Democrats don’t think they’re the bad guys appeared first on The New Neo.

Modern-day jurors have a tendency to discuss trials and deliberations publicly, and a number of Clancy case jurors have come out with a lot to say, post-trial. Their decision came down, as I figured it would, to the idea of reasonable doubt, held by eleven jurors who would have put Clancy in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time rather than in prison for life.

I’ve written before about the fact that Massachusetts law supports that verdict (whether you think it’s a good law or not, and personally I do not) and how unusual that law is. Here’s a post I wrote on the subject.

I will add that in law school I studied the law of criminal responsibility as it relates to mental illness, and I also have my training as a family therapist, and I have long thought there is no good solution to the problem of psychosis and crime. There is a wide variety of legal approaches – very wide, actually – all with pros and cons, and all unsatisfactory.

The approach I prefer is to sentence the person, and if there is diminished responsibility because of a psychosis, the person starts serving the sentence in a mental hospital and finishes out the term in prison when the hospital deems the person recovered from the psychosis, with the total in both institutions being the time served. It’s not a great solution at all, but I think it is probably better than the others.

But it’s very far from the law prevailing in Massachusetts, the law under which Clancy was tried and which operates in this case.

Those who believe Clancy should have been found guilty seem to perceive a sex divide in the jurors’ opinions because the lone holdout was a male – as well as a race divide because he was also black. But there were two other males on the jury, and they sided with the nine women on the panel. The jurors are being portrayed by many on the right more or less this way (the following excerpt is by John Hinderaker):

You know the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case? The one who thought strangling her three children was a crime worth punishing? The one the liberal white women jurors denounced as dumb? Unable to understand the jury instructions and comprehend the subtle concept of reasonable doubt? Turns out he was the only juror “of color.” The holdout juror was a black guy …

But that’s a false dichotomy. Based on Massachusetts law, I might even have reluctantly sided with those “liberal white women jurors” in their verdict (not necessarily in their descriptions of the lone holdout, which by the way don’t seem to have actually included the word or even the concept “dumb”). Was the holdout the only person on the jury who thought strangling three children was a horrific crime “worth punishing”? But the jurors were not being asked if it was a serious crime worth punishing. They were being asked whether Clancy’s moral sense and criminal responsibility were compromised by her serious mental problems:

“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time,” foreperson Roni Carlson said.

Legally in Massachusetts, if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy knew right from wrong and also could have restrained herself from those criminal acts, then the verdict of the eleven would be quite appropriate. That seems to me to be the case, whether I like that verdict or not. But instead, the lone holdout is being considered by the right as a hero and as the only virtuous person on the jury, and the eleven others (nine women and two men) are considered to be excusing the murder of children rather than trying to follow the law while realizing full well how horrific these crimes were.

But the most important reason the holdout should come in for criticism is this (at least, according to the other jurors who gave interviews): he had agreed with them that there was reasonable doubt that Clancy should be held fully responsible and yet he was determined to find her guilty anyway. That’s a form of jury nullification, basically, because it’s not the way the law in Massachusetts works. In Massachusetts, if reasonable doubt on the score exists, you must find the defendant not guilty:

“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.

“There were three forms I had to fill out and I started filling them out, I wrote my signature on each one but then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”

Nor did the interviewed jurors blame Clancy’s husband Patrick instead, which was one of the conspiracy theories popular with some especially extreme online Lindsay-defenders. Here’s what two of the jurors said about Clancy’s husband:

Juror No. 5 said she “will never be the same” after hearing Patrick’s 911 call, which was not publicly broadcast.

The “horrifying” [911 call made by Patrick] dispelled any online conspiracy theories that the husband was somehow involved, according to the anonymous panelist.

“All I could think was that if these people could have heard that visceral, blood-curdling scream, I don’t think I could name a single actor or actress that could have performed that the way he did, and not that he performed it, but I will never be the same after that,” she said.

“Just to imagine living through that and being the person to find your children in that scenario, it shakes you.”

I think it’s very interesting that a great many people on the right who think Clancy absolutely should have been found guilty are playing the race card about the lone holdout juror. They are asserting that the eleven (who were white) who voted to commit Clancy are racists putting down a heroic black man.

Now it turns out that the holdout juror had a history of domestic violence allegations. The Hinderaker article says this:

It is a rule of modern life that anyone who dissents from leftist dogma must be destroyed.

However, there was a reason to reveal the information that’s not about “destroying” this man. That reason was this [my emphasis]:

The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.

The still-unnamed juror, only described as a black man in his 30s, faced a criminal charge in September 2021 for allegedly assaulting his wife, NBC10 Boston reported. …

A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.

If he’d answered honestly, he almost certainly would not have been serving on the jury. I think this matters and that it’s not merely some idle and vicious doxxing, as Matt Walsh writes:

They’re flat-out doxxing an anonymous juror because he didn’t acquit a triple murderer. These people are evil beasts. Demons from hell.

And Hinderaker wrote:

This was an effort by a “reporter” named Sue O’Connell and a Boston television station, NBC10, to doxx the holdout juror and ruin his life. Why? So that in the future, no one will dare to oppose the agenda of the far left while serving on a jury. Every juror must toe the line, or else.

Left out is the fact that the juror apparently lied in order to get on the jury. And so perhaps he did have an agenda after all. There’s a reason they ask that question of jurors. Do we not care about that sort of thing anymore? I submit that we should care and that we certainly would care if this juror had come to a conclusion with which we disagreed.

It’s fully possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. But do it without playing the race card – something about which the right always mocks the left. And do it without pretending that this guy didn’t violate the jury selection rules, at least if these allegations about him are true.

The post The Lindsay Clancy eleven and the sole holdout appeared first on The New Neo.

Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.

Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.

Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence:

Pearl was born Eveline Rejwan on November 11, 1935, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Joseph, was a tailor who ran an import business, and her mother, Victoria (Abada) Rejwan, was a homemaker. … When Pearl was 5, she lived through the Farhud, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Iraq following a failed nationalist coup. She and her family hid in their home for days, protected by their Arab neighbors who told rioters that no Jews lived there.

Her family then moved to a suburb of Baghdad but anti-Jewish attacks persisted and she herself witnessed the bodies of Iraqi Jews hanging from gallows in a square. Her father lost vision in one eye after an assault and he had to bribe a police officer to free his two sons after they were arrested on false charges.

In the late 1940s, Pearl worked with an underground Zionist movement that facilitated the emigration of Jews, then illegal, to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Pearl began using the Hebrew name Ruth. Around 1948, her two older brothers were smuggled into Palestine from Iraq. In 1949, Ruth’s oldest brother was killed fighting for the Israeli army, which she did not learn about until years later as her father had withheld the information from his family. In 1951, Pearl arrived with her family in Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.

So the horror of Arab anti-Semitism was one of her earliest experiences, long before the nightmare returned in a very personal way.

Pearl’s mother met her husband Judah Pearl in Israel, and they moved to the US in 1950 for graduate studies. Both were scientists. Ruth Pearl died in 2021, but her husband is still alive at 87, and he was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants who had had the prescience and good fortune to be able to emigrate to Israel.

Daniel Pearl was abducted, held hostage, and murdered by various jihadi groups in 2002, when he was 38 years old. That was over 20 years ago, so you may have forgotten some of the details that perhaps didn’t seem so important at the time. But here are a few:

On February 21, 2002, a video was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl’s mutilated body …

The Jew Daniel Pearl. And of course there was the broadcasting, with great pride, of not just the killing but the mutilation. What seemed so unusual back then stopped being unusual a long time ago, because we’ve seen many such videos over the years. And now, with social media, we have refinements such as this: filming the murder of a young man on his cellphone, and sending the video to his mother.

But back to Pearl and the video of his killing. During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:

My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.

Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first. One can argue about what the Koran says about Jews; it says a lot of contradictory things, many of them not good. But you can’t argue about what hadith Hamas chose to put in its charter as inspiration:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him

So do not be surprised when Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in Western countries stand in public squares and celebrate the killing of Jews and scream that they want to kill more. As courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:

In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement’s noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.

The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.

As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.

I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.

When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.

Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.

It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word. …

[Much later] I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism’s pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.

The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should ‘nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred’ of Jews.

One of the most chilling things about the 10/7 terrorist attacks was that for several previous years Hamas pretended to be backing away from violence, and fooled Israel into thinking that actually was true. Now they are bragging about the success of their deception, which caused the Israelis to give them travel permits and also to let down their guard somewhat. According to a Hamas official:

“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”

And they want this to be a worldwide effort. They’ve been preparing the ground for decades: emigrating to Western nations, using propaganda in the MSM, and enlisting many allies in academia (see this). Perhaps they have overestimated their support and overplayed their hand, causing at least some of their erstwhile allies in the Western Left to recoil in horror. Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is no mistaking their intent anymore, nor the lengths to which they are willing to go to achieve it.

9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.

The post Don’t forget the murder of Daniel Pearl, “the Jew” appeared first on The New Neo.

Wimsatt was sitting on a park bench at 10:55 a.m. Monday in the 2400 block of Chandler Creek Road when [Benedict Ogbodiegwu, 26] began attacking him with a knife about three minutes later, the document said.

Ogbodiegwu wrapped his left arm around Wimsatt, the affidavit said. It said Wimsatt tried to push him off but failed. Ogbodiegwu stabbed Wimsatt several times before Wimsatt fell to the ground, where Ogbodiegwu continued to stab him, according to the affidavit.

According to the document, Ogbodiegwu then put his knee on the victim’s chest and started sawing the knife across Wimsatt’s neck before running away toward the park’s pool area.

Winsatt never had a chance. By all accounts – and there are many, because Winsatt was known by many people online – the victim was “a gentle and generous soul.” For example, from David Burge (“Iowahawk”):

Andrew was a well respected civil engineer who worked in highway design and transportation research, a bit of a gentle avuncular Southern gentleman who was at the same time an afficionado of punk rock, pop surrealism art, and Midcentury Modern. He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 landmark MCM condominium building near the Texas Capitol in Austin.

He was also a supporter of libertarian causes, particularly free speech on campus, and was a superfriend of @wethefifth and
@TheFIREorg. Supernice as they come, never an angry word about anyone, which makes this all the more incomprehensible.

Last time I saw Andrew was when my son played a show at the 29th Street Ballroom in Austin a few months ago. I didn’t even know he was aware of the kid, but apparently had previously ordered a few signed copies of his debut vinyl LP and was there to see him play live.

Hawkspawn, Mrs B, and I had a nice chat with him after the show. I called Hawkspawn to let him know and he, like me, was a bit shook by the news.

RIP and Godspeed, Busty.

What an outrageous and horrible and utterly cowardly deed. And yet of a type with which we’ve because all too familiar. RIP.

The suspect has a history of arrest for theft; see this. I’m sure the authorities know a great deal more about him, but so far no information has been released.

The post A murder most foul in Austin appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve noticed a great deal of confusion about postpartum depression versus postpartum psychosis. The two are different entities.

Postpartum psychosis is rare and postpartum depression is common. With postpartum psychosis, the sufferer is more likely to be at risk for harming or killing her children even through she has shown nothing but love and caring for them in the past. Postpartum psychosis does not lead to random assaults, when it does lead to crimes. It leads to child harming or child murder, usually under the sway of a delusion of some sort, and often coupled with suicide attempts or completed suicides.

See this:

The postpartum period is the time of highest risk in a woman’s lifetime for the development of a mental illness. Although the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) defines the postpartum period as the immediate, relatively short time following delivery, in research studies this period has been defined as ranging from a few days to 12 months.

Postpartum-onset psychological problems generally fall into one of three categories: so-called baby blues, postpartum depression, and postpartum psychosis. Baby blues affect up to 70 percent of mothers and include mild symptoms of crying and irritability which end by the second week after childbirth. Postpartum-onset depression affects from 7 to 15 percent of mothers and is characterized by sadness, crying, self-blame, loss of control, irritability, anxiety, tension, and sleep difficulties. Factors such as personality, negative feelings toward the infant, marital discord, poor social supports, and ambivalence over parenthood appear to predispose women to the onset of depressive symptoms in the postpartum period.

Postpartum psychosis, the most severe of postpartum mental disorders, occurs in 1 to 2 of 1,000 births and frequently requires hospitalization to stabilize symptoms. … The disorder is characterized by an extended period of loss of contact with reality that may include auditory or visual hallucinations, delusions, or rapid mood swings. The auditory and visual hallucinations may focus on violence toward self or the infant.

Risk factors for postpartum psychosis can be of both biologic and genetic origins. One study found that the rate of postpartum psychosis in mothers with bipolar disorder was 26 percent, with the rate in mothers with bipolar disorder and a family history of postpartum psychosis increasing to 57 percent. …

… [R]esearch supports that postpartum psychosis is associated with prominent cognitive disturbances, ranging from mental confusion and indecision to intrusive and bizarre thoughts. Women with this disorder can appear delirious and disorganized. Second, symptoms can arise and dissipate suddenly, with the woman appearing lucid one moment and psychotic the next. Third, although DSM-IV-TR classifies it as a psychotic disorder not otherwise specified, research shows that the syndrome can have both affective and psychotic components.

It has been estimated that four percent of women with postpartum psychosis commit infanticide. …

The insanity defense is successful in less than 0.1 percent of all criminal trials. However, major population studies, including McKee and Shea, d’Orban, and Bourget and Bradford, found insanity pleas successful in 20, 27, and 15 percent of infanticide cases, respectively. These results suggest that, regardless of the legal or medical guidelines, the law treats women who kill their children with more leniency. Nonetheless, infanticide case outcomes vary extremely. At least two such women have been sentenced to death, whereas some have been released without a prison sentence

That article is from 2012, and the review of cases goes back a ways before that. So we’re not talking about the result of recent internet social media hysteria influencing trials. Most of the data almost certainly predates the ascendance of social media.

You may decide that postpartum psychosis is a myth promulgated by those who wish to avoid punishment for killing their children. I think that underestimates the power of psychosis in general and this type of psychosis in particular. Note also that, as a defense to child murder, it’s most often unsuccessful. It certainly would be far less likely to be a successful defense in cases in which there is no history of deep postpartum disturbance and the seeking of psychological help prior to the murders.

Note also that postpartum psychosis is already very rare, and in that small group 4% go on to murder their children, which makes that phenomenon exceedingly rare indeed. However, I’ve seen people in discussion groups involving the Clancy murders to state that 50,000 women kill their children in the US every year. That bears no resemblance to the actual figures, which are much smaller although still profoundly disturbing:

Between 1976 and 2004, 30 percent of all children younger than five years old who were murdered were killed by their mothers, while 31 percent were killed by their fathers. A study by Brown University showed that from 1976 to 2007, on average, there were 500 cases of filicide a year in the United States.

So that 50,000 figure overstates filicide by a huge factor. Plus, mothers account for about half of the actual figure. This is in marked contrast to the much more lopsided statistics between the sexes for crimes of violence in general.

Nor is the idea of postpartum psychosis as connected with child murder an especially new one:

In the United States, psychiatrists recognized the significance of recent childbirth in acts against infants. In 1927, the field divided infanticide based on whether the mother was still lactating, or breastfeeding. Many cases were attributed to exhaustion or what was then called lactation psychosis, a recognition that hormonal changes and the stress of parenting a newborn could affect one’s well-being.

That article cites a different statistic for filicide in the US – a higher one, although still far short of 50,000 a year:

The Washington Post cites a Brown University study in 2014 that found three thousand filicides occur each year in the United States.

The following are the categories of motivations for maternal filicide (not just for filicide in which the perpetrator claims postpartum psychosis – this is for filicide in general):

Resnick, in his 2016 study, found that mothers who kill their children have one of five motives: altruistic filicide, or the belief that the child is better off dead (usually because the parent intends to commit suicide and does not wish to leave the child alone or because the child has a real or perceived disability); acutely psychotic filicide, or no understandable reason; fatal maltreatment filicide, when a mother abuses the child but does not necessarily intend to kill the youngster; unwanted child filicide, when a mother wants to be free of the child she feels is holding her back (possibly because a new partner does not want stepchildren or the parent seeks a benefit such as insurance money); and spouse revenge filicide, when a mother kills the child to wound the father for actions such as abandonment or infidelity, as in the myth of Medea. Altruistic filicide is the most common—Resnick found that it accounted for 49 percent of the cases reviewed—while spouse revenge filicide is the rarest at 2 percent. Among maternal infanticides, or the killing of a child younger than one year, perpetrators were often unemployed women in their early twenties.

My perception of the Clancy case is that most people who defend Clancy and think she was not criminally responsible believe that her motive was that she was acutely psychotic, period. On the other hand, those who believe she’s guilty of murder tend to believe that her motive was either the first – altruistic suicide – or unwanted child filicide (that she wanted to rid herself of inconvenient children cramping her style in some way).

There are also some Clancy-defenders who believe she didn’t even do it, but that falls into a different category entirely. In addition, there are some people who think Clancy should be found guilty who believe that even if she was psychotic it should not absolve her of any criminal responsibility.

Another high-profile case of maternal filicide and claimed mental illness was that of Susan Smith, in which it seems fairly clear that it was actually unwanted child filicide; Smith was found guilty of murder. She had also distinguished herself by claiming a black man had kidnapped her children:

On October 25, 1994, Smith reported to police that she had been the victim of a carjacking by a black man while driving her 1990 Mazda Protégé sedan with her sons – Michael, aged three, and Alexander, aged 14 months – still in the back seat. For nine days, she made dramatic pleas on national television for their safe return. However, following an intensive investigation and a nationwide search for them, she confessed on November 3, 1994, to letting her car roll into nearby John D. Long Lake, drowning them inside. Her motivation was reportedly to facilitate a relationship with a local wealthy man named Tom Findlay. Prior to the murders, he sent her a letter ending their relationship and expressing that he did not want children. She said there was no motive nor did she plan the murders, stating that she was not in a right state of mind.

Very different fact situation.

The post Postpartum psychosis is not postpartum depression appeared first on The New Neo.

The word “insanity” is actually fairly meaningless in this case, as well. It’s not the legal standard by which Clancy might be found to have had reduced criminal responsibility. I think many people are letting their everyday ideas about “insanity” get in the way of understanding the relevant legal standard in Massachusetts:

In the state of Massachusetts, a person may be found not guilty of a crime “if they lacked criminal responsibility when they committed the offense,” according to the Massachusetts Court System. …

Jurors are instructed that in order to prove a defendant is criminally responsible for their conduct, prosecutors must “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not suffer from a mental disease or defect at the time of the alleged offense.”

There’s also this:

The second way to prove criminal responsibility, according to the state court system, is for prosecutors to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, even if the defendant suffered from a mental disease or defect at the time of the alleged offense, the defendant nonetheless retained the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness or criminality of their conduct and to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.”

That’s the more basic question with Clancy: she would not only have to have known right from wrong at the time (I think she probably did know right from wrong) but she would also have to have been able to “conform her conduct” to the law despite having a mental disease or defect. That last part is the real question: could she or couldn’t she conform her conduct to the law? In order for jurors to find that she could conform her conduct to the law, it would have to have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.. But I think there clearly was reasonable doubt on that score, and/or it’s certainly understandable that someone could in good faith find reasonable doubt.

Nor do we know exactly what the eleven jurors in this case had agreed on for a verdict and what the lone holdout wanted. There were many possibilities for the agreed-on verdict of the eleven, but we can be pretty sure it wasn’t murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence. Of the other possibilities:

Jurors also have the option to find Clancy guilty of the lesser offenses of second-degree murder, which is punishable by a life sentence with the possibility of parole, or manslaughter, which carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

If she is ever found not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility, the court would begin the process of committing Clancy to a state psychiatric facility. Her commitment order would be subject to regular review by the court, though she could be committed to the facility indefinitely.

I think it most likely that the verdict the eleven voted for was “not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility,” and the penalty would be subsequent commitment, and that Clancy would probably end up being confined for a very very long time.

Can we assume we know what the single holdout wanted? Almost certainly it wasn’t “not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility.” But I wouldn’t assume it was “guilty of murder” either, although many people are assuming that. However, it could have been “guilty of second-degree murder” or “guilty of manslaughter.” We simply don’t know; I wonder if we’ll ever know.

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What might happen in a second trial? Perhaps a plea deal of some sort; it’s very hard to say.

However, I was surprised to read yesterday that there is apparently only a single juror who is holding out:

The trial of Lindsay Clancy — which has captivated the nation since July — took a bombshell turn on Thursday when it was revealed that there was one juror who disagreed with the rest following 36 hours of intense deliberation.

The news, which came via a note from the forewoman that a single holdout “refuses to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt, left Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington visibly raging — and demanding the person be kicked off the 12-person jury and replaced with an alternate.

The judge did not grant that demand. But it sounds as though the holdout is for a guilty verdict and the rest are not – although, as I’ve said before, I don’t see how Clancy goes free and I don’t think she will, whatever the verdict.

The law in Massachusetts on this is very unusual – in fact, I think it is singular. This is how it works [emphasis mine]:

Once the defense raises the issue of the accused’s mental state at the time of the crime, prosecutors bear the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible, said Daniel Medwed, a university distinguished professor of law.

“In Massachusetts, we don’t typically use the term ‘insanity defense,’” Medwed said, citing the stigma that attaches to the word “insanity.” Instead, it’s referred to as “lack of criminal responsibility.” …

In Massachusetts, the defense may apply when a person’s mental condition prevents them from understanding or controlling their actions at the time of an alleged crime, including during an episode of psychosis. A qualifying mental disease or defect also need not fit a specific medical diagnosis.

You can see how this might lead to a situation in which a holdout juror refuses to listen to the law on reasonable doubt. That’s because the law on this in Massachusetts is very much tilted in favor of the defendant. In other states, the burden of proof for lack of criminal responsibility is different:

In many jurisdictions, insanity is an affirmative defense, meaning the burden falls on the defense to prove that a defendant had “a mental disease or defect” that prevented them from understanding the nature of their actions, Medwed said. But that is not the case in Massachusetts, he said.

Procedurally, that means the defense “doesn’t have to do as much” in the way of persuading jurors compared with other states, according to Medwed.

However, an affirmative defense doesn’t have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. It needs to be proved by a preponderance of the evidence or clear and convincing evidence, defending on the jurisdiction.

The state of things as I write these words is this:

The judge in Lindsay Clancy’s trial has given the defense one hour to make an emergency appeal before declaring a mistrial. …

A filing from Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney has been submitted to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, according to the clerk’s office.

And the court is on lunch break.

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About the victim:

University of Pennsylvania grad Erin Piacenti, 32, of Chester, NJ, posted a touching photo only four days before her murder of herself smiling broadly while holding her infant and standing with her husband — and wrote how happy she was, the New York Times reported.

Piacenti, also a Fordham Law School graduate who ended up working for Bank of America, said in the post that she was grateful for getting five months off to care for her new daughter, according to the outlet. …

The banking exec was knifed to death by mentally disturbed mom of three Pamela Cisneros, 49, during a random attack Monday afternoon in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district. Cisneros also stabbed and wounded another passerby before cops shot her dead.

The perp had a known history of mental illness, so this case is also still another example of a failure of that system. The police tried to tase Cisneros, but the taser had no effect on her.

The NY Post has written many articles about this horrific incident, including this editorial:

The Times Square stabbing maniac should not have been walking free: Court records and social-media posts sounded blaring alarms that she needed help . . . but progressives fight tooth and nail against involuntary commitment, no matter how many innocents like Erin Piacenti die.

It’s bad enough that obviously homicidal people such as Cisneros are walking the streets. It’s horrific that anyone on the far left celebrates such killings based on the race and jobs of the victims. But this has been going on for quite some time. It’s the same impulse that led to the killing fields of Cambodia, which class enemies (including people who merely wore eyeglasses) were slaughtered:

Once the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a radical reorganization of Cambodian society. This meant the forced removal of city dwellers into the countryside, where they would be forced to work as farmers, digging canals and tending to crops. Gross mismanagement of the country’s economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of people succumbed to disease and starvation. Families were also split up. The Khmer Rouge created labor brigades, assigning groups depending on age and gender. This policy resulted in hundreds of thousands of Cambodians starving to death.

… Because the Khmer Rouge placed a heavy emphasis on the rural peasant population, anyone considered an intellectual was targeted for special treatment. This meant teachers, lawyers, doctors, and clergy were the targets of the regime. Even people wearing glasses were the target of Pol Pot’s reign of terror.

This is also an impulse I recall from the terrorism in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I very much doubt that our present-day young people of the leftist variety know much if anything of this history except perhaps to applaud it. And I also doubt that the Cambodian killing fields or the earlier war of the Soviets against the kulaks are widely taught in many of our US colleges, except perhaps to be excused and/or justified.

Most garden-variety Democrats probably aren’t applauding killings such as that of Piacenti or championing Luigi Mangione, but there’s a not-insignificant group of leftists who are. Plus, it is the case that a great many of those garden-variety Democrats routinely call for the murder of President Trump. There is a bloodthirstiness there that is chilling.

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