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OK, this is a bit of a rant today. So bear with me.
Massachusetts has written into law something that most people probably STILL do not understand: a person can kill someone, successfully claim insanity, and never serve a prison sentence for the killing. Ever.
In Massachusetts, if the jury has reasonable doubt about whether the defendant was criminally responsible due to insanity, the verdict is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
The defendant can then be sent to a psychiatric hospital for an initial 40-day period of observation. After that, the state can seek to keep the person committed, initially for six months and then in renewable one-year periods. SO TECHNICALLY LINDSAY CLANCY COULD BE RELEASED 40 DAYS AFTER SENTENCING.
This is psychiatric confinement, not a prison sentence. Once the person no longer meets the requirements for involuntary commitment, they can be released. There is no murder sentence sitting there waiting to begin. There is no requirement that they spend 20 years, 30 years, or life behind bars because they took another person's life.
Think about what Massachusetts has created. Someone can commit a horrific murder, avoid a guilty verdict because there was reasonable doubt about their sanity at the time of the crime, spend some period of time in a psychiatric hospital, and walk out the door in 40 days if they are later judged well enough to be released. The victims remain dead. The killer can go home and murder again.
That is not a minor technicality in Massachusetts law.
There is no mandatory 20-year sentence. There is no mandatory ten-year sentence. There isn’t even a mandatory five-year sentence. Once the state can no longer prove that the killer remains mentally ill and dangerous enough to justify involuntary commitment, the legal basis for holding that person disappears. The murder does not then send them to prison, because legally they were acquitted of it.
Even more remarkable, it is extraordinarily difficult to determine what happens to these people after release. The Boston Globe found that Massachusetts privacy laws and fragmented records make systematic follow-up nearly impossible.
So the Commonwealth has constructed a system capable of releasing people who have killed after only a few years, while making it remarkably difficult for the public to determine how often they subsequently commit crimes. That is not transparency. And it is certainly not reassuring.
So when you listen to the juror implying that the holdout juror must have had ulterior motives, such as simply wanting to see Clancy go to prison, she is putting words in his mouth. She can’t get inside his head.
Being evil, even being possessed by evil, does not make someone insane. It makes them a murderer. There was substantial evidence that Clancy’s crimes were premeditated and not brought on by drugs. The evidence showed that she went on and off medications and was not taking anything particularly likely to induce psychosis at the time.
But even if she was in a drug-induced psychosis, that does not mean she is insane or shouldn’t be held responsible.
A man who gets drunk or takes drugs and then rapes a woman does not get to claim that the alcohol or drugs made him do it. Intoxication may impair judgment, lower inhibitions, or make someone more violent, but it does not magically erase responsibility for the crime, nor does it prove insanity. Being under the influence is not the same thing as being legally insane.
Massachusetts did not arrive at this absurd system overnight. It is the product of more than a century of law, followed by a series of changes beginning in the 1960s that made an already unusual system considerably more consequential.
