Is being "crazy" an excuse?
I guess that depends on how you handle genetical/mental defects as a society.
I guess that depends on how you handle genetical/mental defects as a society.
Stolen From the Womb: Kentucky woman accused of murder, theft of fetus
- Thread starter Tiassa
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It's a reason.
Bells
Staff member
That would have been her only mistake, and the one which ultimately led to her undoing.
But 6 to 7 months of pretending to be pregnant, preparing for this and trolling through Facebook to find her perfect victim.
I don't think she's crazy.
Several years ago, there was a man here in Australia, who on father's day, drove his 3 son's into a dam and the three children drowned. The father supposedly "escaped" from the car, flagged down a car, did not tell anyone in said car that his 3 young sons were in the car at the bottom of the dam, and asked to be driven to his ex-wife's house, not far away. He got there, started crying and told them about his "accident". The ex-wife and her new husband rushed to the dam and called the police along the way, they got there, the new husband dove into the freezing dam in desperate hope that they had been alive while the wife looked on hysterically. The father? Stood on the side of the dam trying to light a cigarette. At the time, everyone mourned the tragic "accident". And that what many thought it was at the time. But then the police started putting two and two together. The fact that when they got to the dam that night, they noticed that he was standing there smoking a cigarette while the stepfather and mother tried to rescue the children. Then his claims that the car veered into the dam and he couldn't control it. His claims that he had tried to unbuckle the children's seat belts..
When they checked the car, nothing was wrong with it. They realised that the eldest child had died trying to unbuckle his younger sibbling's seat belts in a futile attempt to rescue them. And no skidmarks. You'd think if a car was veering off the road, you'd try to hit the brakes. He did not. I think they even found he'd accelerated. So when his excuse of an accident burned down, he was charged. When the case went to trial, he went with diminished capacity - ie. temporary insanity. His ex-wife believed him, hell, a lot of people believed him. I mean what kind of father drowns his 3 loving sons, whom he apparently adored? But many people thought he was not insane. His ex-wife supported him through his trial, convinced if it was not an accident, that it would have to be temporary insanity. In interviews with her and with her new husband, you could tell the stepfather did not believe he was insane. Quite the contrary. He kept commenting about how he stood there and lit a smoke and how everything seemed so fake.. Over and over again while crying about the death of those three boys. The father was subsequently found guilty as the case unravelled around him as comments he'd made about getting back at his ex-wife started to surface. He'd been planning it for several months and no one guessed what he was planning, even though he had commented about it many times to his friends and family.
His only mistake was to not act like he was crazy and not be crying or even be in shock at the side of the dam, instead of only being concerned with trying to light a smoke and then lying about the car, assuming the police would simply believe him because he was the supposed grieving father.
This mother's sole mistake was to go to a hospital to have the baby checked. Just as that father's sole mistake was to stand there and light a smoke and then lie about his car.
Bells
Staff member
Crazy exists and there are some people who suffer from temporary insanity. But planning for 6+ months for something like this.. that kind of crazy? And no one guessed in all that time? Her husband? Her family? No one?
No, that's not crazy. Just cold and calculating.
Cold and calculating can be a psychopath as i wrote earlier. I wonder why people keep ignoring that.
Bells
Staff member
She is a loving wife and mother to her husband and other children. In fact, she was so nice, that she became good friends with the victim and her family.
Yes, she could very well be a psychopath, she lies well enough for it. But it doesn't sit right with me. *Shrugs*...
One can be cold and calculating without being a psychopath.
cold and calculating yea I guess. But cold and calculating and cut open a pregnant womans womb? I don't know. I guess we'll never know for sure.
Well, some things have surfaced. She wasn't always a loving wife. She actually stabbed her previous husband in the back which led to the first encounter with the police.
Testing shows the baby and mother are a match. She told the police that she purchased the child which of course they have no reason to believe.
Bells concidering the fact that people who have killed during a psycotic break thinking that they worked for the CIA to kill them and been judged not only sane enough to stand trial but culpable for the "murder".
Personally I don't think court judgements are a good judge of wether or not someone is mentally ill. And taking some of your comments about procutors who are more interested in winning than either the truth or justice, I doubt you do either
Personally I don't think court judgements are a good judge of wether or not someone is mentally ill. And taking some of your comments about procutors who are more interested in winning than either the truth or justice, I doubt you do either
Bells
Staff member
She planned this for months. Many months. She told everyone she was expecting, even her husband did not suspect.
This wasn't a short psychotic break.
My point was that everyone, myself included, are very quick to say 'she must be crazy'.. I was curious about what if she was not crazy. As in why do people (again, myself inlcuded) always automatically assume that killers like her must be crazy?
Personally, I don't think she is crazy, as in someone who has had a psychotic break. She would most probably pass as a psychopath.
And frankly, she should never be released from prison if she did in fact do it, and it appears that she did in fact do it.
Lack of Empathy
I'm looking at an apparent lack of empathy. That part of this crime is unquestionably dysfunctional.
I think two things we have to guard against are the obvious responses; I disagree, for instance, with Read-Only's proposition that she's crazy and, "What else is there to say?" The other obvious response is to consider the crazy coefficient as an excuse. Papaya is correct to ask, "Is being 'crazy' an excuse?"
In that context, it depends on how we measure an excuse. As John suggests, crazy is certainly a reason, but does it excuse culpability? Perhaps in a moral consideration, God or the Judge On High or whomever will say, "The condition exceeded her individual capacity to overcome." But in any practical question? Well, here the proposition of an excuse butts up against the question of why we would incarcerate. Reducing Coy's moral culpability does not reduce the danger she presents to society.
And, yes, we're leaping toward conviction, but even in the early-going there seemed a connection beyond doubt, and that was the recovery of the body. We can be as certain as the media-consuming public ever will be that yes, Kathy Coy killed Jamie Stice, but if it turns out she's innocent, we can simply reorient our consideration to the actual killer. Setting that aside, though, Coy even and especially if she's completely bonkers, presents a demonstrable danger to society at large. That is, it is hard to argue that one's mental illness is not dangerous if it has already claimed a death toll.
Clinically, the calculation involved in this crime seems to cry out for a diagnosis. For some, insanity is an answer. For others, it is just the beginning of the inquiry.
But over the course of those planning months, the inability of the psyche to reconcile the intention to the fact of what it equals suggests quite strongly that the killer's social function is severely impaired. You are correct that this is no short psychotic break. But psychotic breaks can be slow-burning; we are accustomed by television narratives to the idea of the sudden and dramatic break, but some knot in the weave came undone, and the warp and woof of reality subtly unraveled. One can never undo the damage done, or pay back the psychomoral debts incurred, but that speaks nothing of the proposition of whether such evil can rise in a single human being without there being something terribly amiss in that individual's fundamental condition.
Bells said:
I'm looking at an apparent lack of empathy. That part of this crime is unquestionably dysfunctional.
I think two things we have to guard against are the obvious responses; I disagree, for instance, with Read-Only's proposition that she's crazy and, "What else is there to say?" The other obvious response is to consider the crazy coefficient as an excuse. Papaya is correct to ask, "Is being 'crazy' an excuse?"
In that context, it depends on how we measure an excuse. As John suggests, crazy is certainly a reason, but does it excuse culpability? Perhaps in a moral consideration, God or the Judge On High or whomever will say, "The condition exceeded her individual capacity to overcome." But in any practical question? Well, here the proposition of an excuse butts up against the question of why we would incarcerate. Reducing Coy's moral culpability does not reduce the danger she presents to society.
And, yes, we're leaping toward conviction, but even in the early-going there seemed a connection beyond doubt, and that was the recovery of the body. We can be as certain as the media-consuming public ever will be that yes, Kathy Coy killed Jamie Stice, but if it turns out she's innocent, we can simply reorient our consideration to the actual killer. Setting that aside, though, Coy even and especially if she's completely bonkers, presents a demonstrable danger to society at large. That is, it is hard to argue that one's mental illness is not dangerous if it has already claimed a death toll.
Clinically, the calculation involved in this crime seems to cry out for a diagnosis. For some, insanity is an answer. For others, it is just the beginning of the inquiry.
But over the course of those planning months, the inability of the psyche to reconcile the intention to the fact of what it equals suggests quite strongly that the killer's social function is severely impaired. You are correct that this is no short psychotic break. But psychotic breaks can be slow-burning; we are accustomed by television narratives to the idea of the sudden and dramatic break, but some knot in the weave came undone, and the warp and woof of reality subtly unraveled. One can never undo the damage done, or pay back the psychomoral debts incurred, but that speaks nothing of the proposition of whether such evil can rise in a single human being without there being something terribly amiss in that individual's fundamental condition.