Roslindale mother found not guilty by reason of insanity for killing her children
By adamg - 5/6/09 - 4:16 pm
A Suffolk Superior Court jury today agreed with Angela Vazquez's attorney that she should not serve jail time for killing her daughter, 13, and son, 10, because she "suffered from a mental disease or defect at the time she committed the act," the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.
However, Vazquez could still be locked up in a psychiatric facility, following a 40-day evaluation, the DA's office says.
Police found the decaying bodies of her two children on July 29, 2007. Officials say they could not determine the exact cause of death because their bodies had badly decomposed by the time they were found in her Maynard Road home, but that evidence and witnesses proved she killed them.
Comments
The trouble with the insanity defense, however, is
that if one person does it, chances are that tons of other people who're on trial for and/or are convicted of murder are going to start to plead for the insanity defense, no? It's all too easy to do that, imho. If that be the case, I forsee disaster here, as it could very well cause the courts to become even more backlogged than they already are.
Yet, in this instance, if the woman has gone in for psychiatric observance and is found to be actually suffering from a devastating psychiatric illness, I hope she gets the best treatment possible, but yet is made to realize that killing people is unacceptable.
No
People already plead insanity, but it rarely works in Massachusetts (now if only I could remember where I read that).
Well then,
If this:
be the case, let's hope it stays that way.
One good reason
One good reason the insanity defense isn't used much: you pretty much have to admit that the accused did all the bad things they are accused of to enter an insanity plea. The insanity plea means that the defendant did what they were accused of, but they aren't responsible because they were too insane to realize they were doing something bad.
A lawyer can't easily say "he didn't do it ... but just in case he did, he had to be nuts!". It isn't an easy out like that.
Don't worry too much
It rarely works anywhere. And it's also basically a total last resort for defense attorneys. A successful insanity defense means that the person gets locked up for an unspecified amount of time, until they are declared mentally stable. Usually this averages out to a lot longer than they'd actually spend in prison. Most people would rather take their chances with a prison term than the possibility of never getting out.
Uh, no
One has to be found by multiple licensed clinicians to have been so out of it that s/he didn't know right from wrong and/or wasn't in a frame of mind to understand, say, that death is permanent.
Just having any psych diagnosis doesn't cut it. Nearly all people who commit crimes are diagnosable with something (since they lack traits of mental health such as impulse control, respect for people and property, conflict-management skills, etc.) No one's implying that it's fine for her to go around killing people, since, um, they're making sure she's going somewhere where she can't.
No set of diagnostic rules
I don't believe there's any law about "multiple licensed clinicians" although it's true that the convincing case has to be made somehow that the defendant was incapable of knowing that her actions were right or wrong. I was on a jury once with an insanity defense and those were the instructions. It's very difficult to prove insanity because it's likely that many jurors will be extremely skeptical of this move. You can be judged insane and still guilty if there's sufficient doubt that you didn't know you were doing the wrong thing.
Generally the multiple clinicians are lined up on one side and the other, so it can be just one person who makes a convincing case who gets the win.
Thanks for the clarification
Yeah, I know there's no set law saying it has to be X number of people with X training -- I just was responding to the post that made it sound like people get off on the insanity defense by just saying "oh hey, I'm insane." Thanks for helping me make more sense!
(Also, the whole idea of licensed clinicians being paid to say what lawyers want them to has always frustrated me. Seems like it violates our codes of ethics. Sure, I've done a couple of evaluations for child custody and educational placements and whatnot, but I let them know that if I don't actually find what they're hiring me to prove, I won't be writing them a report saying things I don't actually find to be true.)
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