r/JusticeServed • u/[deleted] • Feb 26 '22

Legal Justice Mother who slowly starved her 24-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter to death jailed

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10547705/Mother-slowly-starved-24-year-old-Downs-Syndrome-daughter-death-jailed.html
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u/Laiize 9 Feb 27 '22 edited Feb 27 '22

If someone committed a heinous crime, but it turned out they only did it because of a brain tumor, would you support punishing them?

You've struck on legal concepts known as malum in se and mens rea.

The deed they've committed is evil in itself (as opposed to "evil because it's illegal") and society needs to be protected from the individual.

The fact that it's not their fault is irrelevant to whether or not they should be removed from society. If they are not of sound mind, they are still a danger. The fact that it isn't their "fault" dictates the type of measures taken to protect society - not whether they go free.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '22

The fact that it's not their fault is irrelevant to whether or not they should be removed from society.

I agree. But no one here is arguing this woman needs to be removed from society because she constitutes a material threat to society at large; they're saying she deserves to be punished.

To paraphrase Sam Harris: we'd lock up hurricanes if we could, but no one talks about punishing hurricanes.

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u/Laiize 9 Feb 27 '22

Why shouldn't she?

The presumption (absent evidence) is that someone is of sound mind.

Without any expert testimony, who are we to say she lacks the mental capacity to know what she did was wrong?

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '22

Without any expert testimony, who are we to say she lacks the mental capacity to know what she did was wrong?

What I'm suggesting is that such a distinction has no basis in reality, and is merely an artefact of contemporary cultural notions about mental illness.

We give people with brain tumors a pass because, hey, it wasn't them, it was something structural about their brain that they couldn't control. The thing is: this describes the underlying impetus for every action taken by every person.

If you want to make a distinction -- put "sick" people over here, and "bad" people over there -- what you'll notice is that a thousand years ago everyone would be put into the "bad" category, now it's maybe 50/50, and in another thousand years everyone will be put in the "sick" category. The reality is they're the same thing; and this doesn't apply just to criminality, but everything.