Killer mother: God told me to do it
Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2004 10:35 am
Courtesy of The Ralph Bristol Show:
In the middle of the night on Mother's Day a year ago, 39-year-old Deanna Laney woke up her six-year-old son Luke, led him outside the family's home and asked him to put his head on a large rock. Luke did as his mother asked and Laney smashed the child's skull with a large landscaping rock. Then she went to get her oldest child, Joshua. He, too, obeyed his mother and put his head against a large rock in the yard. His mother bashed his skull with a 16-pound rock.
Laney doesn't deny doing this. Nor does she deny trying, but failing, to kill her 14-month-old baby by hitting him in the head with a four-pound rock while he lay sleeping in his crib.
Laney's defense is that God told her to do it, and that makes her insane. Prosecutors played a tape of a 911 call in which Laney calmly told a dispatcher after midnight on May 10: "I just killed my boys." She told the dispatcher, "I just did what I had to do."
Insanity is real, and mental illness can drastically alter reality in a way the renders a person irresponsible. But, psychology is not an exact medical science.
When I rode my sleigh into a fencepost and broke my ankle at age 11, it was easy for the doctor to diagnose. An X-ray clearly showed my ankle was broken in two places. Doctor's won't be able to examine Laney's mind with the same amount of precision and pronounce with no uncertainty that a mental disease rendered her incapable of rejecting God's orders to crush her children's skulls with large rocks.
In this case, two psychiatric experts for the defense, two for the prosecution and one for the judge all agree that she was legally insane at the time of the offense. The prosecutor isn't buying it. District Attorney Matt Bingham told the jury, "The issue of sanity is tried in the court, not the hospitals."
Now, a jury will decide whether the psychiatric experts were right. If they find her innocent by reason of insanity, she will almost certainly be assigned to a mental hospital until other psychiatrists "cure" her insanity, and then she'll be allowed to go free, as if she had never killed.
That's not right. A woman who is so delusional that she thinks God told her to kill her sons had to show signs of delusion prior to that fateful night. She, and/or her husband, had a responsibility to protect their children from the potential consequences of that delusion. They failed to do so, and there should be some permanent consequences.
I believe the plea "not guilty by reason of insanity" should be abolished altogether and replaced with "guilty, but insane." Defendants would then understand that if they are persuasive, they will not be sentenced to prison, but they will be confined to a secure mental institution for a period of time equal to the time that a normal guilty verdict would have produced.
I was going to suggest a harsher treatment, but God told me to go easy.
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I like Ralph's idea on this issue. This whole insanity defense thing is just another fine example of Liberal ideology at work.
In the middle of the night on Mother's Day a year ago, 39-year-old Deanna Laney woke up her six-year-old son Luke, led him outside the family's home and asked him to put his head on a large rock. Luke did as his mother asked and Laney smashed the child's skull with a large landscaping rock. Then she went to get her oldest child, Joshua. He, too, obeyed his mother and put his head against a large rock in the yard. His mother bashed his skull with a 16-pound rock.
Laney doesn't deny doing this. Nor does she deny trying, but failing, to kill her 14-month-old baby by hitting him in the head with a four-pound rock while he lay sleeping in his crib.
Laney's defense is that God told her to do it, and that makes her insane. Prosecutors played a tape of a 911 call in which Laney calmly told a dispatcher after midnight on May 10: "I just killed my boys." She told the dispatcher, "I just did what I had to do."
Insanity is real, and mental illness can drastically alter reality in a way the renders a person irresponsible. But, psychology is not an exact medical science.
When I rode my sleigh into a fencepost and broke my ankle at age 11, it was easy for the doctor to diagnose. An X-ray clearly showed my ankle was broken in two places. Doctor's won't be able to examine Laney's mind with the same amount of precision and pronounce with no uncertainty that a mental disease rendered her incapable of rejecting God's orders to crush her children's skulls with large rocks.
In this case, two psychiatric experts for the defense, two for the prosecution and one for the judge all agree that she was legally insane at the time of the offense. The prosecutor isn't buying it. District Attorney Matt Bingham told the jury, "The issue of sanity is tried in the court, not the hospitals."
Now, a jury will decide whether the psychiatric experts were right. If they find her innocent by reason of insanity, she will almost certainly be assigned to a mental hospital until other psychiatrists "cure" her insanity, and then she'll be allowed to go free, as if she had never killed.
That's not right. A woman who is so delusional that she thinks God told her to kill her sons had to show signs of delusion prior to that fateful night. She, and/or her husband, had a responsibility to protect their children from the potential consequences of that delusion. They failed to do so, and there should be some permanent consequences.
I believe the plea "not guilty by reason of insanity" should be abolished altogether and replaced with "guilty, but insane." Defendants would then understand that if they are persuasive, they will not be sentenced to prison, but they will be confined to a secure mental institution for a period of time equal to the time that a normal guilty verdict would have produced.
I was going to suggest a harsher treatment, but God told me to go easy.
------------------------------------------------------------
I like Ralph's idea on this issue. This whole insanity defense thing is just another fine example of Liberal ideology at work.
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