Psychotic

In light of the Lindsay Clancy trial for brutally strangled her three children to death, there’s been much debate on what should be done to her. Some people believe that she should be sent to prison for the rest of her life, others believe that the death penalty is too good enough for her, but there are other people who believe that she was dealing with extreme psychological issues which led her to commit such a heinous crime. There is some validity to that point. No woman, no mother in her right mind would strangle her three children to death like she did. It makes no rational sense, not just to want to do that, but to actually do it. It is obvious she did not consider the consequences, not just for her children, but for herself – spending the rest of your life in prison or being executed. She must have been dealing with an extreme psychological disorder when she did what she did.

I would take it even further, that most violent crimes that people commit, the person must be dealing with extreme psychological disorders to commit such a crime. People commit murder every day. Bryan Kohberger up in Idaho, decided one day to sneak into the apartment of four college students, and use a  hunting knife to slaughter them. He is now serving a life sentence in prison. He clearly was not thinking rationally when he decided to murder four college students. He did not weigh the pros and cons of committing such an act. He now sits in his jail cell, thinking to himself 50 times a day, what the hell was I thinking?

Luigi Mangione decided one day to take a gun, hunt down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and murder him in broad daylight. Does a rational thinking mind do anything like that? Of course not. He was from a rich and wealthy family. He had all the privileges that you would want in life, and he decided to give it all away to live in a 6 x 8 cell because he wanted to kill some random CEO of a health insurance company? That is not rational, reasonable thinking.

Karmelo Anthony is going to spend the next 35 years in prison because one day he decided to bring a knife to a track meet and show everybody how big he was by stabbing someone in the heart. Does anyone think that he was using a rational and reasonable mind when he decided to kill Austin Metcalf at that track meet? Did he weigh the pros and cons of such an act?

Jamie Lee Komoroski was a 25-year-old woman who decided to get drunk one night and then drove her car at speeds over 100 mph and killed a bride on her wedding day. Was she thinking reasonably or rationally when she decided to get behind the wheel of that car? Of course not. That’s the reason why we outlaw drunk driving because when you have too much alcohol coursing through your brain, you do not make rational and reasonable decisions. I guarantee you most people in life when they look back at the bad decisions they made, most of them were made when they were under the influence of alcohol. You make bad decisions when you’re drunk. And one of those bad decisions is actually getting behind the wheel of a car.

So very rarely are people using a rational reasonable mind when they commit heinous crimes. They are acting psychotic. What about the sociopaths? You may ask. That’s my point. Sociopaths are dealing with severe mental issues. That’s the definition of a sociopath. Mental health professionals do not even use the term sociopath anymore; they call it antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and have classified it as a severe mental health condition. The overwhelming majority of people who are in prison are dealing with severe mental issues. Adolph Hitler was a sociopath.

I’m not trying to justify anybody’s crimes, what I’m arguing is that regardless of what mental state you are in, you need to be held accountable for your actions. Decarlos Dejuan Brown who killed Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, NC, is not being held accountable for the crime because a judge found Brown incompetent to stand trial due to mental illness and ordered him to undergo treatment. If he was mentally fit, he would not have randomly stabbed a woman on a train. That’s a litmus test on whether you’re mentally fit or not. Anyone who believes that it’s a good decision to walk up to a random woman and stab her in the heart is mentally deranged. Anyone who thinks it’s a good decision to murder a health insurance CEO, is mentally deranged. Anyone who thinks committing a drive-by shooting because somebody dissed them, is mentally deranged. Anyone who thinks that strangling their three children is a good thing is mentally deranged.

We can’t selectively decide what mentally deranged people we send to jail for the rest of their lives, and which mentally deranged people we don’t send to jail. Which mentally deranged people we execute, which ones we don’t? Does anyone think that Charles Manson was not mentally deranged? That’s why he did what he did.

One of the main reasons why there are so many people defending Lindsay Clancy, is because there’s so many people who are in fact mentally deranged themselves. Many of those women see no problem with the mother murdering her three children, because many of them probably have murdered their own children in their womb. These people think it’s okay for a doctor to go into a woman uterus who was 38 weeks pregnant and dismember the baby limb by limb inside of her, crush the baby’s skull and suck out the pieces of baby, and throw the remains in the trash.

It is a coincidence that this trial is happening right after the governor of Massachusetts signed into law the ability to kill your unborn baby up until the second before it is born. I guess it is okay to kill babies now. I bet that Lindsay Clancy was a big pro-choice advocate. She didn’t see her children as individual human beings with their own identities with their own inherent value and own right to life. She saw them as her property that she can do with whatever she wished. That is the way pro-choicers view the baby inside the womb. They say “my body, my choice”. There is zero consideration for what is best for the baby, only what was best for her.

There is a video on social media of a woman saying that she supports Lindsay Clancy because that could be her one day, which is one of the sickest rationalizations that I’ve ever heard. It’s okay to kill babies because one day I may want to kill my own baby, and I don’t want to be held accountable for it. That is the motivation for most women who support abortion rights – not what is morally right, but the mere fact that one day they may need an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, so it should be legal. We all know what she did was wrong, but what is wrong are the people supporting her because another woman in a similar situation may view doing the same thing as a viable option.

This is why there are things that you just don’t do under any circumstance. One of them is kill little children. That is never an option. There is a reel on social media of an ob-gyn saying that Lindsay Clancy had no other choice. She had about a thousand other choices which would have been better than what she chose. Every other option was better than what she chose. We must as a society stand up and say, no what your mental state is, this is wrong.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.