Utterly Meaningless

Some of the arguments don’t make a lot of sense. “IF she thought satan was inside her and she didn’t want her children to go to hell then she was aware of what she was doing” umm…Are they implying that a person who thinks they are possessed by an evil entity is sane enough to decide anything? I’d think the very fact that she thought SHE was possessed is enough to imply that insanity occurred before she drowned those children.

A gedankenexperiment. A 3-year-old finds a gun in the yard and, pointing it a neighbor, yells “Bang!” as the gun discharges, killing said neighbor.

Question: Would you arrest the child for manslaughter? Or 1st Degree murder? Why or why not?

Chris,
In answer to your question – yeah, it probably would still have happened. I’ve known enough people with schizophrenia to know that a person’s delusional system usually reflects something from whatever their particular frame of reference is. So, if not Satan, the delusions would have been of Hitler, or her dog, or the CIA, etc. and this, or some equally horrible tragedy would have resulted.

I arrest the person who left the gun in the yard and charge them with something – not sure manslaughter would be the right thing. A 3 year old doesn’t know that a gun can really kill, and probably doesn’t understand the concept of death anyway.

Kobayashi Maru