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> Davila authorized the examinations after Holmes’ lawyers said they intended to introduce expert evidence from a clinical psychologist “relating to a mental di

> Davila authorized the examinations after Holmes’ lawyers said they intended to introduce expert evidence from a clinical psychologist “relating to a mental disease or defect or any other mental condition of the defendant bearing on the issue of guilt.” > > The defense expert, Mindy Mechanic, is a California State University at Fullerton professor specializing in psychosocial consequences of violence, trauma and victimization, including violence against women, and often testifies in cases involving interpersonal violence, according to her university biography. Ok, so my theory is that based on the expert her lawyers are calling, they are going to argue that Sunny groomed/abused Holmes over the course of their relationship (probably by calling attention to the age difference/power dynamic difference when they first met), which left her with trauma that led to her making the decisions she made. So “Battered Woman Syndrome” [1] but applied to fraud instead of assault/murder. If that’s the case, it really seems like they aren’t going to argue that Holmes didn’t deceive and commit fraud, but that her PTSD is a defense. Novel. This may have worked in the 1980s, the era of the the Twinkie defense [2] and other ways of arguing diminished capacity, but I’m not sure it’ll be successful here. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense

donmcronald 6y ago
It's pretty crazy how rich people get to argue they have mental health issues, but poor people can't. If she were a poor person that robbed a convenience store it would be straight to jail and no one would care about any past trauma. I also think it's kind of BS to be honest. To me it feels like one step away from "the defendant is a psychopath that feels no remorse, so never developed the ethics needed to understand that murder is wrong, so they shouldn't be culpable." It's rich people paying "experts" to skew the perception of what's right and what's wrong.
- taurath 6y ago
  And yeah, if someone who doesn’t have enough to eat steals from a grocery store we throw em in jail. I’d venture most people in prison were traumatized at some point. Take into account their circumstances. This is an educated privileged woman who defrauded everyone around her for years. I expect her to get community service, frankly. The only reason she’d end up in jail is that she took rich peoples money.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I agree with your broader point even if I think this characterization is exaggerated. The system is skewed toward the rich; however, I do think sentencing should factor in the likelihood of re-offending, and I would intuit that rich people (especially white-collar criminals) are less likely to re-offend due to some combination of greater fear of prison ("more to lose") and damage to their reputation ("people don't tend to trust fraudsters multiple times" though there are exceptions to every rule). Poorer people are probably more likely to re-offend due to systemic issues, and at least in my major US city we have a perennial problem of violent gun offenders being released after only a few months or years only to re-offend (typically disproportionately in poorer communities, perpetuating the poverty cycle). I very much doubt that differences in likelihood of re-offending account for the entire sentencing disparity between rich and poor; however, to the extent that it contributes to the disparity, we shouldn't try to solve for that gap by lightening sentences on account of poverty, but by addressing the upstream systemic issues (notably, lighter sentencing often perpetuates systemic issues, as with my anecdote about violent gun offenders).
    - taurath 6y ago
      1st - is there actually a higher statistical likelihood of poor people reoffending? Rich people go to jail less often, so I’d imagine those that do might even have a higher rate. 2nd - if you wanted to drop the reoffense rate, as well as the offense rate, what would you do? Why aren’t we doing it?
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        1. I'm not sure. It's only my assumption, but it should definitely be verified. Obviously if the assumption is bad then my conclusion is no good. 2. Several broad categories of solutions spring to mind with their own tradeoffs: 2.1 Invest in rehabilitation. Difficulties are cost and probably political problems due to ignorance (or maybe I'm ignorant for my faith in rehabilitation?). 2.2 Longer sentencing (or rather require prisoners to serve more of their sentence more frequently, as opposed to early probation, etc). Downside is cost, ethics, and politics (a lot of well-meaning, typically upper- and upper-middle-class folks believe that longer sentences harms communities of color more than violent re-offenders, or rather they don't consider the costs of the latter). 2.3 Death penalty. Downside is ethics.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Agree. This reminds me of the afluenza defense somewhat. [*] https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/12/the-affluenza-defense-judge-rules-rich-kids-rich-kid-ness-makes-him-not-liable-for-deadly-drunk-driving-accident/ https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/12/the-affluenza-defense-j...
- asveikau 6y ago
  I think there are probably a lot of people in jails and prisons who have undiagnosed mental illness, though. I don't remember where I heard the following claim: a substantial rate of death row inmates in some study were shown to have prefrontal cortical abnormalities. It's an interesting question if it's possible that understanding of the brain ever reaches a point where things of that nature can be detected and/or treated, either before or after a crime, instead of jailing people or sending them away.
- wheels 6y ago
  It's worth noting that the right response probably isn't locking either of them up. There are a couple of different basic theories of imprisonment, and the US is on the extreme end of the spectrum philosophically (which is part of why it has the world's largest per capita prison population). Most western countries don't put people in jail to punish them, but either to rehabilitate them, or in the case that that's impossible, to protect society from them. For both individuals there are more effective solutions than imprisonment: Davila should be banned from being a corporate executive, and a person robbing a convenience store would probably needs a social worker and stronger welfare benefits. (I'm assuming a person doing it out of need rather than, say, being a kleptomaniac.)
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I certainly agree that the US has a lot of room for improvement, but the US's policy on imprisonment is largely based on protecting society and deterring future crime (whether it succeeds in those aims is a separate question). Rehabilitation is part of protecting society, and while I agree that the US should invest more in proactive rehabilitation, it would be a mistake to ignore all of the great work we're doing toward rehabilitation (there are a lot of educational opportunities available to prisoners) even if the investment isn't yet world-class. Further, I want to ephasize your point that the disinvestment in rehabilitation is only part of the reason that the US has so many prisoners--the much more significant reason is that the US has distinct systemic issues on the front-end that create more criminals than many other wealthy western countries. "Rehabilitation" on the backend is probably not a feasible solution to closing this gap, but rather we need to focus on preventative causes that address the problem at its root--probably focusing on issues like inequality and poverty.
- garmaine 6y ago
  A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Bravo! That's exactly the problem and not a easy one to solve.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year and hire enough to assign dozens to each case. There’s solutions, just not realistic or affordable ones :(
      - nix23 6y ago
        >Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year Payed from the same side as the prosecutor? And the prosecutor just gets the 'normal' pay or millions too?
        garmaine 6y ago
        Public defenders are paid for by the government.
        nix23 6y ago
        >Public defenders Those are normally Not the Superstars Defenders right? That's what we talk about here, if your rich you can afford the best Defender/Attorney-Team. Your wrote that: >A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.
        garmaine 6y ago
        Yes, and if we paid public defenders superstar salaries, that’s where the talent would be. I’m not saying this is a practical choice to make, though.
- chromedev 6y ago
  That's exactly what it is, but remember the government does this all the time. Even in their experimentation efforts of giving Sisyphus and having children eat radioactive material. They'll find psychologist to agree that something isn't morally wrong and use that as a basis for their experiments.
- scoot_718 6y ago
  Perhaps the wealth is the problem. The courts should cure these people of their malady by removing their money.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Usually successfully arguing that it was mental health gets you institutionalized anyway [0], so its not always as simple as saying rich people get to get off easy with the insanity defense. They've got to avoid the consequences of that as well, which they may or may not have a better ability to do with their wealth. Usually it seems they'll be able to get a lawyer good enough to get off not guilty. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/magazine/when-not-guilty-is-a-life-sentence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/magazine/when-not-guilty-...
jariel 6y ago
It's a terrible notion, yes. But at the same time, she started when she was very, very young, and was in that bubble from the start. It's not a defence but I can see how someone gets caught up in a cultish situation like that.
ponker 6y ago
Might work. Women are frequently seen as having low external agency so when they do anything impressive people look to find the man behind it and when they do anything bad, people do the same. Might work on a jury.
55555 6y ago
This is a very 2020 defense. It just might work. Depends on the jury.
- ponker 6y ago
  Agree - it's a good strategy - victimhood has never been more venerated and a Bay Area jury just might bite.
  - uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
    Dissolving responsibability at the core - what a ruined society this is.
  - Balgair 6y ago
    I suspect most Public Defenders may disagree.
    - ponker 6y ago
      Very true very true... college graduate white woman victimhood is definitely the most in vogue
jacquesm 6y ago
They're going to have a lot of problems with the timing there.
himinlomax 6y ago
There's no doubt she has a mental defect, she's very obviously a psychopath. However it's the kind of defect that should always result in being put in jail, for the good of society.
himinlomax 6y ago
> So “Battered Woman Syndrome” [1] but applied to fraud instead of assault/murder. It's interesting how before she got into legal trouble, she was the poster child for the strong powerful woman, but now it turns out she was too weak to be anything but a victim ... or I'm supposed to believe.

donmcronald 6y ago

It's pretty crazy how rich people get to argue they have mental health issues, but poor people can't. If she were a poor person that robbed a convenience store it would be straight to jail and no one would care about any past trauma. I also think it's kind of BS to be honest. To me it feels like one step away from "the defendant is a psychopath that feels no remorse, so never developed the ethics needed to understand that murder is wrong, so they shouldn't be culpable." It's rich people paying "experts" to skew the perception of what's right and what's wrong.

taurath 6y ago
And yeah, if someone who doesn’t have enough to eat steals from a grocery store we throw em in jail. I’d venture most people in prison were traumatized at some point. Take into account their circumstances. This is an educated privileged woman who defrauded everyone around her for years. I expect her to get community service, frankly. The only reason she’d end up in jail is that she took rich peoples money.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I agree with your broader point even if I think this characterization is exaggerated. The system is skewed toward the rich; however, I do think sentencing should factor in the likelihood of re-offending, and I would intuit that rich people (especially white-collar criminals) are less likely to re-offend due to some combination of greater fear of prison ("more to lose") and damage to their reputation ("people don't tend to trust fraudsters multiple times" though there are exceptions to every rule). Poorer people are probably more likely to re-offend due to systemic issues, and at least in my major US city we have a perennial problem of violent gun offenders being released after only a few months or years only to re-offend (typically disproportionately in poorer communities, perpetuating the poverty cycle). I very much doubt that differences in likelihood of re-offending account for the entire sentencing disparity between rich and poor; however, to the extent that it contributes to the disparity, we shouldn't try to solve for that gap by lightening sentences on account of poverty, but by addressing the upstream systemic issues (notably, lighter sentencing often perpetuates systemic issues, as with my anecdote about violent gun offenders).
  - taurath 6y ago
    1st - is there actually a higher statistical likelihood of poor people reoffending? Rich people go to jail less often, so I’d imagine those that do might even have a higher rate. 2nd - if you wanted to drop the reoffense rate, as well as the offense rate, what would you do? Why aren’t we doing it?
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      1. I'm not sure. It's only my assumption, but it should definitely be verified. Obviously if the assumption is bad then my conclusion is no good. 2. Several broad categories of solutions spring to mind with their own tradeoffs: 2.1 Invest in rehabilitation. Difficulties are cost and probably political problems due to ignorance (or maybe I'm ignorant for my faith in rehabilitation?). 2.2 Longer sentencing (or rather require prisoners to serve more of their sentence more frequently, as opposed to early probation, etc). Downside is cost, ethics, and politics (a lot of well-meaning, typically upper- and upper-middle-class folks believe that longer sentences harms communities of color more than violent re-offenders, or rather they don't consider the costs of the latter). 2.3 Death penalty. Downside is ethics.
grugagag 6y ago
Agree. This reminds me of the afluenza defense somewhat. [*] https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/12/the-affluenza-defense-judge-rules-rich-kids-rich-kid-ness-makes-him-not-liable-for-deadly-drunk-driving-accident/ https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/12/the-affluenza-defense-j...
asveikau 6y ago
I think there are probably a lot of people in jails and prisons who have undiagnosed mental illness, though. I don't remember where I heard the following claim: a substantial rate of death row inmates in some study were shown to have prefrontal cortical abnormalities. It's an interesting question if it's possible that understanding of the brain ever reaches a point where things of that nature can be detected and/or treated, either before or after a crime, instead of jailing people or sending them away.
wheels 6y ago
It's worth noting that the right response probably isn't locking either of them up. There are a couple of different basic theories of imprisonment, and the US is on the extreme end of the spectrum philosophically (which is part of why it has the world's largest per capita prison population). Most western countries don't put people in jail to punish them, but either to rehabilitate them, or in the case that that's impossible, to protect society from them. For both individuals there are more effective solutions than imprisonment: Davila should be banned from being a corporate executive, and a person robbing a convenience store would probably needs a social worker and stronger welfare benefits. (I'm assuming a person doing it out of need rather than, say, being a kleptomaniac.)
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I certainly agree that the US has a lot of room for improvement, but the US's policy on imprisonment is largely based on protecting society and deterring future crime (whether it succeeds in those aims is a separate question). Rehabilitation is part of protecting society, and while I agree that the US should invest more in proactive rehabilitation, it would be a mistake to ignore all of the great work we're doing toward rehabilitation (there are a lot of educational opportunities available to prisoners) even if the investment isn't yet world-class. Further, I want to ephasize your point that the disinvestment in rehabilitation is only part of the reason that the US has so many prisoners--the much more significant reason is that the US has distinct systemic issues on the front-end that create more criminals than many other wealthy western countries. "Rehabilitation" on the backend is probably not a feasible solution to closing this gap, but rather we need to focus on preventative causes that address the problem at its root--probably focusing on issues like inequality and poverty.
garmaine 6y ago
A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.
- nix23 6y ago
  Bravo! That's exactly the problem and not a easy one to solve.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year and hire enough to assign dozens to each case. There’s solutions, just not realistic or affordable ones :(
    - nix23 6y ago
      >Pay public defenders millions of dollars a year Payed from the same side as the prosecutor? And the prosecutor just gets the 'normal' pay or millions too?
      - garmaine 6y ago
        Public defenders are paid for by the government.
        nix23 6y ago
        >Public defenders Those are normally Not the Superstars Defenders right? That's what we talk about here, if your rich you can afford the best Defender/Attorney-Team. Your wrote that: >A poor person that magically had the kind of lawyers Holmes uses would do just as well. Unequal access to legal resources is the root of the problem.
        garmaine 6y ago
        Yes, and if we paid public defenders superstar salaries, that’s where the talent would be. I’m not saying this is a practical choice to make, though.
chromedev 6y ago
That's exactly what it is, but remember the government does this all the time. Even in their experimentation efforts of giving Sisyphus and having children eat radioactive material. They'll find psychologist to agree that something isn't morally wrong and use that as a basis for their experiments.
scoot_718 6y ago
Perhaps the wealth is the problem. The courts should cure these people of their malady by removing their money.
vikramkr 6y ago
Usually successfully arguing that it was mental health gets you institutionalized anyway [0], so its not always as simple as saying rich people get to get off easy with the insanity defense. They've got to avoid the consequences of that as well, which they may or may not have a better ability to do with their wealth. Usually it seems they'll be able to get a lawyer good enough to get off not guilty. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/magazine/when-not-guilty-is-a-life-sentence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/magazine/when-not-guilty-...

jariel 6y ago

It's a terrible notion, yes. But at the same time, she started when she was very, very young, and was in that bubble from the start. It's not a defence but I can see how someone gets caught up in a cultish situation like that.

ponker 6y ago

Might work. Women are frequently seen as having low external agency so when they do anything impressive people look to find the man behind it and when they do anything bad, people do the same. Might work on a jury.

55555 6y ago

This is a very 2020 defense. It just might work. Depends on the jury.

ponker 6y ago
Agree - it's a good strategy - victimhood has never been more venerated and a Bay Area jury just might bite.
- uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
  Dissolving responsibability at the core - what a ruined society this is.
- Balgair 6y ago
  I suspect most Public Defenders may disagree.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Very true very true... college graduate white woman victimhood is definitely the most in vogue

jacquesm 6y ago

They're going to have a lot of problems with the timing there.

himinlomax 6y ago

There's no doubt she has a mental defect, she's very obviously a psychopath. However it's the kind of defect that should always result in being put in jail, for the good of society.

himinlomax 6y ago

> So “Battered Woman Syndrome” [1] but applied to fraud instead of assault/murder. It's interesting how before she got into legal trouble, she was the poster child for the strong powerful woman, but now it turns out she was too weak to be anything but a victim ... or I'm supposed to believe.