TX: Judge: Schlosser not guilty (cut baby's arms off)

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/040806dnmetschlosser.108ec24a.html

A judge decided Friday that Plano mother Dena Schlosser was not guilty by reason of insanity of capital murder for cutting off her infant daughter’s arms, ensuring that she will be sent to a mental hospital.

“This is the verdict we’ve been working for, for 16 months,” Ms. Schlosser’s attorney David Haynes said outside the courtroom. “We believe justice was done in this case.”

State District Judge Chris Oldner presided over Ms. Schlosser’s first trial, which ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked 10-2 in favor of the same finding: not guilty by reason of insanity. If she had been found guilty, she would have been sent to prison for life.

The judge heard new evidence last week that Ms. Schlosser has a life-threatening growth in her mid-brain that could have fueled the religious delusions and hallucinations psychiatrists believe caused her to kill her infant daughter. It was unclear whether Ms. Schlosser had the tumor the day Maggie died.

brain if she ended up with a tumor there shortly thereafter, if it wasn't there at the time of the horrible event.

"It was unclear whether Ms. Schlosser had the tumor the day Maggie died."

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Now, if there's a brain tumor that triggered all this, perhaps it would have been identified earlier if we didn't have a wacky societal habit of giving a blank check to all weirdness that allegedly stems from religion. If memory serves, she was also part of a christian cult with a domineering leader.

If religion is taken out of the equation, insanity is much easier to identify. When the supernatural of spirits and voices is held as unassailable, dangerous people don't get help or get isolated from the rest of us.

How many fundies have to kill their children before someone takes action? The answer is that they could all do it and our collective fear of questioning the big Sky Chief would be such that it still couldn't be addressed.

Religion will destroy our species, and as we go down, there will be an ever-increasing set of excuses for it.

We just had a case here in Illinois where a guy murdered his 8 year old daughter because he decided she was the devil and if he didn't kill her the world would end. They are already laying the grounds for his insanity defense.
What bothers me is our culture tacitly endorses this kind of thinking. One of the mourners at the funeral said that "she is an angel in heaven now". The pastor said "god is weeping with us". This, to me is just as insane as thinking your daughter is inhabited by the devil. A majority of Americans believe in the devil and demons and angels. It's just one step from believing in angels to sending your children to be one.
If it is insanity, than it is a cultural insanity, and if that is the case things like this will just keep on happening.
It isn't atheists murdering their own children, it is people who have gone off the deep end with their religious beliefs sanctified by a culture that can murder a hundred thousand Iraqis and still call themselves a "Christian" nation. A cultural psychosis, in other words.

All who pretend that the style of thought is different are delusional themselves.

... I checked out the freepers on this one. I'll save you the trouble of looking yourself and having to disinfect your brain after.... here's the high(low)lights....
Are some of you DUers posting any of this shit in Freepland just to encourage the psychopaths over there to comment?)
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1611013/posts

If she's sane she should be executed. If she's insane she should be put out of her misery.

So if you commit an unspeakable murder, you can escape the death penalty by being found insane.
This will only encourage more outrageous acts.

This woman should be executed.

There are many pathetic reasons people use for the evil they do. Execute them all and let God sort them out.

She kills a baby but it is her husband's and preacher's fault?

Total lack of responsibility for one's actions.

*shrug* allah would be pleased.

Scum is too good a word.

So if you commit an unspeakable murder, you can escape the death penalty by being found insane. This will only encourage more outrageous acts.

Now that I know I have the right to maim and murder, I'm going to go out and get a brain tumor so I can join in on the fun. :sarcasm:

They only wish they could hear God through their tumors.

c'mon people, she is seriously ill!

All those passing judgement on religion should realize that they could become JUST AS DELUSIONAL if they were unlucky enough to get a brain tumor as well!

When your brain is sick, like this woman's is, you do wacky things. Sometimes horrible things, like this woman did. Punishing her is completely ineffective, all it does is satisfy people's need for vengeance.

in my head I just might figure they don't belong there. I certainly would't accept it as 'normal'.

Of course, if they sounded like aliens from the planet Zebulon...

You wouldn't know what "normal" is anymore.

The difference between mental health and mental illness is that when you're mentally healthy you know when you're sick or not feeling normal. People with mental illness are too sick to know they're sick.

Ever see 'A Beautiful Mind'?

Once he learned that he was sick, he learned how to recognize the symptoms. Then he was able to deal with it.

I think there are a lot of people out there who are actively keeping their mental illness in check, without medication. Not something I advocate, but for some rare individuals it is possible.

The flip side of it is situations like the Texas law, which requires that a person be so far gone that they have no grip on reality at all to be considered insane. It is entirely possible for a person to be insane, in the grip of a compulsion, and to know what they are doing is wrong but still not be able to not do it. The psychopaths who write notes saying 'Stop me before I kill again' are not necessarily taunting the police - they may know that they are doing wrong, but the compulsion will not permit them to stop themselves.

Mental illness is seldom as cut and dried as the law would have us believe.

It's one of my favorite movies of all time. You're right about exceptions to the general rule. As with all things, mental health/illness is on a bell curve and some people are very close to the borders one way or the other.

control, once the illness begins to affect your behavior.

You can't just smugly say, "Well I would know voices in my head were not supernatural." You just can't know that.

there is no way that I would interpret voices in my head in such a way. These people who do believe are in a situation of having those beliefs vindicated so they don't wonder about them.

With my predisposition, if such a psychosis manifested in me it would likely result, as I said, in delusions that aliens were talking to me, or the CIA was beaming shit into my head. But if I were to suddenly begin acting out religious fantasies my family would have me committed, because they all know my feelings about that and it would be an obvious sign of psychosis. These unfortunate women live in a society that is soaked in religion, so no warning bells went off with their families.

And the psychotic break, from being sane one day to batshit crazy the next, is extremely rare. Most people who recover to receive treatment say they knew something was not right with them and had felt it going for a long time.

I'm sorry about your experiences, but you cannot apply what happened to one individual to all others. Every person is different, and deals with it differently.

ON EDIT: And I hope you don't think that I'm saying she should be held responsible for what she did. I absolutely agree that she is ill and needs treatment, not punishment. As I said in another thread, the law that says that you are insane only if you don't recognize that what you did was wrong is an extremely narrowly written law - plenty of people know that they are doing wrong but are in the grip of compulsion and not able to not do it. Otherwise, no one would ever write a note saying 'stop me before I kill again'. They know it's wrong, and know they cannot stop themselves. If that isn't just as crazy and not knowing right from wrong, then I don't know crazy.

and postpartum psychosis is serious stuff; tumor or not. My heart goes out to this woman. If she ever gains her sanity, she will really be suffering then.

Is there one? I think anyone who'd do that couldn't be sane, so why try it as if she were from the start?

I think it should fall on someone. If not the mother, than anyone who never diagnosed her properly if she were capable of this. And if she were sane enough to not exert action to show she was dangerous well...is that what our going standard for sane is?

Why should there be no cry for justice at the torturing of a young child? Or is this more children don't matter semantics. As I said before, children and women are not protected in this country because some people think so little of them, the laws are weak enough to either not be enforced or too weak to mean anything. This mother, she may have had voices or delusions. But ANYONE with compassion in their heart would not mutilate their own daughter. Don't give me this insanity stuff. This is sick and wrong, and justifying this as insanity is no different than justifying hunting as sport.

My mother died of hippocampal sclerosis after living with it for at least 10 years.

During that time she did some pretty bizarre stuff, thankfully nothing violent beyond sometimes slapping people.

In the beginning, she was pretty normal, but would sometimes say or do really off the wall things. We didn't know it at the time, but she was TERMINALLY ILL. She didn't know that she said or did anything inappropriate. How could she know? Her brain was disintegrating.

This woman who killed her daughter has a life-threatening tumor. Her brain is being disordered and damaged by this disease. There is no sense in attempting to hold her accountable.

and you clearly don't have a clue about what true insanity is. You're talking about such "scientific" issues as "compassion in their heart". True medical insanity is no less real than a heart attack or stroke.

Being sociopathic means having no conscience, but you are totally sane... like Ted Bundy.

Forget the brain tumor: someone is psychosis is literally in an alternate reality -- compassion has nothing to do with it -- THEY ARE INSANE!!! If it was caused by a brain tumor, she was MEDICALLY UNFIT.

People in this country so don't get mental illnesses and brain disorders....