u/UnbrokenAwakening

Many of you have mentioned how absent the children seem from the defense narrative.“Team Bow” seems to be the only side keeping Cora, Dawson and Callan visibly present in the courtroom.

Today I've been thinking about how different LC comes across compared to other mothers with similar defenses. She somehow seems to be the central victim of her own actions.

I recently read an article about Carol Coronado, who killed her three young daughters while severely mentally ill. And a long time afterward, Carol apparently believed they were still alive. She asked about them, spoke about them in the present tense and believed they might walk through the door. When her attorney finally told her exactly what she had done, she became hysterical and inconsolable. And her mother reported that she kept on saying things that didn’t make sense for years after the murders. Coronado was nevertheless found legally sane and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences without parole.

I'm not suggesting this is how someone who was genuinely psychotic must behave. But the contrast is striking.

From very early after waking in the hospital, LC seems remarkably future-oriented: she worried about her recovery, rehabilitation, legal situation, marital situation, and even expressed wanting to pursue a career as an advocate for postpartum women. WTF?????

Throughout the testimonies is emerging a woman that displays an (unusual?) intense self-focus and need for attention/reassurance. The constant monitoring of symptoms, repeated contact with providers, extensive research, strong preferences about treatment. It is also reiterated ad nauseam what an exceptionally loving mother she was. I'm not diagnosing that or claiming I know what it means.... but it makes the absence of the children in her accounts feel even more striking.

So much of the larger narrative is about what happened to Lindsay: her illness, medications, treatment, how the health care system failed her - I guess now are supposed to believe her family also failed to take her hallucinations seriously. Her family has rallied around her, and now entire online communities and rallies are centered on supporting her.

In my opinion, the testimonies have shown a woman with considerable agency. She was actively managing her treatment, researching symptoms and medications, making choices, rejecting recommendations and seeking alternatives. Yet afterward, the narrative increasingly casts her as someone things simply happened to: failed by providers, failed by medication, failed by the system.

How does someone with so much apparent agency become almost entirely passive in the story of what happened, while Cora, Dawson and Callan, who really had no agency at all, gradually disappear from it? 

This isn't an argument that LC didn't react “correctly” but doesn’t it support her being criminally responsible? I don't even know exactly what I'm asking anymore. Just had to vent.

 

I have leaned heavily toward guilty/criminally responsible throughout this case. I have never been convinced that LC was psychotic, and honestly, I still don't see compelling evidence of psychosis.

But listening to her providers has made me much more conflicted.

First, I do not blame her providers. From what I've heard, they seem to have responded appropriately to what LC presented and involved her extensively in treatment decisions. She was not a passive patient at the mercy of doctors. She researched medications and side effects, worried about dependency, had strong preferences, sometimes rejected recommendations, and actively sought different treatments.

What strikes me most is the sheer intensity of the help-seeking. So many providers, so many contacts, so much focus on medications, symptoms and finding something that would help. Part of me has wondered whether there was an element of attention/reassurance-seeking or whether she was looking for something specific from providers that she wasn't getting. But perhaps this was simply what severe anxiety and desperation looked like for her...

Either way, after hearing these witnesses, I find it difficult to deny that something was seriously wrong before the murders and LC herself seemed to know it.

The medication history also troubles me more than it did before. I'm not suggesting malpractice, but hearing medication after medication being started, stopped and changed while she continued to deteriorate makes me wonder what role that whole process played in her downward spiral. With hindsight, I can't help wondering whether prolonged inpatient stabilization might have changed the trajectory.

However, I don't think LC is evil. I think something broke, and she could feel it breaking. What I still don't know is what broke.

The provider testimony has made me much more convinced that LC was genuinely psychiatrically deteriorating. It has not made me more convinced that she was psychotic. I still struggle with the one-time voice, the timing, the lack of an established delusional framework beforehand, and how much the psychosis narrative ultimately relies on LC's own account.

But this is where Massachusetts law becomes difficult for me.

The defense doesn't have to prove postpartum psychosis. The Commonwealth has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that a mental disease or defect did not leave her without substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing or to conform her conduct to the law. And after hearing her providers describe her deterioration in real time, I'm becoming less certain the prosecution can clear that bar.

I can still believe LC intentionally killed her children. I can still be unconvinced by her account of psychosis. And yet I can have reasonable doubt about whether she retained substantial capacity to control her conduct.

That's not somewhere I expected to find myself in this case.

Has the provider testimony changed anyone else's thinking, particularly those who, like me, have leaned strongly toward criminal responsibility?