In a column published Monday, American Thinker contributor Jeannie DeAngelis asks a blunt question that sits at the intersection of criminal law, gender politics, and cultural assumptions about motherhood: why are women who kill their children treated differently from men who kill theirs?
DeAngelis builds her case around the trial of Lindsey Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three children, and around a series of high-profile filicide cases in which female defendants were found not guilty by reason of insanity while male defendants facing comparable allegations were convicted and sentenced to death. Her argument is not that psychosis is irrelevant; it is that the same evidence of psychosis appears to be weighed differently depending on the sex of the defendant.
The column opens with a Biblical frame, invoking Eve and the Garden of Eden as an archetype for what DeAngelis sees as a long historical pattern: when a woman transgresses, the culture reaches for explanations that soften her culpability; when a man does the same, it reaches for condemnation. “Penalties for both, yes,” she writes. “But greater culpability for the man, also yes.”
The Yates and Jones comparison
The centerpiece of the piece is the pairing of Andrea Yates and Timothy Jones Jr. Both killed five of their children, DeAngelis notes, and both relied on insanity defenses supported by evidence of psychosis. Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was committed to a psychiatric facility. Jones’s insanity defense was rejected; South Carolina law, DeAngelis writes, will allow him to choose between lethal injection and the firing squad, with electrocution as the default.
Her summary of the contrast is unsparing: “Both are certifiable: one walks around in street clothes, while the other is a dead man walking.”
She then extends the list. Deanna Laney, who claimed God ordered her to kill her children, killed two sons with rocks and injured a third; she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. John Allen Rubio decapitated three young children based on a belief that they were possessed by witchcraft; his insanity plea was rejected by a Texas jury, and he was sentenced to death. Lisa Ann Diaz drowned her two daughters and was found not guilty by reason of insanity on a defense of psychotic delusion. Andre Thomas, who killed his estranged wife, son, and stepdaughter amid delusions involving God, demons, and the Antichrist, and then gouged out his own eye, saw his insanity defense rejected by a jury that convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to death.
DeAngelis concedes nothing about the severity of any of these crimes. Her point is narrower and more uncomfortable: if the psychosis is comparable, the outcomes should be too.
What the research cited actually says
She cites a 2024 forensic psychiatry practice resource published by the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, which she says reports that female defendants are more likely than male defendants to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and to be diverted to psychiatric facilities. She also points to a study of filicide in which attorneys presented with a fictional child-killing case were more likely to attribute the female perpetrator’s act to mental illness and to pursue an insanity defense on her behalf, while attributing the male perpetrator’s act to jealousy or retaliation and recommending a 15-year prison term.
That second finding is the one that cuts deepest, because it suggests the disparity may not originate on the bench. It may originate in the assumptions that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and jurors bring to the courtroom before a single witness is sworn. “The atrocities are comparable,” DeAngelis writes, “but the duplicity is stunning.”
She also flags a tension in the broader cultural conversation. In her framing, the same society that treats a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy as an exercise of rational autonomy often treats a woman’s decision to kill a born child as evidence of diminished capacity. For men, she argues, neither excuse is available. A father who kills his child is portrayed as dangerous, testosterone-driven, and evil, she writes, while a mother who does the same is met with questions: What happened to her? Was she abused? Was she controlled by a man? Did the medical or pharmaceutical complex damage her?
The question the column leaves open
DeAngelis is careful to say that she is not disputing that severe psychosis can impair a person’s grasp of reality. That is not the issue, she writes. The issue is whether a society that insists men and women are equal is also willing to apply the same threshold of criminal responsibility when the brutality, the psychosis, and the guilt are comparable.
Her proposed resolution comes in two forms, and she presents them as alternatives rather than a single demand. Either strip away what she calls the insanity fig leaf from Eve and hold women to the same standard as men, or acknowledge that if the sexes are truly equal, then Adam’s motives, actions, and excuses deserve no more suspicion than Eve’s.
It is a provocative framing, and it lands in the middle of a live legal and cultural debate about how insanity defenses function in practice, how gender shapes perceptions of violence, and whether the language of victimhood and mental illness is applied evenhandedly. The column does not pretend to resolve that debate. It does, however, insist that the disparity it describes is real enough to warrant asking where men’s equal treatment went.
Readers who want the full argument, including the specific case citations and study references, can find the original piece at American Thinker.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/is-it-time-to-rip-the-insanity-fig-leaf-from-eve/