Yeah, I'm going to babble about semantics again.

This woman in Texas drowned her five children because she thought she heard Satan's voice telling her to kill them. Now she's on trial for the crime.

(Note to readers: if you ever hear the voice of Satan telling you to do something, you may wish to seriously consider declining. If you think the voice is Satan's, the advice is probably suspect. You know?)

Neither the defense nor the prosecution are disputing the fact that she murdered her children. Rather, the point of the trial is to determine whether she was, technically speaking, sane when she committed the acts. The prosecution maintains that the killings were premeditated, and therefore show a rational mind at work. The accused had allegedly told people that she was planning to use a knife, but decided in the end to drown her children in the tub, instead, because that would be less bloody. Hence, premeditation.

The defense maintains that she had had urges to kill her first child shortly after he was born (she heard voices, she has allegedly told her psychiatrist, advising her to use a knife), and then again after later children were born. Thus, contends the defense, we see a pattern of schizophrenia. (Seems to me that this argument also supports the premeditation argument, but I won't go there for now.)

I am not a lawyer, and I do not claim to know all of the legal aspects involved in the case. I'm pretty sure that if she is found "Innocent by reason of insanity", she'll be committed to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life. Not quite the same as being acquitted. If she is found guilty, however, the prosecution plans to ask for the death penalty. So, there *is* something at stake here, beyond semantics.

Quite frankly, the evidence seems pretty compelling to me: the mother was guilty of premeditated murder, and *of course* she was insane. Murdering your five children is not the activity of a healthy mind.

Dennis Miller, in one of his recently published rants about coddling, suggests that we change the "Innocent by Reason of Insanity" plea to "Guilty by Reason of Insanity." Sounds like a great idea to me. The fundamental result of a successful plea -- being committed to a psychiatric ward -- doesn't need to be changed. But let's get off this politically correct bandwagon that somehow equates insanity with innocence. The insane are not always innocent... even if the innocent *are* always insane.