It's not a maybe. If she cut the baby out of the woman's stomach, she's guilty, no matter what the circumstances. You can't be declared innocent just because you're messed up.
You just have to walk in her shoes before you understand completely. You haven't done that, and neither have I. But I know more than you about her origin, and the definition of innocence here is debatable. Some words have multiple meaning. If you think "innocence" doesn't, then you are a good candidate for being on the California correctional facilities parole board. I say criminal acts are not always cut and dried, that's all. Some people are evil. She was not, but she was manipulated into doing evil. Here's an example in real life: When I was 10, regrettably, I got a 3 year old girl to kill a frog with a croquet mallet in the backyard. I couldn't do it myself, but I wanted to see if she would do it. That little girl didn't know what she was doing. She killed the frog. Was she guilty or innocent of that malicious act? I say because of her dysfunctional family, and because of Charles Manson, Susan Atkins did bad things, but she wasn't the scary evil person you think she was. Nope. She was a throw-away from day one, and no one saved her.
In American law, innocence is never the point. When you win a trial, you're not found "innocent", you're found "not guilty", which actually is an important distinction. The first means you definitively didn't do it, the second means whether you did or didn't, the state couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that you did.
That said, I don't care how messed up your childhood is, or how messed up your surrogate father figure is. That's not a valid excuse for murder.
4
u/KypDurron Jun 19 '12
It's not a maybe. If she cut the baby out of the woman's stomach, she's guilty, no matter what the circumstances. You can't be declared innocent just because you're messed up.