13
votes
Lauren Dickason trial: Jury finds New Zealand mum guilty of murdering her three children in majority verdict
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- Title
- Lauren Dickason trial: Jury struggling to reach verdict, judge gives further instruction on deliberations
- Authors
- Anna Leask
- Published
- Aug 16 2023
- Word count
- 1076 words
This might be controversial, but I don’t find prison time to be helpful here. There’s a very low risk of reoffence. I’d be interested to know whether they explored postpartum psychosis. I’m also interested to know how many times she saw a doctor after having the twins, and how many times they checked in with her about her mental health. If it’s anything like australia they might have checked with her once, at the 6-week check, and never again. Cases like this are a failure of our healthcare system and lack of support for women postpartum. There’s a fairly high chance this tragedy could have been avoided. I feel for those babies, and I feel for their dad and the rest of the family. But I feel for her too.
I agree. Like many cases, it calls into question what purpose incarceration serves in our society. Is it to prevent crime through deterrence? That's unlikely in this case, as the motivation is not tethered to rational thought, therefore others in her position are unlikely to consider the rational fear of prison. Is it to protect future potential victims of the same perpetrator? As you mentioned, that's also highly unlikely in this case. Is it to rehabilitate the convicted? Surely a Healthcare facility would be better equipped for that in this case. So what purpose is served by her incarceration? Could the resources used to incarcerate her possibly go to systems that would prevent this sort of tragedy in the future? I'm inclined to believe that they could.
Absolutely agree. The only purpose could be revenge, and that’s a colossal waste of time and money, and frankly irrational.
Why would you say that she is unlikely to be of further harm? What if her ex husband upsets her? What if her parents upset her? She's obviously not well enough to handle her thoughts. Yes she won't have children causing her issues but she'll have countless other issues now. So while a jail cell might not be the best, freely walking out of the door is not an option either.
Thank you, that really sums up how I'm feeling about it. Lauren was a GP in South Africa and she was self-prescribing antidepressants (which is apparently legal in SA). The five experts who testified in the case all agreed that her treatment in SA was sub-optimal. Worse than that, as the family prepared to emigrate to NZ Lauren stopped her medication because she thought that might be more favourable in the eyes of NZ immigration officials. This is what has lead to the disagreement between experts about whether her PPD had remitted or not and therefore whether infanticide applied or not.
Oh that’s interesting. So she potentially wasn’t being checked up on by anyone. I assume the prosecution argued that stopping antidepressants meant she was no longer depressed? What a sad sad case.
Lauren Dickason has today been found guilty of murdering her three young children. It's been a devastating case for all involved. The defence centred around Lauren's mental state at the time of the killings, claiming either that she was not culpable of the killings due to insanity or a partial defence of diminished responsibility due to infanticide. A good summary of infanticide in NZ law is given here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/494902/what-does-infanticide-mean-in-nz-law-and-what-must-the-jury-decide-in-lauren-dickason-s-trial#:~:text=Infanticide%20has%20a%20legalistic%20meaning,have%20been%20murder%20or%20manslaughter.
I've been following the case very closely these last four weeks, and I was honestly surprised by the verdict. It seemed to me exactly the type of case for which infanticide was made for. All the experts agreed that Lauren was extremely mentally unwell at the time of the killings, but they varied in their opinion as to how much of her condition could be attributed to post-partum depression. The crucial evidence in my mind was when one of the two crown experts admitted in cross examination that he couldn't be certain that Lauren's post-partum depression had remitted.
Having been so wrapped up in the coverage of the case I was wondering if anyone else here had been following it and had any thoughts to share. The comments on Reddit were just the type of cesspool I've come to expect from there so I don't know why I even bothered to look but having personally suffered major depressive disorder and post-partum depression I have probably been more invested in the trial coverage than I should have been and I am curious about others thoughts on it all.
Legitimate question here. Do you believe a post like this to be more about the person and the case or really more of a discussion about post-partum depression, mental health, infanticide, and the justice system?
Personally, I find the former tragic and sensationalist - it reminds me too much of true-crime addicts who sometimes end up treating cases as entertainment, even taking on sports-fan like mentalities at times.
Great question. I'm very much hoping for some insight/perspective about post-partum depression and mental health as it relates to criminal culpability, which is why I posted to ~mental.heath rather than ~news.
However, I fully acknowledge that I have been probably overly obsessed with this particular case, likely to the detriment of my own mental health to a certain degree. These issues are very personal to me and this event has happened in my own community and involves people I know in a peripheral way. Because of the nature of what happened, it's such a touchy subject amongst my friends and acquaintances, everyone seems to have very strong opinions. I suppose I hoped the relative anonymity of the internet might help me debrief now that the trial has ended.
Edit to say: I originally titled the post "Has anyone been following the Dickason case in NZ?" but it was edited by someone and my tag "sensitive content, trigger warning" was removed. This was my first post on Tildes so I'm clearly still finding my way around here. I was hoping to connect with people who were already familiar with the case, rather than trying to amplify or sensationalise the reporting of it for general consumption.
In general, when you submit a link topic it's considered best to not editorialize the original title too much, unless you're trying to help clear up potential confusion, remove clickbait, or provide some needed context.
So if you want to ask a question of Tildes users, with a link as the focus, you can do that either in a comment in that link topic, or by submitting a text topic (leave the "Link" field of the post topic form blank) and then just include the link, and your questions/commentary in the text field below it. Text topics usually get left as is, since they're considered more like "personal property" than a link submission. Whereas link submissions are usually considered more "community property" so often get edited in order to keep things civil, on-topic, organized, and easily searchable on the site.
And as for the
sensitive contentandtrigger warningtags, there has been a bunch of debate over the years as to whether we should use them or not, but nothing was ever decided on or formalized, AFAIK. I personally think they're a good idea and have advocated for them in the past, but others disagreed. @mycketforvirrad (the king of tags) includedtrigger.deathon this topic though, and what he decides usually becomes de-facto policy. So from now on I'll probably start includingtrigger.<subject>tags when appropriate going forwards as well, so people can filter them out if they want to avoid topics on those subjects.I hope that helps clarify some things. And if you have any more questions about Tildes, please feel free to ask, and I will try my best to answer them.
p.s. As already mentioned, you can see who edited what by clicking on the "Topic log" dropdown in the sidebar. And if you ever need clarification on a change, or want to request it be undone, you can usually just ask the person who made the change... or ping me in a comment using @cfabbro.
If you expand the topic log on the right side of this submission, you can see who edited the title and tags. The tags are just a means for people to sort through posts, so I'm not surprised that they don't want people to have the ability to deliberately search for potentially-triggering posts (not that I'm saying that was your intention!).
I welcome the discussion over PPM and how it could affect culpability. Truth be told, my initial kneejerk reaction of the story was that she needs to be in prison, but after reading these comments, I'm aware of how ignorant and surface level my reaction was.
I remember listening to a story on NPR about how difficult it is for women in America (not an American story, I know, but trying to relate) to have PPM treatment be covered by insurance. Just an awful situation all around.