‘one flew over the cuckoos nest’ inspired a lot of people to let the crazy people go free. it was a big ‘empathetic’ movement of the kind we are periodically cursed with. i know everything is reagans fault somehow. so maybe he co wrote the screen play.

This is what happens to a country that has been savaging its own infrastructure for nearly 40 years—ever since the miracle of Reaganomics was birthed—in order to justify tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich.

Lol yeah I remember all the wealth on display in the 70s in America’s dying inner-cities.

I argue it’s similar to how if they originally agreed to kill a third party with him pulling the trigger but he backs out and despite her trying to get him to do it, he doesn’t. Then there’s no crime.

He was incredibly mentally vulnerable, she knew that, and instead of encouraging him to seek help or simply even removing herself from his life, she encouraged him to kill himself - because of his fragile mental state, she is as culpable as if she stood beside the car ordering him to get back in and kill himself. She…

Let’s say two teens were plotting to murder a third. The boyfriend gets cold feet, but the girlfriend convinces him to go through with it. Even if the girl did not physically kill the victim, she is culpable. Is this situation analogous? Is she even more culpable because of Roy’s mental state?

Stop viewing her as some misguided teenager. The girl is a sociopath. She is absolutely guilty as charged. I have no doubt that she’s done other horrible things to other people we will never hear about. And if she had the chance, she would do more of the same again. Sociopaths don’t change. They have no conscience. I…

How so? In both instances all she used was words. The only difference is the competency of the toddler vs. the teen. The teen obviously had a greater understanding of the consequences of his actions. But the teen was also at a disadvantage due to his mental illness. She took advantage of that illness, just like…

If she had been standing next to him, or outside the car, saying those things to him in his presence, would she be legally culpable? The answer being almost certainly yes, and knowing that medium doesn’t matter means that she’s legally culpable for saying those things over the internet or in phone calls.

She knew where…

So you believe she’s morally culpable and the law says she’s legally culpable. Not sure what the hang up here is.

I think the law needs to catch up to technology, and all the horrible ways that technology is used today. The problem is that people use texting and social media posts like FB and Twitter without feeling the sense of immediacy and intimacy that face to face conversations have. This is a real problem.

It’s truly appalling. And the idea that she would put her own interests ahead of his life — I’m guessing that she claimed that it would reflect poorly on her, setting off her social anxiety, if he backed out — is positively chilling. You’d feel more confident eventually releasing her if she’d just testified that…

I don’t like the precedent that telling someone to do something is legally equivalent to forcing them to do something.

I think she should be. Fuck her.

Exactly. The only meaningful difference between the hitman case and this one is in the hitman case the victim presumably did nothing to cause their own death, and in this case the victim did. But so what? Even if you want to assign some sort of culpability to the victim here, more than one person can be culpable for…

Instead of a suicidal young man, imagine if she told a two year old that there’s candy for him/her in the middle of a busy freeway, and then sat back and watched the toddler get run down. The suicidal young man had psychological issues, and she took advantage of them in his vulnerable state.

So she deliberately provoked a fragile person into killing themselves, but you don’t think she should be legally culpable, because young white woman? Will you expand that exoneration for other types of people?

“ And even if she is, I don’t know that I think she should be.”

Repeatedly urging someone you know is suicidal to commit suicide, including ordering them to continue the attempt after they try to abandon their attempt, isn’t something we should find legally culpable?

This girl knew right from wrong and if it wasn’t for…

Not just that, she listened to him dying and did not call an ambulance, did not call his parents, did not call his friends.

Yeah, I get that the defense have to play any angle but it was an uncomfortable sell. Same with people excusing her because of her youth. I get that young people are often assholes but there’s garden-variety teen assholishness and then there’s this. I have been a teen and I have been on SSRIs and I have even been a…