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INSANITY! That’s What Defense Attorneys Are Planning For Woman Who Hung Her Two Children

Berks County, Pennsylvania is a large county in the Keystone State that encompasses all of the city of Reading and part of the Combined Statistical Area of Philadelphia and Camden. It also is now home to an individual who is on trial for doing something terrible to her two children.

Defense attorneys are going to try an insanity defense for Lisa Snyder, 37, who is charged with first-degree murder for hanging her little boy and little girl from a dog leash. Reading prosecutors want the death penalty, but the defense just recently filed the paperwork for an insanity defense.

They are accusing Snyder of hanging her son Conner, 8, and daughter Brinley, 4, in the basement of her home. After Snyder was arrested, she tried to shift the blame onto the oldest victim, claiming that he had been bullied at school and was severely depressed over it. However, state trooper Ian Keck testified at a preliminary hearing that Conner was happy and was very popular in his class according to teachers, a bus driver, and even fellow students.

Thus, in a nutshell, the prosecution believes that “Mom did it”, and the defense believes that all the prosecution has is just a circumstantial case at the most. The new documents point out the fact that the defense is going to point out that this mother has had a history of “severe mental disorders”, going as far back as when she had post-partum depression at the ripe old age of 16. Additionally, they are going to claim that she had posited suicidal ideations, and that she had perceived that the kids were being hurt by other people.In a nutshell, the defense is going to claim that the reason she killed them is because she believed that she was protecting them from “feelings of abandonment and as a means to alleviate the painful feelings they were experiencing at the time.”

Of course, here is the definition of insanity according to Pennsylvania law:

“(1) ‘Mentally Ill’: An individual who has such a lack of capacity due to mental illness that they cannot appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct or to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law. (2) ‘Legal Insanity’ When the act was in progress, the defendant was laboring under a severe defect of reason, and it caused them to have such a disease of the mind that they didn’t know the nature and quality of the act, or if they did know it, they weren’t aware that it was wrong.”

Of course, the cops are claiming that Snyder told them that she had only found her children hanging, and that she had tried to lift them, but she was unable to do so because she was sweating profusely due to her “anxiety spikes.”

Whatever the outcome of this case may be, the authorities are also claiming that they found pictures of the defendant sexually abusing the family dog. Naturally, the defense wants these charges to be severed from the murder case, simply because they believe that particular evidence would “unneccesarily inflame the passions of the jury and unfairly prejudice them.”

I guess time will tell how this case will play out.

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