An “Altruistic” Opening

It’s not an opening you want to see in a news story:

Lawyers for a Manhattan executive charged with murdering her 8-year-old son are attempting an unusual defense: They claim Gigi Jordan had no choice but to kill the boy, and was completely in her right mind when she did it.

Jordan had poisoned her son to death with pills, and now offers a defense of “altruistic filicide.”

In court papers, the defense argues that Ms. Jordan, who has pleaded not guilty, correctly believed her son was threatened by forces so insurmountable, death was the best option.

She claimed that a former husband was going to murder her to solve their tangled financial relationship and that the boy’s father (not her husband, but a man who she met in a gym who agreed “to help her become a mother”) would get custody and sexually abuse him. The boy has severe developmental problems.

It’s not an opening you want to see because the case is so sad — whether or not the mother is telling the truth, and whether or not she’s really as sane as she claims to be — that many people will take it as an excuse for “altruistic filicide.” And indeed a forensic psychiatrist quoted in the article says:

“Jurors are stuck in a position today of punishing too much or lying,” he [Park Dietz] said. “A jury must either convict a mother who has committed altruistic filicide with all the stigma and ramifications that come with the conviction or they must . . . cut her a break and find her insane despite the evidence to the contrary.”

It sounds so reasonable, put that way. How unfair that the  law doesn’t distinguish this kind of killing from murder on the one side and altruism from insanity on the other. But all the terms means is that you’ve killed someone without his permission because you’ve decided, on grounds that you (but possibly no one else) thinks sufficient, that he’d be better off dead. Put that way, the alternative guilty or insane doesn’t seem so unfair.