There are three facts worth remembering about the Lindsay Clancy trial before getting lost in all the debates surrounding it: Cora Clancy was five years old, Dawson was three and Callan was eight months. All three were strangled by their mother.
The question before a Massachusetts jury is not whether Lindsay Clancy killed her children: her defence does not dispute that. Her lawyer has said explicitly that he is not contesting the prosecution’s basic case that she strangled each child with exercise bands in the basement of the family home. The argument is instead that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was therefore not criminally responsible for what she did. As I write, the jury is deliberating. Mental illness can diminish moral responsibility and, in extreme circumstances, perhaps remove it altogether. The Catholic Church has always recognised this. The Catechism says that responsibility may be “diminished or even nullified” by psychological factors.
The prosecution argues that what happened on January 24, 2023, was not a sudden frenzy. Clancy searched for a restaurant and a pharmacy and sent her husband out to collect dinner and children’s medicine. While he was away, prosecutors say, she took the children downstairs and strangled them one by one, each for several minutes. The medical evidence showed ligature strangulation, and the prosecution has argued that the killings unfolded over a period in which Clancy had to make repeated choices about where, how and in what order to kill the children. Her husband even spoke to her briefly on the telephone while he was out.
The defence has presented expert evidence that she was psychotic, including the claim that she heard a voice telling her to kill the children. Prosecution experts have challenged that account. That is exactly the sort of evidence a jury exists to weigh, and those of us watching from thousands of miles away should have some humility about declaring what was happening inside another person’s mind.
Speaking of humility: Candace Owens has announced that Clancy is “obviously not guilty”, blaming her doctors and psychiatric medication and claiming that she was placed into an “intentional psychosis”. Around the case has grown the usual ecosystem of internet detectives and conspiracy theorists, including people turning suspicion onto Clancy’s former husband despite there being no evidence at all to suggest that he was involved in the killings.
This is the increasingly familiar pattern with online commentary: start with the conclusion which will attract the most attention, then reinterpret every inconvenient fact until it fits: evidence which points the wrong way is just evidence of a cover-up. A horrific crime ceases to be a tragedy involving real people and becomes “content”.
But the strangest reaction has come not from professional pundits but from the public. Hundreds of supporters have gathered outside the courthouse dressed in pink. Some wore shirts bearing messages such as “Believe”, “She Needed Help” and “Peace For Lindsay”. One organiser explained that women who had experienced anxiety, depression or postpartum difficulties felt that “any one of us could be sitting in her chair”. More than $1 million has meanwhile been raised for Clancy’s parents, who relocated and exhausted much of their savings while supporting their daughter.
It could have been any one of us? No, it could not. Most mothers who suffer from postpartum depression do not kill their children. Most people who suffer from psychosis do not kill anybody. Saying this is not cruelty towards the mentally ill; quite the opposite. Treating murder as some almost natural extension of maternal anxiety does a grave disservice to the countless women who endure serious psychiatric illness without harming their children.
We understand this perfectly well in other circumstances. A school shooter may be severely mentally ill. He may suffer delusions, paranoia or suicidal thoughts. His mental condition may be highly relevant when determining his culpability. But nobody sensible would conclude from the diagnosis alone that he therefore bears no responsibility. We ask further questions. Did he understand what he was doing? Could he understand that it was wrong? Was he acting deliberately? Mental illness explains some actions; it does not automatically excuse them.
Yet something about motherhood appears to have short-circuited the consciences of many observers in the Clancy case. Their compassion for the mother has become so overwhelming that the children almost disappear.
And perhaps this is where the case tells us something uncomfortable about the wider culture. Modern moral reasoning increasingly begins with the feelings and circumstances of the adult. If the adult is frightened, desperate, traumatised or suffering, our instinct is to look at the world entirely through his or her eyes. The weaker party gradually becomes an abstraction.
We have seen something remarkably similar in the abortion debate. Only this year, Parliament changed the law in England and Wales so that the old criminal offences relating to abortion no longer apply to a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy, at any stage of gestation. Even the criminal law protecting a child capable of being born alive has been dis-applied in relation to the pregnant woman herself.
The language used in those debates is usually compassionate: desperate women, terrible circumstances, difficult choices. Such considerations do of course matter, but compassion becomes dangerous when it consumes every other moral consideration, including the existence of another human being.
In the Clancy case there is no ultrasound screen and no euphemism to provide distance. There are photographs of Cora, Dawson and Callan. They have names. They smiled, played and were loved. Suddenly the habit of looking exclusively through the eyes of the distressed adult becomes much harder to sustain.
There may, then, be one very small silver lining to an otherwise unspeakably tragic case. Certain fashionable ideas survive because everyone is afraid to say that something has gone badly wrong. We saw something similar with the excesses of progressive politics during and immediately after the Covid years. For a time institutions and corporations competed to affirm increasingly absurd propositions, until eventually the absurdity became so visible that ordinary people simply stopped pretending.
Moral confusion can occasionally do the same thing. It becomes so jarring that something has to give. Perhaps the sight of crowds gathering in shirts proclaiming solidarity with a woman who does not deny strangling her three children will have that effect. Perhaps it will remind people that sympathy is not the highest moral virtue, and that understanding why someone did something is not the same as declaring that what they did no longer matters.
Whatever verdict the jury reaches, Cora, Dawson and Callan should not become incidental characters in the story of their mother’s suffering. Compassion is a Christian virtue. But compassion separated from truth and justice is not mercy. It is sentimentality: and sentimentality, when it refuses to see the innocent, can become something very dark indeed.
