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I’m going to discuss one of the most horrifying murder cases in memory. This murder case is so awful, so dark, so totally unthinkable, and ghastly, that frankly I don’t like to think about it, and would therefore prefer not to discuss it.
Yet the case does have implications — not merely political, but deeper than that. The murder itself, the reaction to it, the commentary on it, and the defense that’s being argued in court, all say something — and something quite troubling — about our culture. And that’s why I’ve decided to discuss it.
Lindsay Clancy is a former labor and delivery nurse. Back in January of 2023, she sent her husband, Patrick, out of the house to run an errand at CVS and pick up food.
With Patrick out of the way, Clancy took her young children — Cora (age 5), Dawson (age 3), and Callan (8 months) — into the basement, where she methodically strangled each of them to death with exercise bands. Clancy then slashed her wrists and jumped out of a second-story window, sustaining serious injuries that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
When her husband arrived, she told him the kids were in the basement. He ran downstairs to find them all dead. Later, according to her husband, Lindsay claimed that she had “heard a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself.”
Despite what the wannabe Nancy Drews are saying on TikTok, this is not exactly a whodunnit. Lindsay Clancy confessed to the crime. Her guilt is self-evident. And her attorneys, in front of the jury, aren’t even attempting to argue that she didn’t commit the crime.
They’ve stipulated to all of the forensic evidence, which means they formally agreed that all of the evidence is real and legitimate and valid. Again, they are not trying to argue that she didn’t do it. She did it, and it’s not being disputed by any rational person — though it is being disputed by plenty of irrational people.
Instead, the case is about whether Lindsay Clancy qualifies as “not guilty by reason of insanity” — specifically, by reason of “postpartum psychosis” exacerbated by the medications she was taking.
This defense should not exist as a matter of law. Once a woman brutally murders her own children, it does not matter what a therapist says about why she did it. It does not matter how she felt. It does not matter if she was sad or anxious or indeed insane. She should be removed from society permanently as a matter of justice.
If her defense is that she’s so crazy that she just can’t help herself — that she had no choice but to strangle her own children to death — then that’s all the more reason to remove her from society permanently.
It should not be controversial to say that a person who methodically executes three children, strangling each to death as the others watch in horror, is a person who must be punished to the fullest extent of the law, crazy or not, or on medication or not.
There are some things that you can do in life that — once they’ve been done — preclude you from ever walking free again. These are actions that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. Justice must be done. Punishment must be given. And if murdering three children — your own young, helpless children — does not qualify as one of those sorts of actions — if it does not call for the most severe punishment — then nothing does.
We should note that a successful insanity plea in the state of Massachusetts does not at all mean, necessarily, that the person who was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” will spend the rest of their life in a mental institution.
You’ll often hear people claim that there’s no reason to get upset when a murderer is found not guilty by reason of insanity, because they’ll still be locked up in an institution for life. But that’s not true. There’s a reason defendants try for the insanity defense. The fate of a person found not guilty on that basis is considerably more favorable than one found guilty.
If we were still living in the 1940s, when the criminally insane were committed for life to insane asylums, which were institutions often more punishing and nightmarish than actual prisons, then I might feel differently. But we are not in the 1940s anymore.
If Clancy’s insanity defense is successful, she will be placed in a mental health institution indefinitely — but not necessarily permanently — and the state will have to petition every single year to keep her there. Every year they will have to prove that she is still mentally ill and a risk to society. If they can’t prove it, or decline to petition in the first place, she will, in fact, be released back into society.
This happens all the time. And there’s a very high chance it would happen with Lindsey Clancy. The only way to permanently remove this woman — who, again, murdered three children — from society is to find her guilty of murder in the first degree and put her in prison for life with no parole or execute her.
The entire concept of an insanity defense, as I’ve argued before, is completely nonsensical and antithetical to the basic notions of justice and fairness. That is particularly true in this context.
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So, “If a mother says she’s not feeling right, or if she’s struggling,” that might mean she has “postpartum psychosis” or “postpartum depression.” Other symptoms to look out for include “confusion, disorientation, increased energy, racing thoughts, and sleep disturbance” — which, incidentally, are all symptoms that every human being has at some point in their life, particularly when they’re in a stressful situation. There’s no lab test for this disorder, and the diagnostic criteria are so broad that they apply to about 95% of the population.
Nevertheless, “postpartum psychosis” is currently a viable defense to first-degree murder, and we’re all supposed to take it seriously. To be clear, I’m not denying that “postpartum psychosis” can occur. Sometimes people do hallucinate, for one reason or another. Certainly, postpartum depression is a very real phenomenon.
But even if you’re fully on board with the idea that some women can develop this psychosis because their hormones get out of whack, the idea that it completely removes all agency, that they are not responsible at all for anything they do — up to and including slaughtering three human beings — is ludicrous.
Remember that Clancy sent her husband out of the house so that she could murder her kids. Remember that she murdered them with exercise bands, one at a time. Rem
