I keep coming back to one stubbornly simple thought about the Lindsay Clancy case: she strangled her three children to death. Three small children. Whatever else we debate—and apparently we are capable of debating almost anything these days—that fact sits in the middle of the case and refuses to move.
I understand that there is a serious legal question about whether Clancy was criminally responsible for what she did. I understand the testimony about postpartum psychosis, medications and profound mental illness. I'm willing, for purposes of argument, to grant every bit of it. What I cannot understand is how we get from any of that to a system in which Lindsay Clancy might someday be free.
Maybe that's because I'm looking at this differently from many people discussing the case. I'm actually less interested in deciding whether Lindsay Clancy is evil or insane than you might expect. My visceral reaction is that what she did was unspeakably evil. The methodical nature of it is particularly difficult for me to process: strangling three children individually, and, according to the prosecution's account, pursuing one of them through the house.
There is something about those facts that I find almost impossible to reconcile with ordinary human behavior. At an emotional or even spiritual level, words like "evil" and "demonic" come much more naturally to me than clinical terminology. But I also recognize that those are my judgments, and the criminal justice system can't operate on my visceral reaction. Psychiatrists know things I don't know. Jurors heard evidence I didn't hear. The legal definition of insanity exists for a reason.
So let me grant the other side the entire argument. Let's say Lindsay Clancy was profoundly psychotic. Let's say she genuinely could not appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing in the way the law requires. Let's even say that after years of excellent psychiatric treatment she completely recovers, becomes lucid and stable, and doctors eventually determine that her likelihood of committing another violent act is extraordinarily small.
My answer is still the same: she can never be free.
That isn't because I want her tortured, mistreated or made miserable. It isn't even necessarily about punishment. If she's legally responsible, put her in prison for the rest of her life. If she's not legally responsible because she was severely mentally ill, put her in an appropriate secure psychiatric institution and give her excellent treatment for the rest of her life. Give her dignity. Give her medical care. Give her books, therapy, recreation, decent food and whatever humanity demands that we provide to someone in state custody. But don't open the door.
This is where I find myself increasingly frustrated by the conversation surrounding the case. So much attention is devoted to whether Clancy should be regarded as a murderer or as a desperately ill mother experiencing psychosis. I understand why that distinction matters legally and morally. But there is another question that matters enormously to me: What happens afterward?
If an insanity verdict means secure psychiatric treatment today but creates a legal path by which, after enough years and enough favorable psychiatric evaluations, someone who killed three children can eventually return to unrestricted life in society, then I believe the law is inadequate. Change the law.
John Hinckley Jr. is one reason I feel so strongly about this. He shot President Ronald Reagan, gravely wounded James Brady and shot two law-enforcement officers. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent decades institutionalized, gradually received increasing privileges and eventually obtained complete, unconditional freedom. I understand the legal reasoning. I understand that doctors concluded that the conditions justifying his confinement no longer existed. I don't have to believe those doctors were dishonest or incompetent to believe the ultimate result was wrong.
My position is simpler: after certain demonstrated acts of catastrophic violence, society should not be required to take that chance again.
Someone will reasonably object that no human being presents zero risk and that "the risk isn't zero" cannot become a general justification for locking people up forever. I agree. That would be a frightening principle if applied prospectively to people who haven't committed terrible crimes. I'm not advocating Minority Report. I'm talking about people who have already demonstrated, through proven conduct, an extraordinary capacity for lethal violence. There has to be a threshold somewhere. If methodically killing three children doesn't cross it, I genuinely don't know what possibly could.
That brings me to the lone holdout on the Clancy jury. Eleven jurors reportedly favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible. One did not. We now know that the lone holdout was also reportedly the only Black juror on the panel, a detail I find striking given how frequently modern American culture tells us that demographics and lived experience matter. I have some pretty pointed thoughts about the irony of that circumstance, particularly when people who ordinarily emphasize racial perspective suddenly seem remarkably uninterested in it.
But I also have to challenge myself here. I don't know what that man's race had to do with his decision. I don't know his politics. I don't know the politics of the other eleven jurors. And reducing twelve individual human beings to demographic categories would be doing precisely the kind of thing I regularly criticize other people for doing.
What I do know is that one man stood alone.
One of the other jurors subsequently described the disagreement by saying, in essence, that the holdout simply couldn't get around the fact that Clancy strangled her children. When I heard that, my immediate reaction was almost incredulous: Yeah. No shit. That's a pretty enormous thing to "get around."
I realize the juror almost certainly meant something more sophisticated than the quote sounds in isolation. The legal question wasn't whether Clancy killed her children; everyone knows she did. The question was whether severe mental illness rendered her legally incapable of criminal responsibility at that moment. The other eleven apparently believed the psychiatric evidence answered that question. The holdout apparently did not.
Still, I admire him.
Imagine sitting in that room with eleven people telling you that you're wrong. Imagine the pressure as hours become days, everyone wants to go home, and eleven people believe you're the obstacle standing between them and a verdict. It would be incredibly easy to begin doubting yourself. Maybe they're smarter than I am. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I should just go along. He didn't. Whatever his reasoning ultimately was—and unless he chooses to speak publicly, none of us should pretend we know it—he remained unconvinced. In a system requiring unanimity, that wasn't misconduct. That was his responsibility.
Perhaps the other eleven were legally correct. I need to leave room for that possibility because I wasn't sitting in the courtroom hearing every expert and examining every piece of evidence. I also don't think those jurors are monsters because they reached a conclusion that makes me deeply uncomfortable. My initial emotional reaction toward them is considerably harsher than that, and I've had to remind myself that people can look at the same horrific facts and sincerely reach different conclusions about legal responsibility. If I'm going to demand that other people resist caricaturing those with whom they disagree, I have to make some effort to do the same.
But my larger position survives even that concession. Suppose the eleven were right and the holdout was completely wrong about criminal responsibility. Fine. Then Lindsay Clancy belongs in a secure psychiatric institution rather than a prison. What I cannot accept is that the distinction should someday become the difference between confinement and freedom.
There are crimes for which I believe society is entitled to say: we will care for you, we will treat you humanely, and if you're sick we will treat your illness—but we will never again ask innocent people to assume the risk of what happens if we're wrong about you. That isn't vengeance to me. It is incapacitation. It is acknowledging that psychiatric predictions, however sophisticated, remain predictions, while three dead children are not theoretical.
And perhaps that's ultimately what bothers me about this entire discussion. We seem consumed with finding the perfect label for Lindsay Clancy: murderer, monster, victim, patient, psychotic mother. I don't particularly need one. She may be some combination that I will never fully understand. The justice system can wrestle with culpability. Doctors can wrestle with diagnosis. The rest of us can wrestle with mercy, morality and forgiveness.
But three children are dead.
Whatever else we decide about Lindsay Clancy, I believe society owes those children—and every innocent person who might someday encounter her—one absolute promise:
We will never ask anyone to take that chance again.
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