A Lindsay Clancy ‘Not Responsible’ Verdict Would Have Sent Women Back 100 Years

“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent,” Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith said — and if modern history were to test that theory, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial would be, for lack of a better term, Exhibit A.

The courtroom drama ended Friday in a mistrial, and the jury appears to have narrowly avoided the miscarriage of justice — and the “cruelty to the innocent” — that would have resulted had they returned with a verdict declaring her “not criminally responsible” for her actions.

So who is the guilty in this case? The answer to this question is pretty straightforward: Lindsay Clancy, whatever one might believe about the factors that may have contributed to her mental state at the time of the murders, is the one who committed them.

Clancy herself — along with her entire defense team — has never once denied that she is the one who strangled her three young children to death with exercise bands. During the trial, text messages revealed that she planned the murders — at least in the short term — and intentionally sent her husband on errands away from the house in order to give herself time to carry them out.

Her defense team claimed at trial that she heard a voice telling her to carry out the actions. Reddington then painted a picture of a woman so debilitated by the effects of postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis — coupled with a laundry list of psychotropic drugs that had been prescribed at different times by her doctors — that she could not be held responsible for planning and carrying out three murders and an apparent suicide attempt.

None of this is to say that Clancy was not suffering or did not need help — only that, by her own admission, she committed the crimes of which she stands accused.

And who is the innocent? This is slightly more complicated, because the obvious victims are the three children who will never see another birthday — not to mention the father who was the first to discover the bodies of his dead children and will never toss a football with his son or walk his daughters down the aisle.

A ”not responsible” verdict, to them, would mean that no justice will ever be served for what was done to them.

But there are many more who would feel the impact of a “not responsible” verdict — and some of them are the ones who have been screaming the loudest for exactly that. The damage such a verdict could do to women across the board cannot be overstated.

While it might look like compassion to declare Clancy a victim — of her diagnoses, of disjointed health care, or a combination of those things — what it would become is an indictment of any woman who has been or might be a victim of the same.

If, for example, postpartum depression is accepted as what pushed Clancy to kill her own children, who could then say that Child Protective Services was out of line if they began removing children from any home in which the mother was diagnosed with PPD? And in family court? Instead of arguing that children need their mothers, lawyers would be forced to prove that their female clients weren’t on the brink of crisis.

And while that seems extreme, what about the women who have high-stress jobs? Would their bosses be correct to sideline them if they learned of such a diagnosis? And given patient privacy laws, why would employers ever risk hiring women at all — knowing that they could be one hormone shift away from crisis — for such jobs?

Female pilots? No airline would ever take the risk. Combat roles? Not likely. In fact, military leadership would put more restrictions on the jobs women were allowed to do. Law enforcement officers? Air traffic controllers? Supreme Court Justice — or any judge, for that matter? Fewer women would ever make it into any of those jobs — and a whole list of others — and every one who did would forever have an asterisk next to her name. And kiss the idea of a female president of the United States goodbye forever.

In starker terms, a “not responsible” verdict for Lindsay Clancy would hit rewind on even the most basic rights and freedoms that the First Wave Feminists — think Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, not Sandra Fluke and the p*ssy-hat mafia — fought to obtain: to vote, to own property, to have a credit card or bank account that didn’t require a man’s signature. After all, can you really trust a woman with the household finances if she’s at the mercy of her hormones? What are the odds that any woman would ever again be allowed to own a firearm?

Women cannot demand equality with men when it comes to jobs and positions of power and then demand special consideration when it comes to accountability for their actions.