What Everyone Is Missing About Lindsay Clancy

One of the things that I find very interesting about the Lindsay Clancy case is that it’s a complex fact pattern.

There’s a fake thing that happens in psychiatry in which it’s assumed that people are capable of pure, easy diagnoses and that drugs are extremely effective. Neither one is true. If you spend any time with psychiatrists or with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) — or people who have dealt with psychiatrists, the DSM, or medication — you would know it’s probably the least-developed area of all medicine.

Psychiatry is incredibly vague. Basically, these things are diagnosed based on checklists and a person’s self-reported symptoms. And then when it comes to psychiatric drugs, very often it’s basically trying different combinations. It is virtually that basic: see what works, then adjust medication based on the symptoms.

It’s really complex. In this particular case, it basically comes down to: Was she psychotic enough not to recognize the difference between right and wrong at the time of the murders? That is the essence of the case. And there’s the fact that Massachusetts law is incredibly biased in favor of the defendant when it comes to the insanity defense.

I know a lot of people are very agitated on the Right, saying, “It’s a clear-cut case; she’s absolutely guilty.” Meanwhile, a lot of people on the Left are agitated, saying, “It’s a clear-cut case; she’s absolutely innocent.”

I’m not all that surprised there’s a hung jury, although I’m surprised it was 11-1 in favor of acquittal. I would have thought it would have been six on one side and six on the other.

The “beyond a reasonable doubt” provision of the law, combined with the insanity defense in Massachusetts, which puts the burden of proof on the prosecution to prove sanity rather than the burden of proof on the defense to prove insanity, makes it a very, very high bar for the prosecution to pass.

This is one of the reasons why I think it’s such a sin for people to conflate their own personal issues with those of Lindsay Clancy. The reality is that in the United States, every year you have probably 15 multiple homicides of children by women in circumstances similar to Lindsay Clancy’s.

But there are many women claiming they are suffering the same thing Lindsay Clancy supposedly suffered from, which is totally insane and really, really damaging for society at large.

I would say the defense has three basic arguments in favor of the idea that she was truly psychotic at the point at which she committed the murders. The most obvious one, the one that the prosecution had the hardest time with, was the fact that she tried to kill herself. If she just killed the kids and then didn’t try to kill herself, I would have said to give her the death penalty.

Her hearing voices? That is the most difficult part of this case because there’s literally no way to determine whether that happened, since it’s purely subjective. She’s going to say she heard a voice. Everybody else is going to say, “There’s no way you heard a voice.”

I always thought that was the weakest part of her defense — and also the one her case largely rested on.

And then there was the basic idea that she was worried about the medication interactions. I thought that was pretty weak for the defense: she didn’t give evidence that she thought she was being poisoned. She worried that the medications were interacting poorly and weren’t working for her, which is really, really common in psychiatric circles.

But when you put all that together, and then you add that the burden of proof is on the prosecution, I can see how people would arrive at reasonable doubt. It will be interesting to hear from the jurors afterward about how these deliberations actually went.

There’s something else that is even more disturbing, and that is turning everything into a societal problem. Let’s say that you are an advocate for Lindsay Clancy. You truly believe she went through a psychotic episode. Why in the world does that implicate all of human society?

Why are you protesting? What are you protesting against? That bewildered me when I first saw these protesters outside the courtroom. Normally, when you have protesters outside a courtroom, they are arguing that a fundamental miscarriage of justice is being done because society is corrupt in some way.

For example, if there’s a highly polarized racial trial, people show up outside the courtroom to suggest that America’s racial past is impacting the verdict. In this case, there was no implication that anything remotely like that was happening. It just seemed like a cry against the world that somehow all of society is responsible for Lindsay Clancy’s psychotic behavior.

The most controversial aspect of the trial is everything that was happening outside the trial. When it comes to the actual people outside who were saying, “It’s absolutely clear that not only was she innocent, her lawyer is a hero on behalf of women everywhere,” what the hell is that?

You have to tie that into the broader left-wing belief that somehow abortion is a sacrament. Clearly, this crazy behavior comes from the same sort of philosophy that suggests that the only important thing in life is a “woman’s right to choose.”

This underscores something that pro-life people have been saying for quite a while, which is that there’s no distinction between the pre-born and the post-born.

The case is horrific enough, but this reaction outside the trial is truly appalling.