On the Lindsay Clancy Saga

Never forget Callan, Dawson and Cora:

The trial in Massachusetts over the woman who killed her three young children has just resulted in a hung jury which likely will result in a retrial. Many are utterly astounded that such an open and shut case of a deliberate and wanton act of murder (times three) is taking so long to get a verdict on.

Oceans of ink have already been spilled on this case, before, during, and after the 40 or so hours of deliberations. I cannot improve on what so many have already said, so let me share comments from others. First, three short posts that tell us we may have some real double standards going on here:

“If Lindsay were a man, this case would have ended a long time ago. Go ahead, deny it.”

“John Battaglia killed his 2 daughters in what forensic psychologists said was psychosis, stemming from a bipolar disorder. The jury deliberated for 19 minutes. He was executed in 2018.”

“Timothy Ray Jones Jr. strangled his 5 kids to death during schizophrenic psychosis. The jury deliberated for 2 hours. He got the death penalty.”

As to the case itself, here are a number of helpful commentaries:

Allie Beth Stuckey

3 reasons why Lindsay Clancy is absolutely guilty 1. Mental illness does not equal legal insanity. The question isn’t whether Lindsay was mentally ill—it’s whether she was incapable of knowing right from wrong or controlling her actions. The defense did not make a strong case that she was out of control. 2. The evidence points to planning and purposeful action. She calculated the distance to the restaurant, added a CVS stop, timed Patrick’s absence, and calmly answered his call while the killings were underway. This doesn’t point to an uncontrollable psychotic break, but to a carefully planned sequence of events so she would have enough time to complete the murders. 3. Medical evidence at the time of the killings is stronger than hindsight opinions. Doctors who treated Lindsay before the killings documented depression, anxiety, insomnia, intrusive thoughts, and suicidal ideation—but not psychosis, postpartum depression, or auditory command hallucinations. Those terms were attached to her after the killings. The evidence points to Lindsay Clancy being criminally responsible for the murder of her children.

Gerald Posner

Amid all the analysis of what a mistrial will mean in the Clancy trial, it’s worth stopping for a moment. Callan was eight months old. Dawson was three. Cora was five. Callan lived four more days on life support before he died. Testimony says each child took up to two minutes to strangle. Time two minutes right now. Now imagine doing that three times, to your own children, without stopping. Don’t lose the victims in all the legal procedures.

Megan Basham

Women are increasingly going to excuse child murder because 25% of American women (at least) have blood guilt on their hands that they have never reckoned with. A quarter of American women have already murdered their own children. So it should hardly surprise us that they identify with the killer and not the victims.

Megan Basham

If you’re trying to understand, how 11 people on the Lindsay Clancy jury could be so morally blind, let me just point out that Massachusetts is one of the least Christian states in the nation. In the bottom 10. Only 20% of Massachusetts residents attend a religious service even once a month. So maybe there’s yet another reason we shouldn’t be so hot on dismantling “cultural Christianity.” Because maybe, even when everyone doesn’t really mean it in their hearts, it still functions to shape society in just and moral directions and keeps us from becoming the sort of people who will excuse the cold and calculated killing of three innocent children by their own mother.

Dinesh D’Souza

The jurors who want Lindsay Clancy to get no criminal penalty have the abortion mentality. 1. The woman is the only one who matters. 2. Her kids are her property to do with as she wishes. Even the dad has no rights. 3. Killing one’s offspring is a form of healthcare.

Kayleigh McEnany

There must be a consequence for strangling three children. Why is this a statement that evokes mass societal discord? When society cannot agree on a common set of facts and a common set of morals, I worry grievously for our future.

Nancy Mace

If hormones can be an excuse for murder; then hormones can be an excuse for rape. Dear Liberal White Women PLEASE Stop being so completely STUPID.

Melissa Chen

The Clancy case has exposed that men and women, in large numbers, have fundamentally different foundational beliefs, conceptions of justice and ideas of how justice should be applied. This wasn’t considered important at the time our justice system was being devised but it seems awfully relevant now.

Matt Walsh

Clancy’s entire “insanity” defense rests completely on the claim that she “heard a voice” telling her to kill her kids. The problem is: 1) There’s no way to prove or disprove an imaginary voice. Any murderer can make this claim and if it counts as “reasonable doubt” then we can never convict anyone of anything ever again. 2) She never reported this voice before or since the crime, strongly indicating that she made it up. 3) Most importantly, even if she DID hear a voice, why didn’t she refuse to follow the command? If a voice told me to murder my children, I would refuse. If the voice threatened and harassed me, I’d still refuse. If an actual real human told me to kill my kids and put a gun to my head, I would still refuse. If this imaginary voice did appear, Clancy could have chosen not to obey it. Instead, by her telling, the voice spoke exactly one time and she just immediately complied with what it told her to do. Not even a moment of pushback. Even if I bought that bullsh*t, which I don’t, she would still be guilty as hell.

Matt Walsh

It’s extremely clear what happened and why it happened. There’s really no mystery. Lindsay Clancy is a psychopath. That’s why she googled “can you treat a sociopath” just a few days before the killing. She wasn’t and isn’t insane. Insane people aren’t difficult to identify. They babble nonsensically and behave erratically and incoherently. They are totally dysfunctional and disconnected from reality. None of that applies to Clancy, now or then, which is why she was never diagnosed as insane by anyone. She’s just a psychopath. It’s not complicated. For a while she was troubled by her psychopathy and tried to find a drug that would get rid of it and make her love her family. But no drug could ever do that, which made her increasingly resentful towards her kids and her husband. After a while the resentment metastasized into a seething hatred. She blamed them for turning her into a monster. Finally she decided to free herself of the burden. Was that a “rational” decision? Yes, in the sense that it’s intelligible. She hated her kids and therefore wanted them to no longer exist. It’s the same reason why a million other murders have been committed. The thought process is evil but coherent. That is: not insane.

Lila Rose

I believe that the lionizing of Lindsay Clancy is directly responsible for the new social contagion we are seeing now where mothers feel overwhelmed and then murder their children. Just this week in Illinois, a mother obsessed with the Clancy case, texting in a group thread about it hours before, hung her 2 year old in their garage while her husband was away. Not guilty by reason of insanity for homicide MUST be met with many years of incarceration in a mental asylum. Yes, we must have deep compassion but we must have boundaries to protect children and declare her acts what they are: sick and evil. The fact that Lindsay, if she had been determined not guilty, could have been in a mental hospital for a year and then let go — and further lionized — is a profound mistake. Her lawyer is calling her “so brave, so awesome.” She is a child of God but she is a dangerous, unwell person. She needs compassion but she also needs to be kept in a place where she can never harm another helpless child again. For her own sake and the sake of others. Lord have mercy on us all.

Benny Johnson

I don’t think women understand the damage they just did to themselves… If they’re blaming hormones for Lindsay Clancy murdering her own children, the most heinous act one can commit, how can any woman be trusted in any position of responsibility? How can they be trusted as a judge, or as President or to even drive a car if this is the evil their hormones are capable of? The best way to solve this is not to blame hormones… The way to ensure this doesn’t happen again is give psycho murderers like this the death penalty.

Ames Straight

This pretty much sums up where we are. Apparently, “Don’t kill your children” is a controversial political position now. I don’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, male, female, rich, poor—or what diagnosis your defense attorney puts in front of a jury. Children deserve to be protected. Mental illness can explain behavior. It can matter enormously in determining criminal responsibility. But saying three murdered children are the victims should not belong to either political party. That should be the most bipartisan statement in America. Yet here we are.

James Woods

The Clancy case highlights so many completely separate issues that converged in a horrific moment of the slaughter of the innocent. Did she commit murder? Yes. Was she suffering from mental illness? Quite possibly. Was that mental illness caused by the drugs she was taking or at least exacerbated by them? Why are we not taking mental illness more seriously in this country? Did we learn anything about the sheer ruthless greed of Big Pharma during the COVID scam? Has society as a whole gone “off the rails” with prescribed medications? Have abortion and legalized marijuana laws taken the governor off the common sense pedal in our brains? If there is an option for Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, why is there no option for Guilty, but Criminally Insane? Will this society ever recover from the madness of the left?

Outspoken Samantha

Lindsay Clancy was NEVER diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. She was also NEVER diagnosed with postpartum depression or anxiety. Not by her doctor. Not by her psychiatrist. Not by her therapist. No one. Postpartum conditions were attached to her by her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, after she murdered her 3 young children. And he did so just to gain sympathy for his client from the jury and the public. Think about that. The Lindsay Clancy mob made a mother who strangled her babies into a symbol of womanhood, and made Kevin Reddington a hero for women’s issues … All because a man manipulated them into that position, by using their own mental health problems against them. You can’t make this stuff up.

Douglas Wilson

The story in this case is not so much about Lindsay Clancy as it is about the astonishing outpouring of public support for her among liberal white women. The money raised for her family has topped $1M to date, and rallies for her have taken place around the country. The most obvious place that support for her has shown up has been, naturally enough, online. Inexplicably it has become a dividing line issue. Now the world has always been a broken place, and awful stories like what happened to Clancy’s kids have taken place with disturbing regularity. That does not diminish the wickedness and horror of such crimes, but family murders scarcely an unknown phenomenon. The disturbing irregularity in all this is the outpouring of psychotic empathy. That should be looked into. We need to see somebody about that. The issue is not the nature of the fit that seized Lindsay, but rather the nature of the fit that is seizing her empathizers.

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