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The Clancy Effect: A Criminal Trial is Not a Culture War

The Clancy Effect: A Criminal Trial is Not a Culture War

Last updated on: September 20, 2026 at 10:02 am by Dennis Knapp

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The Clancy Effect: A Criminal Trial is Not a Culture War 2026-09-20T10:02:33-06:00 Dennis Knapp

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Introduction

The Lindsay Clancy case has produced a remarkable amount of commentary, and only some of it has been about the case.

Clancy killed her three children in January 2023. At trial, the question was whether she was criminally responsible when she acted. Her defence said postpartum psychosis had taken that capacity from her. The prosecution said the evidence showed planning and an awareness of wrongfulness.

After more than five weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for around thirty-eight hours across seven days, could not agree, and the judge declared a mistrial on 4th September. The defence has since filed a renewed motion for a required finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, listed for 29 September, when prosecutors are expected to say whether they will retry her.

Twelve people sat through the evidence, deliberated for a week, and could not arrive at a single conclusion. That should make the rest of us cautious. It has not. The case has become a canvas for arguments that were waiting for something to paint on. For some commentators, Clancy is proof of the wages of feminism, the corruption of the family, or the return of witchcraft. For others, she is proof of a broken healthcare system and a justice system that refuses to understand mental illness.

Some of those concerns have real substance. But a criminal trial does not owe anybody’s theory of civilisation a hearing. It owes one answer to one question about one person, based on the evidence.

The children must not disappear

One complaint about the commentary deserves attention first, because it is the one most likely to be true of whatever we say next. In the public discussion, the three children can disappear.

That is an extraordinary thing to say about a case in which three children were killed. The surviving adult has a story. She can be described, diagnosed, photographed, interviewed, defended. Her medical records can be read, her treatment criticised, her suffering imagined. The dead have none of that. They have no expert witnesses, and their interior lives ended before anyone could take their testimony. Whatever one concludes about Clancy’s responsibility, Cora, Dawson and Callan are not scenery in an adult tragedy.

This is not an argument against compassion for their mother, but against a compassion that sees only what is easy to see. Compassion that attaches itself to the articulate sufferer in the room, the one with a face and a history and a lawyer, and finds nothing to attach itself to in the silence left by the dead, has become partiality.

The children cannot tell their story. Someone has to remember that there was a story to tell.

What horror cannot prove

Here is where much of the commentary goes awry, and where Catholic moral theology should have helped prevent it.

There is a powerful temptation to reason from the horror of what was done to the culpability of the one who did it. The act was monstrous; therefore, the woman is a monster; therefore, anything that complicates that judgement is an evasion. The argument has emotional force. It runs together two distinct questions.

The killing of those children was objectively and gravely evil. They were innocent. Their deaths cry out for justice. None of that establishes that Clancy possessed the capacity required for criminal responsibility when she acted. That was the question the jury faced, and it was about her mind, not the gravity of the act.

The distinction is not a concession to therapeutic culture, and it was not invented by feminists, defence attorneys or psychiatrists. Aquinas holds that a human act, properly so called, proceeds from deliberate reason and will. The Catechism states it plainly: imputability and responsibility can be diminished and even nullified by ignorance, duress, fear, and other psychological factors (CCC 1735).

There is no contradiction in saying both things. Only a difficulty, and it’s one we tend to dislike.

Refusing the distinction has a cost, and justice pays it. A system that will not separate the evil of an act from the culpability of an agent has no way of distinguishing punishment from anger. It can only match the severity of the sentence to the severity of the horror.

What the evidence actually looked like

Anyone who wants to treat this case as obvious should sit with both halves of the record.

On one side, a documented collapse. In the months after her third child was born, Clancy went to her psychiatrist, then to two emergency rooms. She was prescribed a long succession of medications, saw several different clinicians, told her providers she was having intrusive thoughts and hallucinations, called two suicide hotlines, disclosed thoughts of harming her children to her husband and her mother, and admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital at the start of January. Her clinicians did not have complete records of one another’s treatment and did not speak to each other. The experts retained by each side reached sharply opposed conclusions about her mental state on the day itself.

On the other side, a series of ordinary decisions. She took her daughter to a paediatric appointment that morning, built a snowman with the children, exchanged routine texts with her husband, looked up the driving time to a restaurant in the next town, ordered takeaway, sent him out for the food, and killed the children in the basement in the interval. The psychiatrist who saw her the day before observed no psychosis and recorded that she denied both suicidal and homicidal thoughts. She reported a voice commanding her to kill on that day, and never again. Prosecutors argued that a voice which left her to choose the room, the method and the ligature left her a great deal of choosing to do.

That is what the jury was asked to weigh.

What the jury was actually asked

The legal question was narrow, and narrowness is a virtue in a courtroom. The jurors were not asked whether the killings were terrible, whether Clancy deserved sympathy, whether American obstetric care is adequate, or what the case says about the state of the family.

One detail of Massachusetts law is worth stating, because most of the commentary has got it backwards. Once lack of criminal responsibility is in issue, the burden does not sit with the defendant. Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not suffer from a mental disease or defect that deprived her of substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform it to the law.

Nor was the choice binary. The judge left five possible conclusions, running from murder in the first degree through manslaughter to not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. A public argument conducted in the language of monster or madwoman was never describing the actual verdict form.

The jury failed to agree. Notes from the foreperson indicated an eleven-to-one split in favour of lack of criminal responsibility, and several jurors have since said so publicly, describing a holdout who allegedly acknowledged doubt and would not apply it. He has given his own account through a spokesman, saying he had no doubts at all and was cut off when he tried to explain himself. Even what happened in the deliberation room is now contested by the people who were in it. Eleven votes were not a verdict as a criminal jury in Massachusetts has to be unanimous.

So the mistrial tells us that twelve people could not be brought to a single conclusion, not which conclusion the evidence warranted. It establishes neither that Clancy was insane nor that she was responsible. That is what due process means, and due process was built for the cases we may least want it. Nobody needs a burden of proof to protect the obviously innocent.

The case reverts to where it stood before the trial. Prosecutors could retry her, offer a plea, or decline. Any of those is due process finishing its work if the evidence warrants it, and a repetition of the earlier failures if it is not chosen for an election, a budget, or fatigue with the spectacle. And a person found not criminally responsible may still require secure psychiatric confinement, because the reason she is not culpable may be the reason she is not safe.

A trial built for spectacle

Watching from Britain, I notice what the American media commentary on both sides has been reacting to. The trial was conducted under conditions built to produce this kind of noise.

Plymouth County’s district attorney is elected, as American district attorneys generally are. That tells us nothing about why this case was charged as it was, and we should not reason from an office to a motive any more than from an act to a mind. But it describes an incentive structure the Crown Prosecution Service does not have. English and Welsh prosecutors do not face voters. Pretending that makes no difference is not neutrality. It is a blind spot.

The trial was livestreamed throughout, watched by millions and fiercely debated. During deliberations, a woman was arrested outside the courthouse after troopers found footage of the jurors on her phone. Nor did the public story wait for the trial. By the time it began, years after the killings, a substantial online audience had convinced itself that Patrick had killed the children and framed his wife.

Facing the lone holdout, Clancy’s defence attorney asked the judge to dismiss him and then filed an emergency appeal arguing that his reasoning reflected a bias against people with debilitating mental illness. The argument had been made in a courtroom that was also a broadcast studio.

What has happened since is worse. Jurors have given television interviews about each other. A newspaper identified the holdout from photographs, court records and an interview with a fellow juror, and his own history was pulled up and published. He is now reported to be at an undisclosed address in another state.

A juror is the most anonymous figure in the courtroom by design. Within a fortnight this one had become a cause, with a spokesman and a fundraising campaign. Both camps are responding to a spectacle the trial itself created, and neither has noticed that the spectacle, rather than the verdict, is what deserves the criticism.

Two ways of getting it wrong

Much of the commentary from the right starts from a legitimate worry. It is entirely possible to explain an evil away, to become so absorbed in an offender’s history and circumstances that the victim turns into an obstruction in the narrative. That danger is real.

Then the commentary takes another step. The reaction to Clancy becomes an instance of feminism. Feminism becomes subjective feeling displacing objective truth. The jury becomes evidence for the feminisation of justice. Mental illness becomes a pretext for moral relativism. The whole case becomes evidence that the West has lost the capacity to tell good from evil.

Notice what has happened to the children by the end of that chain. They have disappeared a second time, into an argument conducted by people who began by complaining that others had made them disappear. They are no longer Cora, Dawson and Callan. They are evidence.

The other camp takes the same step in the other direction. Clancy becomes evidence of maternal mental-health failures, inadequate treatment, patriarchal expectations, or the cruelty of prosecuting the mentally ill. Then a psychiatric explanation should supersede moral judgment, and then criminal responsibility is itself a punitive fiction, a category society invented because it prefers blame to treatment. By the end of that chain, the question the jury was asked, whether this woman retained a particular capacity on a particular morning, has vanished into a theory about what responsibility language is for.

The further the commentary travels from that question, the less it is discussing justice and the more it is discussing itself, whichever direction it travels. The dispute is not new either. Twenty-five years ago, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Texas, and the same questions were fought over in the same terms, through a conviction, an appeal, and a second trial ending in a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The claim that a recent collapse in moral confidence explains the sympathy shown to Clancy has to reckon with a quarter of a century of the same argument.

Explanation is not exoneration.

Suppose Clancy’s treatment was inadequate, or postpartum psychosis is poorly recognised in ordinary practice, or warnings about her condition were mishandled. Each would matter enormously. None of them answers what she was capable of understanding on the morning she acted. The opposite applies too. A finding of diminished responsibility would not vindicate every institutional decision that came before it, any more than a finding of responsibility would condemn them all.

Those questions are already being asked elsewhere. In January, both Lindsay and Patrick filed civil suits against the providers who treated her. Two courts, two questions, one set of events, and no requirement that the answers match.

Culture-war narratives want clean causal chains. Human beings rarely supply them.

No one stays a person

This, I think, is the deeper problem, and the two camps share it more intimately than either would like.

Clancy is not a symbol, whatever the law eventually decides. She is one woman who did something irreversible and whose condition at the time has to be weighed honestly, by people willing to be surprised by what they find. That is harder work than ideology, and less satisfying, because it produces conclusions nobody can deploy.

Then there is Patrick, who holds together in one life everything the commentary insists must be divided. He asked the public to forgive his wife and described her as ill rather than wicked. He testified for the prosecution about the months of her decline and about the ordinary morning that preceded the killings. He divorced her and remarried. He is suing her doctors on behalf of his children’s estates. After the mistrial, he thanked the court and the jurors and said a second trial would take its own toll.

No faction can use him. He forgives and litigates, mourns his children and does not denounce their mother. He was the prosecution’s witness and is the defence’s best evidence that the woman they describe was loved by someone who knew her. I am not sure any theory of the case survives contact with him. That is what actual people are like, and it is precisely what ideology cannot afford to notice.

What Catholicism already knows

Catholic moral thought holds the distinctions needed to resist both temptations. It can affirm the objective evil of an act without pretending that everyone who performs it is equally culpable. It can insist on the dignity of the victim without surrendering the dignity of the offender. It can demand justice without letting justice collapse into vengeance, and extend mercy without lying about what happened.

The formula that mercy does not require us to falsify evil is worth keeping. So is the sentence heard less often: recognising evil does not require us to falsify responsibility.

If Clancy’s freedom was gravely impaired, justice has to take that seriously. If it was not, justice has to take that seriously too. The task is to find out what is true and be bound by the answer, not to reason toward whichever finding a prior commitment prefers. A woman suffering from severe mental illness is owed compassion, and that illness does not by itself dissolve her responsibility, though it may substantially diminish or remove it. The legal system owes protection to victims and the burden of proof to defendants, at the same time. Mercy and justice are not competitors, and holding them together is the whole difficulty.

The harder discipline

Societies argue about punishment, prisons, mental illness and the limits of state power, and so they should. Something has gone wrong when a particular case stops being the occasion for those arguments and becomes the battlefield on which they are fought.

At that point the defendant is no longer a defendant. The victims are no longer victims. The jury is no longer a jury, as the man now hiding in another state under a lawyer’s protection could tell us. Everyone has become a representative of a tribe, and what the evidence establishes becomes oddly secondary, a detail to be settled once the meaning has been agreed.

On 29 September the court will take up the defence’s motion, and prosecutors will say what they intend to do. Whatever happens, people on both sides will read it as confirmation. It will confirm nothing except that the process is still running.

Name the dead. Tell the truth about the act. Take mental illness seriously. Take responsibility seriously. Listen to the evidence, including the inconvenient parts. Let the law do the work it was built to do, slowly, in public, without our help.

And resist the temptation to make one family’s catastrophe carry the weight of a civilisation’s argument with itself.

A criminal trial is not a culture war.

Thank you!

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