What Our Society Would Lose If Lindsay Clancy Is Exonerated

W hat is the minimum we owe one another, and when is that minimum excused? This question has become a disorienting cultural flashpoint following the prosecution of Lindsay Clancy for strangling her three young children. Clancy has conceded that she killed her children, but has argued that because of severe postpartum mental illness, she is innocent. Demonstrators gathered outside the courthouse advocating for her exoneration; scholars (some in the formal capacity as witnesses for the defense, others in the media) have claimed it is unequivocal that Clancy should be “acquitted by reason of insanity.”

Exonerating Clancy would require stripping her of moral standing and existential dignity. It would leave children vulnerable to like-situated caregivers who could more readily claim incompetence. It would erode the standards of basic regard for the welfare of others — the central principle in a society of justice and safety. That her first trial ended with a hung jury, with all but one juror choosing to acquit, shows how tenuous the commitment to such principles may be. These principles are not only central to criminal justice; they are the pillars of a just and safe society. To strip away this moral standing too readily — particularly in the context of motherhood, where these obligations are at their most powerful — threatens every meaningful social value, from individual dignity to collective welfare. These foundational commitments are the true stakes of Clancy’s trial.

In arguing that Clancy could not act freely, the defense has conceded that Clancy lacks the defining attribute of a moral agent. In their eyes, Clancy was a “puppet,” thanks to delusions. She was so deranged to believe that killing her children would send them to heaven. She was so psychotic that she lacked the ability to freely act despite her otherwise normal behavior that day. Personal responsibility is the very heart of criminal law. If Clancy is truly not responsible for her actions, it would be an affront to justice to hold her accountable.

When criminal law exonerates someone who would otherwise be guilty, it identifies some outside force or impulse as accountable. The defense of necessity illustrates this. A bus driver’s brakes fail unexpectedly, and the bus driver must decide between crashing into an oncoming car and crashing the bus; the driver may knowingly strike the car and kill the occupants, but if the alternative was sacrificing the lives of the passengers on the bus, doing so may be a grim necessity.

An insanity defense claims a version of the same: The person did not choose the circumstances that brought about the death of others. But this claim lives entirely within the mind of the person claiming innocence. There is no outside force or influence. This raises first a problem of evidence. Where a person claims necessity or duress, they can point to some visible factor outside themselves. If Clancy had killed one child because a psychopath threatened to kill all three if she did not do so, we would attribute her act to the psychopath, not to her. Such a situation is tragic and heartbreaking, but from the core principles of morality, freedom, and responsibility, it can be readily grasped.

That the basis of an insanity claim is the sealed mind of the perpetrator explains the prevalent law. The M’Naghten Rule requires proving a mental state so altered that the person who would otherwise be responsible for the crime either (1) did not grasp they were performing the act, or (2) did not know it was wrongful. Some have seized upon the Clancy case to argue that many American states have tests for insanity that are too onerous (though Massachusetts, the state of Clancy’s trial, uses a rule that is far more ready to acquit by reason of insanity than most).

We should doubt a more expansive definition because of what it means for the moral and social standing of the person claiming it. To be legally insane is to lack the rational capacity of a human. In the deepest sense, it is objectification — claiming to be an object helplessly buffeted about the world. This is what the defense claimed in suggesting Clancy was a “puppet” when she killed her children. So framed, Clancy’s claim of innocence based on postpartum psychosis is an extraordinarily strange position. It uses a not-uncommon medical condition (its commonality driving the level of popular support for Clancy) to completely degrade her moral standing. Michelle Oberman recently wrote in the New York Times that the current harshness in the criminalization of parental killing “does little to honor [Clancy’s] children.” The reality is that the stake of honor in such a criminal trial is the honor of the accused, not the honor of the victim.

The dehumanizing nature of the insanity defense is particularly unsettling given why Clancy claims she is psychotic. The claim is that because she gave birth, she was unable to control herself. But motherhood typically is grounds for expanding rather than contracting a person’s moral standing — parents step into the most important role in society, with intimate power over the most vulnerable. That Clancy behaved as a largely functional parent until she killed her children (that “psychosis can wax and wane” in the words of the defense) further shows the uncanniness of the claim that parenthood alone was enough to drive her to psychosis.

There are wider and more ominous implications. Criminal guilt holds persons responsible for their behavior and declares destructive conduct to be morally wrongful and deserving of criminal punishment. When behavior is excused by the wrongdoer’s purported helplessness, this suggests greater toleration of that behavior and increases the likelihood it will occur again. In Clancy’s case, absence of guilt would send the signal that postpartum-induced killing of one’s children does not automatically comprise fundamental wrongdoing. But such accountability — enforced both by law and expectations of self-control — is the central mechanism by which the social order is maintained.

That the hung jury largely favored Clancy’s claim shows how easily individuals can be convinced that a person lacks moral responsibility. Juries are meant to weigh facts, but follow the law. Because of the opacity of an individual’s mental clarity in an insanity defense, jurors necessarily take a view of when a person should be held morally responsible. Most of the jury in Clancy’s case could clearly be convinced that the mere fact of motherhood can render a woman blameless for harming her children.

Clancy’s ultimate interior state will forever be unknowable. The final judgment rests with the transcendent or the divine. In this world, we must think of the consequences of attributing responsibility. For a system of justice to readily strip a wrongdoer of moral status has far greater import than any single evil act. It also suggests a society that will more readily tolerate violence inflicted by parents upon their children. This is a threat to the fabric of the social order itself.