Lindsay Clancy trial: Insanity defense isn't a loophole but justice
What does Christianity require of us when a mother kills her three young children?
Justice seems like the obvious answer. But what does justice mean when there is no question that something unimaginably evil happened, yet there is profound doubt about whether the person who committed it possessed the mind necessary to be morally responsible for it?
I have wrestled with those questions since I began following the Lindsay Clancy case.
Apparently, I am not alone.
For seven days, 12 Massachusetts jurors wrestled with essentially the same question. Eleven of them reportedly concluded that Clancy should be found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. One disagreed. The resulting mistrial leaves Clancy facing the possibility of another trial for the 2023 deaths of her three young children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
Here is where I have landed. If the evidence establishes that postpartum psychosis deprived Lindsay Clancy of the capacity for criminal responsibility, then I do not believe justice requires we send her to prison. I believe justice requires we treat her. That is not the same thing as setting her free.
I am a lawyer, a former prosecutor, a Christian and the father of four children. Each part of me sees this case a little differently.
The father sees three children who should still be alive. The former prosecutor believes deeply in accountability and punishment. But the Christian keeps coming back to a harder question: What is godly justice?
I spent the first four years of my legal career prosecuting sexually violent predator cases for the State of Missouri. During that time, I tried and convicted more than 30 sexually violent predators. I have looked evil in the eye, and I have locked it behind bars.
I believe in punishment. Government has both the authority and obligation to protect the innocent, restrain evil and punish wrongdoing. Retribution, deterrence and incapacitation are legitimate purposes of criminal justice.
But precisely because punishment matters, culpability matters too.
There is no dispute Lindsay Clancy killed her children. Her defense argued postpartum psychosis had so profoundly distorted her mind that she lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions or conform her conduct to the law. Prosecutors argued she understood what she was doing and deliberately planned the killings.
That is the factual question with which the jury wrestled. But beneath it lies a question Christians should be particularly interested in: Does the horror of an act itself establish the moral culpability of the person who committed it?
Scripture suggests the answer is no.
Modern criminal law recognizes the concept of mens rea, the "guilty mind." We do not ordinarily determine criminal responsibility simply by asking what happened. We also ask what the defendant intended, knew and understood.
Scripture makes similar distinctions.
Consider Deuteronomy 19. Moses describes two men who go into the woods to cut timber. One swings his axe, the head flies from the handle, strikes his neighbor and kills him. A human being is dead, and another man's actions caused his death. Yet Scripture does not treat him as a murderer. The law allows him to flee to a "city of refuge" because he had not previously hated his neighbor.
Numbers 35 similarly distinguishes the killer who acts "in hatred" or "lies in wait" from someone who kills "suddenly without enmity" and without intending harm.
In Luke 12, Jesus distinguishes between the servant who knows his master's will and disobeys it and the servant who acts wrongly without knowing.
The physical outcomes are the same. The moral culpability is not.
I concede none of this establishes a biblical insanity defense. But it does establish something important about biblical justice: God does not judge outcomes in isolation. He considers the heart, mind and will behind it.
And that brings me back to Lindsay Clancy.
Whatever one ultimately concludes about her legal responsibility, the story of the months before she killed her children should trouble us.
Clancy knew something was wrong, and she repeatedly sought help. She sought psychiatric care, emergency treatment and inpatient hospitalization only to be sent back home. She called suicide prevention hotlines and was told they couldn't help. And the doctors she reached out to did little more than prescribe an ever-expanding cocktail of psychiatric medications. The system she was navigating was clearly fragmented and ill-equipped to recognize and respond to the severity of what was happening.
That does not mean her doctors caused this tragedy. Psychiatric illness is complicated, and one terrible case should not become an indictment of an entire mental-health profession filled with people trying their best to care for patients.
But Clancy was asking for help, and the help she received failed to stop her deterioration.
That should matter to us. Even if it does not automatically absolve Clancy of responsibility, it should cause us to ask whether we are adequately equipped to identify and treat mothers suffering from severe postpartum psychiatric illness before desperation becomes catastrophe.
It should also make us ask what punishment would accomplish if the defense's account of Clancy's mental condition is true.
Deterrence makes little sense if a woman is experiencing a psychotic break. Someone incapable of rationally processing reality is not weighing the consequences of a potential prison sentence.
Incapacitation is different here too. If Clancy's actions resulted from an extraordinary psychiatric collapse associated with childbirth, this is not the conventional case of a dangerous offender seeking victims who must be removed from society to prevent the next crime.
That leaves retribution.
And this is where the Christian in me becomes most uncomfortable.
There is something deeply understandable in wanting punishment when three innocent children have been killed. I feel it too.
But justice and vengeance are not synonyms.
If Clancy understood what she was doing, appreciated its evil and deliberately chose to murder her children, punishment follows naturally from culpability.
But if a psychotic break had so profoundly fractured her mind that she could no longer appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing or conform her conduct to the law, what exactly are we punishing?
Perhaps that is why the insanity defense exists.
I said earlier that I have come to see this backward. Here is why: "Not guilty by reason of insanity" sounds to many people like a loophole, a mechanism through which someone who unquestionably committed a horrific act escapes justice. But in the rare case in which it genuinely applies, it is not an exception to justice. It is an expression of justice.
Our law recognizes something Scripture recognized thousands of years ago: an act alone does not completely establish moral culpability. That is why we distinguish murder from manslaughter, recklessness from negligence and intentional conduct from accident. In the most extreme circumstances, we also recognize that mental disease can so profoundly impair the human mind that a person can commit an otherwise criminal act without possessing the mental capacity necessary for criminal responsibility.
That does not diminish the victims. Nor does an insanity verdict mean Clancy simply walks out of the courthouse. Massachusetts law provides for psychiatric commitment following a finding that a defendant lacked criminal responsibility.
There is, however, a profound moral difference between confinement because someone is mentally ill and potentially dangerous and imprisonment because we believe she deserves punishment.
Christians should understand that distinction.
There is also a danger in discussing this case that I do not want to ignore. In focusing on mental illness and failures in postpartum care, we can gradually transform Lindsay Clancy into the principal victim of the story.
She is not.
Cora, Dawson and Callan are.
Three children who should be growing up together are dead. No diagnosis makes their deaths less horrifying. No failure by a doctor can return them to their father or restore the lives they should have lived.
Christianity demands that we look directly at that evil. But Christianity demands something harder too. It requires us to look at their mother alongside them.
God sees the act, but He also sees the mind, heart and will behind it. Our courts cannot see those things as perfectly as God does.
Justice requires that they try.
The Massachusetts jury tried for seven days and could not unanimously answer the question. That deadlock does not establish Clancy's legal innocence. But 11 jurors reportedly concluded that the Commonwealth had not proven her criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
I increasingly find myself in the same place.
Cora, Dawson and Callan deserved protection. They deserved childhoods and long lives. Their father deserves answers. Lindsay Clancy needed help before whatever happened inside her mind became irreversible. She still does.
And other mothers desperately seeking help deserve something better than the answers this family received.
I believe deeply in the state's responsibility to punish wrongdoing and protect the innocent. Precisely because I believe in punishment, I believe we must be rigorous about whom we punish and why.
The insanity defense is sometimes caricatured as an escape from justice. In a case like this, I believe it can represent something closer to justice in its purest form: the refusal to punish someone merely because the horror of an act makes us desperate for someone to pay.
Scripture gives me no easy verdict for Lindsay Clancy.
The prophet Micah tells us what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.
Justice requires us to remember three innocent children. Mercy requires us to see the profoundly broken woman who killed them. And humility requires us to admit that those truths can exist at the same time.
In the case of Lindsay Clancy, humility may be the hardest command of all.
By day Jay Atkins works as a Government Affairs attorney for a New York-based technology company. By night he is a lay author and Christian apologist. He thinks and writes about proofs for faith and how they intersect, or should intersect, with public policy.
