This post is late because it’s concerning the Lindsay Clancy trial. I wrote and scheduled it before the mistrial was declared. I decided to postpone it so I could do some edits. This is the result.
The Lindsay Clancy case has brought the TikTok Detective bureau out of the shadows. These women, experts in everything from police procedure to medicine, psychology, forensic evidence collection, law, military tactics, and nuclear physics are on the case and have declared Lindsay to be not guilty for reasons ranging from insanity to “her husband did it.”
Of course claims she didn’t do it at all for some reason, including claims that it was her husband are demonstrably false. As evidence, we can take the word of her attorney. No, not the attorney in the current criminal trial, but her attorney from January, where she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit against her doctor. I’m posting a pdf of the notes from the case and the actual complaint filed with the Norfolk, Mass. court (pdf warning).
In that lawsuit, she made the following claim:
and this one, also from her lawsuit:
Keep in mind, she was indicted for killing those children in October 2023, yet waited to file this lawsuit until January of 2026, shortly before her criminal trial. This is part of a claim Lindsay and her attorneys are making, that she was not in control or aware of her actions at the time she killed the children.
For that reason, there is no doubt, zero, that she in fact killed those children.
Killing someone isn’t always illegal, but in those cases, the defense requires admitting to the facts. For example, if I shoot and kill someone who tried to rob me at gunpoint, claiming self defense requires that I admit to shooting and killing the person, but I have an affirmative defense in that self defense is legal. I make the claim of being in reasonable fear for my life. The prosecution then has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the shooting wasn’t in self defense.
The actual controlling Massachusetts rule is the doctrine of criminal responsibility, originating in Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case law rather than a statute specifically saying “psychosis.” The foundational case is Commonwealth v. McHoul, 352 Mass. 544, 546–547 (1967). The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s current 2026 Model Jury Instruction on Criminal Responsibility states:
A person is not criminally responsible for his conduct if he has a mental disease or defect, and, as a result of that mental disease or defect, lacks the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.
The evidence never required anyone to believe Lindsay Clancy was well. She clearly was not, as anyone who will kill their children is not mentally well. But being profoundly mentally ill and not being responsible for your actions are not the same thing. The law in this case requires the person making the insanity claim be unaware of the wrongfulness of their actions.
None of the providers who treated Lindsay Clancy diagnosed her with postpartum depression or psychosis. The evidence instead pointed toward a serious mood disorder, with multiple of them diagnosong her as bipolar.
As many who are bipolar do, she resisted that diagnosis, changed providers, often skipping or refusing to take medications. She hid some of her most disturbing thoughts from the people treating her because she knew it would result in her kids being taken. Above all, people with this condition are well known for resisting treatment, because they “aren’t crazy.”
Lindsay claims through her attorney that she became convinced that her brain was damaged and she would never return to her old self. She was suicidal, but her children were a tether to life, according to her claims.
Then there is the alleged voice. After months of treatment without documented psychosis, Lindsay said she heard a voice telling her to kill the children in the days and minutes before the killings. We are talking about roughly an 18-minute window where a voice commanded she kill her children. She never spoke of this voice before, or mentioned it until after the killings.
Yet during the killings and the hours preceding them, she was capable of purposeful, sequential behavior.
She created the opportunity to be alone with the children. She researched how long her husband’s trip would take and added another errand to extend that time. She killed the children one by one over a 15 minute period. When her husband called during this time, she missed his call and then made the decision to call him back. In the middle of a psychotic break so profound that it compelled her to kill her three children without realizing the gravity of her actions, she still recognized her husband had called, understood that not responding could warrant him returning early, and took affirmative action to call him back. That is difficult to reconcile with the narrative that Lindsay suddenly “snapped” and had no awareness of what she was doing.
Lindsay was profoundly mentally ill and genuinely wanted to die. But she still understood what she was doing when she killed her children. Those things are not mutually exclusive. She took steps to hide her psychosis, this alleged voice compelling her to kill, to get her husband out of the house, and to one by one kill her children.
Mental illness deserves compassion, and postpartum mental health deserves treatment, attention, and resources. However, compassion can’t replace the legal standard for criminal responsibility.
If the standard becomes, “She was a loving mother, therefore she must have snapped,” we’re no longer applying the law to the evidence. We’re creating our own definition of justice based on emotion and feelings.
In my opinion, this woman knew exactly what she was doing. She took steps to hide her behavior while she was carrying out her plan. All of this suggests cunning and a sense of guilt. You don’t hide your actions if you are unaware of the wrongness of what you are doing. In Massachusetts, the legal term for this is “consciousness of guilt.”
The legal issue to which those facts are relevant is whether the Commonwealth proved that the defendant retained substantial capacity to “appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness” of the conduct and to conform conduct to law. Massachusetts defines “appreciate” as understand, “criminality” as the legal significance of the conduct, and “wrongfulness” as its moral significance.
In this case, taking steps to prevent her plan from being foiled:
- conceal what they intended to do
- waited until her husband was gone
- created a diversion to get her husband away from the scene
- lied about what she intended to do
- selected the time or place designed to avoid intervention
- took steps calculated to ensure nobody discovered or stopped the act.
In my mind, that is what it boils down to: Did this woman know what she was doing was wrong, as evidenced by the fact that she took active, complex actions to ensure no one could discover or prevent her from carrying out her plan.
I think the answer is that she knew full well what she was doing. I tip my hat to the one juror who had the cajones to stand his ground in the face of the other 11 members of the jury, the judge, and the defense attorney. He stood up for those children, despite surely knowing what would happen to him in the aftermath, once his identity is discovered. The left is going to make his life miserable.
Now there are actually dumbasses out there who are calling for the elimination of the jury trial, saying we should use professional tribunals instead.
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