I finally got around to looking over the Clancy case and my opinion is that most of the opinions suck.
If you look at the case, just a plain-faced interpretation, it boils down to whether or not Lindsay Clancy knew what she was doing and understood the significance of it when she killed her children. There's ironclad evidence that she was mentally ill. There's pretty strong reason to think that the killings were motivated by delusions, but there's also good evidence that she acted intentionally to plan the killings out and conceal them to law enforcement.
Prior to the incident, she reported hearing voices in her head and having thoughts about hurting the kids, and she had been on a variety of different psychiatric meds. Neither of these things prove it but in MA, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to show that she was competent to commit these crimes. On the flipside, she had made some murdery google searches in the days prior to the killing. She sent her husband off on errands prior to the act so he couldn't intervene, and checked the travel time on Google Maps to make sure she'd have enough time to carry out the act. With that confused set of facts, it's no surprise we got a hung jury. The legal question -- to me -- is really rather open-ended.
But if you view the possible consequences, we have a very different story. Pretty much the worst you can imagine of Clancy is that she was simply very depressed and emotionally unstable postpartum but otherwise mostly of sound mind. Even if you assume that's the case and that she killed her children knowing what it meant, the fact, is, the mental health condition she has is almost certainly temporary. Locking her up for 40 years or whatever is not at all necessary; if you just put her in inpatient care for maybe a year and a half, she would almost certainly not reoffend. And if she is ruled not guilty and put in a holding facility, then unlike most inmates, she's likely to get out in a short period of time because her condition is something that is widely known to be temporary. With all this in mind, the question of whether she's guilty is somewhat divorced from the question of whether she should be ruled guilty.
With such a nuanced case, the online commentary is predictably disappointing. Just to be clear, if you're a friend of mine and have commented on this, I truly mean no antipathy and I love you lots.
First of all, social media is flooded with nimrods who just don't engage with the substance of the case at all and it gives me a headache. They just say that if you want her to be shown leniency or ruled not guilty, you support child murder, and it's just kind of disgusting. They're very dumb people, and I mean that literally. They talk in very simple repetitive speech patterns almost like a bot without much computing power. I'm guessing most of this is Conservative/manosphere types. Honestly even talking about how much they suck just feels trite, they're low-hanging fruit.
I see people claiming the husband neglected her, but then... you look at the case and that doesn't seem to be what happened. He had her in mental healthcare treatment, he hired a nanny. The couple was confronted with an extraordinary and horrible situation, and it seems like he did his best to support her. I think the best criticism you could come up with about him is that after she told him she had had thoughts about hurting the children, she didn't try to separate her from the children.
Perhaps if he had taken legal action, those children might still be alive right now, but in viewing that, we have the benefit of retrospect. From his perspective, his wife had just confided in him some difficult thoughts that disturbed her just as much as they disturbed him. At best, if he took legal action, he would be ripping a struggling mother who hadn't done anything wrong away from her children. At worst, it would be his word against hers in court. His actions were very much in the range of what a normal person would do, you can't expect everyone to act optimally under extreme circumstances.
I see people faulting him for moving away and re-marrying after the fact, and to me, that just seems... disgusting a little bit? He had just lost his children to a horrific death, he had essentially lost his wife to mental illness & the justice system, so he went far away and found comfort in whatever he could. He didn't have new children with his new wife, he maybe just wanted someone to hold close in the darkest moment in his life.
I see people claiming that she kept trying to reach out for mental healthcare and was ignored, but the evidence doesn't support that either. Clancy was in therapy, and she went into inpatient care temporarily when her mental state reached crisis levels. Her doctors would prescribe her a medication, and Clancy would voluntarily stop taking that medication before they reached their full effects. Clancy was nervous about the side effects of meds, and that was deeply understandable on her part.
She was going through a lot and psychiatric medications genuinely can be quite scary in themselves. That being the case, I don't think you can reasonably fault a doctor for the outcome when the patient voluntarily didn't accept the medical care they prescribed. The doctors are often faulted for switching between medications so much, but it kinda makes sense given the circumstances. They were just trying to find something, anything that could manage her symptoms, which she would tolerate for long enough to stabilize her mental state. Obviously the healthcare results were awful, but there's a difference between the results being bad and the treatment being bad. No healthcare intervention is 100% effective, and mental health conditions in particular can be super treatment-resistant.
Probably the most disconnected from reality, are the takes claiming that the husband killed the children and framed them. This is an absurd proposition, there's 0 evidence he did it, and not even the defense is taking on that perspective. It's a fringe view, but I think it's one 100% motivated by some people being unwilling to acknowledge that women are people to and are also capable of doing bad things.
And any time any of these narratives get challenged, the people reciting them just retreat back to population-level averages and generalization. "Men are so often uncaring to their partners after pregnancy." "Women are infantilized and their misdeeds are swept under the rug by society." "It's so hard for women to get adequately their mental health problems taken seriously." These are generalizations which have some validity at the population-level, but applying statistical realities to specific cases involving individuals is a recipe for disaster. The nature of statistics is that even if something is true in most cases, there are some cases where it won't be true or relevant.
Through all this... I just can't imagine how harmful all this rhetoric is to the people involved in this court case. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to suffer through the worst mental break of your life, do something truly unthinkable, and wake up one day to find a campaign of targeted hatred attacking these acts viciously and intentionally misconstruing you and what you were going through. And imagine losing your family in a traumatic event and then waking up one day to a hate mob blaming you for it and smearing your character. Hell, imagine being a doctor, losing a client who you had bonded with to their illness, and then a bunch of people with no professional credentials point the finger at you for it. It's truly heartbreaking, and it reflects... so badly on social media and society that so little empathy is being extended to these people who all seem like decent people.
The one productive piece of discourse I have seen is that postpartum depression & psychosis are not well researched enough due to systemic sexism in the medical field. And perhaps if more work and funding had been put into understanding this illness, we would have more effective treatments and this tragedy never would have happened. So maybe that should be the takeaway.
But yeah all this bullshit is why I initially was resistant to learning about this case. Whenever court cases about regular, everyday crime (not like SCOTUS cases on law) blow up like this, the discourse is always such a shit show. Serves me right I guess.
Prior to the incident, she reported hearing voices in her head and having thoughts about hurting the kids, and she had been on a variety of different psychiatric meds. Neither of these things prove it but in MA, the burden of proof is on the prosecution to show that she was competent to commit these crimes. On the flipside, she had made some murdery google searches in the days prior to the killing. She sent her husband off on errands prior to the act so he couldn't intervene, and checked the travel time on Google Maps to make sure she'd have enough time to carry out the act. With that confused set of facts, it's no surprise we got a hung jury. The legal question -- to me -- is really rather open-ended.
But if you view the possible consequences, we have a very different story. Pretty much the worst you can imagine of Clancy is that she was simply very depressed and emotionally unstable postpartum but otherwise mostly of sound mind. Even if you assume that's the case and that she killed her children knowing what it meant, the fact, is, the mental health condition she has is almost certainly temporary. Locking her up for 40 years or whatever is not at all necessary; if you just put her in inpatient care for maybe a year and a half, she would almost certainly not reoffend. And if she is ruled not guilty and put in a holding facility, then unlike most inmates, she's likely to get out in a short period of time because her condition is something that is widely known to be temporary. With all this in mind, the question of whether she's guilty is somewhat divorced from the question of whether she should be ruled guilty.
With such a nuanced case, the online commentary is predictably disappointing. Just to be clear, if you're a friend of mine and have commented on this, I truly mean no antipathy and I love you lots.
First of all, social media is flooded with nimrods who just don't engage with the substance of the case at all and it gives me a headache. They just say that if you want her to be shown leniency or ruled not guilty, you support child murder, and it's just kind of disgusting. They're very dumb people, and I mean that literally. They talk in very simple repetitive speech patterns almost like a bot without much computing power. I'm guessing most of this is Conservative/manosphere types. Honestly even talking about how much they suck just feels trite, they're low-hanging fruit.
I see people claiming the husband neglected her, but then... you look at the case and that doesn't seem to be what happened. He had her in mental healthcare treatment, he hired a nanny. The couple was confronted with an extraordinary and horrible situation, and it seems like he did his best to support her. I think the best criticism you could come up with about him is that after she told him she had had thoughts about hurting the children, she didn't try to separate her from the children.
Perhaps if he had taken legal action, those children might still be alive right now, but in viewing that, we have the benefit of retrospect. From his perspective, his wife had just confided in him some difficult thoughts that disturbed her just as much as they disturbed him. At best, if he took legal action, he would be ripping a struggling mother who hadn't done anything wrong away from her children. At worst, it would be his word against hers in court. His actions were very much in the range of what a normal person would do, you can't expect everyone to act optimally under extreme circumstances.
I see people faulting him for moving away and re-marrying after the fact, and to me, that just seems... disgusting a little bit? He had just lost his children to a horrific death, he had essentially lost his wife to mental illness & the justice system, so he went far away and found comfort in whatever he could. He didn't have new children with his new wife, he maybe just wanted someone to hold close in the darkest moment in his life.
I see people claiming that she kept trying to reach out for mental healthcare and was ignored, but the evidence doesn't support that either. Clancy was in therapy, and she went into inpatient care temporarily when her mental state reached crisis levels. Her doctors would prescribe her a medication, and Clancy would voluntarily stop taking that medication before they reached their full effects. Clancy was nervous about the side effects of meds, and that was deeply understandable on her part.
She was going through a lot and psychiatric medications genuinely can be quite scary in themselves. That being the case, I don't think you can reasonably fault a doctor for the outcome when the patient voluntarily didn't accept the medical care they prescribed. The doctors are often faulted for switching between medications so much, but it kinda makes sense given the circumstances. They were just trying to find something, anything that could manage her symptoms, which she would tolerate for long enough to stabilize her mental state. Obviously the healthcare results were awful, but there's a difference between the results being bad and the treatment being bad. No healthcare intervention is 100% effective, and mental health conditions in particular can be super treatment-resistant.
Probably the most disconnected from reality, are the takes claiming that the husband killed the children and framed them. This is an absurd proposition, there's 0 evidence he did it, and not even the defense is taking on that perspective. It's a fringe view, but I think it's one 100% motivated by some people being unwilling to acknowledge that women are people to and are also capable of doing bad things.
And any time any of these narratives get challenged, the people reciting them just retreat back to population-level averages and generalization. "Men are so often uncaring to their partners after pregnancy." "Women are infantilized and their misdeeds are swept under the rug by society." "It's so hard for women to get adequately their mental health problems taken seriously." These are generalizations which have some validity at the population-level, but applying statistical realities to specific cases involving individuals is a recipe for disaster. The nature of statistics is that even if something is true in most cases, there are some cases where it won't be true or relevant.
Through all this... I just can't imagine how harmful all this rhetoric is to the people involved in this court case. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to suffer through the worst mental break of your life, do something truly unthinkable, and wake up one day to find a campaign of targeted hatred attacking these acts viciously and intentionally misconstruing you and what you were going through. And imagine losing your family in a traumatic event and then waking up one day to a hate mob blaming you for it and smearing your character. Hell, imagine being a doctor, losing a client who you had bonded with to their illness, and then a bunch of people with no professional credentials point the finger at you for it. It's truly heartbreaking, and it reflects... so badly on social media and society that so little empathy is being extended to these people who all seem like decent people.
The one productive piece of discourse I have seen is that postpartum depression & psychosis are not well researched enough due to systemic sexism in the medical field. And perhaps if more work and funding had been put into understanding this illness, we would have more effective treatments and this tragedy never would have happened. So maybe that should be the takeaway.
But yeah all this bullshit is why I initially was resistant to learning about this case. Whenever court cases about regular, everyday crime (not like SCOTUS cases on law) blow up like this, the discourse is always such a shit show. Serves me right I guess.
