The Lindsay Clancy Cult Has Lost the Plot

Three children are dead, their mother killed them, and somehow a portion of America decided the person most deserving of its emotional energy was the woman who ended their lives.

MAGA Viral illustration accompanying opinion commentary by George P. Brooks about the public reaction to the Lindsay Clancy mistrial.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Her trial ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict. This commentary addresses the public reaction to the case and represents the opinion of its author.

There is compassion, and then there is moral inversion.

The public spectacle surrounding the Lindsay Clancy case has crossed that line so thoroughly that I am no longer particularly interested in pretending otherwise.

After a jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared, supporters vowed to return in “bigger numbers,” while a fundraiser benefiting Clancy’s parents surged beyond $1.2 million.

Meanwhile, somewhere beneath the psychiatric terminology, courtroom drama, hashtags, sympathetic letters and social-media advocacy remain three stubborn facts with names:

Cora.

Dawson.

Callan.

They were five years old, three years old and eight months old.

Both the prosecution and defense agreed that their mother killed them. The disputed legal question was whether she was criminally responsible because of her mental condition at the time.

COMPASSION DOES NOT REQUIRE CANONIZATION

Apparently, even stating that distinction now requires walking through an ideological minefield.

Mention the children too forcefully and someone immediately lectures you about postpartum psychosis. Ask why Clancy has become the emotional center of the story and somebody accuses you of lacking compassion for mental illness. Demand accountability and suddenly you are participating in an imaginary war against motherhood.

Spare me.

I have spent years advocating for mental-health treatment, and I am perfectly capable of understanding psychiatric illness without surrendering every functioning neuron responsible for moral reasoning.

Mental illness is real.

Psychosis is real.

Postpartum psychiatric emergencies are real.

None of those statements requires me to participate in the canonization of Lindsay Clancy.

This is what irritates me about the cultlike element surrounding the case: explanation has quietly metastasized into absolution.

Clancy’s defense argued that postpartum psychosis left her without criminal responsibility. Prosecutors argued that she understood the wrongfulness of what she was doing and acted deliberately.

That was the central dispute at trial.

Reasonable people can examine complicated psychiatric evidence and disagree about legal responsibility. Portions of the public conversation, however, have moved well beyond legal analysis into something resembling sainthood by diagnosis.

THE CHILDREN ARE BECOMING SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

The children increasingly appear as supporting characters in the story of their own deaths.

Their names are invoked briefly before the discussion races back toward Lindsay: Lindsay’s illness, Lindsay’s medications, Lindsay’s suffering, Lindsay’s treatment, Lindsay’s defense, Lindsay’s future and Lindsay’s supporters.

Following the mistrial, one supporter outside the courthouse told ABC News that supporters would return for a second trial “in bigger numbers.”

A fundraiser established for Clancy’s parents, intended to help with the expenses they incurred while supporting their daughter, surpassed $1.2 million and raised its goal to $3 million.

Where is this ocean of emotional energy for the three people who never received an opportunity to grow up?

That question apparently makes people uncomfortable.

Good.

It should.

Cora will never graduate from high school.

Dawson will never learn to drive.

Callan never reached his first birthday.

Whatever one’s opinion about criminal responsibility, those are the irreversible realities around which every other conversation should orbit.

Instead, America has developed an extraordinary appetite for transforming people accused of horrific acts into psychological documentaries. We excavate every wound, diagnosis, medication, trauma, social pressure and mitigating circumstance until the victims become almost inconvenient because they complicate the redemption narrative constructed around the person responsible.

This is not compassion.

It is compassion stripped of hierarchy.

EMPATHY IS NOT A FINITE RESOURCE

Civilized people should care about mentally ill defendants.

We should also possess enough moral clarity to recognize that empathy is not a finite resource requiring us to erase victims before extending it to defendants.

We can demand better postpartum psychiatric care, better screening, better intervention, better medication management and stronger support for mothers in crisis.

We can do all of that while refusing to treat three dead children as secondary to the cultural significance of their mother’s diagnosis.

Those positions are not contradictory.

One concerns preventing future tragedies and treating serious illness.

The other concerns remembering the people whose lives were taken.

A compassionate society should be capable of doing both.

EXPLANATION IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY ABSOLUTION

What particularly fascinates me is how quickly accountability becomes reinterpreted as cruelty whenever a defendant fits a sympathetic cultural archetype.

Imagine applying that standard consistently.

Every person who commits a violent act has a biography. Childhood abuse, addiction, neurological abnormalities, depression, trauma, poverty, rage, personality disorders and psychiatric illness appear throughout the criminal population.

Human behavior always has causes.

If discovering those causes automatically dissolved responsibility, criminal law would eventually become impossible.

That is why the legal standard for criminal responsibility requires more than establishing that a defendant had a mental illness. The relevant question is how that condition affected the defendant’s ability to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or conform that conduct to the requirements of the law.

The Clancy jury could not unanimously resolve that question.

That produced a mistrial, not an acquittal and not a conviction.

It was not a declaration of innocence or guilt. It meant the jurors could not unanimously agree upon a verdict.

The case remained unresolved, with additional court proceedings scheduled.

DISAGREEMENT IS NOT IGNORANCE

I am also tired of the suggestion that anyone who views this case differently must simply be ignorant about postpartum illness.

That rhetorical trick has become tiresome throughout American culture: disagree with my conclusion, and I will diagnose your disagreement as insufficient education.

No.

Sometimes two people understand the same evidence and reach different legal or moral conclusions.

Adults used to recognize that possibility before social media converted every disagreement into evidence of wickedness.

Someone can understand the severity of postpartum psychosis and still believe the evidence supported criminal responsibility.

Someone else can review the same testimony and believe Clancy lacked criminal responsibility under Massachusetts law.

A jury was asked to resolve that dispute. It could not reach unanimity.

Recognizing the legitimacy of the legal disagreement does not require treating every public reaction as equally reasonable.

REMEMBER THEIR NAMES

My conclusion remains uncomplicated.

I want mothers experiencing postpartum psychiatric emergencies identified early and treated aggressively.

I want families taught the warning signs.

I want doctors to take psychiatric deterioration seriously.

I want women suffering from psychosis protected from themselves and others before catastrophe occurs.

I also want Cora, Dawson and Callan remembered as something more than exhibits in America’s latest ideological argument.

Those positions are not contradictory unless one’s worldview has become completely disordered.

Support Lindsay Clancy’s right to a vigorous defense.

Argue that the psychiatric evidence satisfied Massachusetts law if that is your conclusion.

Advocate for postpartum mental-health reform.

Those are legitimate positions.

But stop demanding that the rest of us rearrange the moral universe until the person who killed three children occupies its center.

Three children died.

They do not get retrials, fundraisers, advocacy campaigns, interviews, diagnoses, rehabilitation or second chances.

Whatever compassion remains in America should remember their names first.

Cora.

Dawson.

Callan.

SOURCES AND VERIFICATION

ABC News — “Lindsay Clancy Supporters Vow to Return in ‘Bigger Numbers’ After Mistrial,” September 4, 2026

CBS News — “Lindsay Clancy Murder Case Ends in Mistrial,” September 4, 2026

Reuters — Reporting on the Lindsay Clancy mistrial and subsequent legal proceedings, September 2026

The Associated Press — Reporting from the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, August 2026

People — “GoFundMe Raising Money for Lindsay Clancy’s Parents Increases Goal to $3 Million,” September 8, 2026

Massachusetts judicial materials concerning lack of criminal responsibility and jury unanimity