Have you ever seen the movie “12 Angry Men”? This whole shite about Clancy reminds me of the movie, but in reverse.
These are the undisputed facts:
- The killings occurred in the basement of the home while her husband, Patrick Clancy, was out running errands (picking up takeout dinner and medication for one of the children at her request). He left around 5:15 p.m. and returned shortly after 6:00 p.m.
- She used exercise bands to strangle the children. Medical examiners determined the causes of death as asphyxia (Cora and Dawson) and complications of asphyxia (Callan, who initially had a pulse but suffered catastrophic oxygen deprivation and died days later after life support was withdrawn).
- After the killings, she cut her wrists and neck with a knife and jumped (or dropped) from a second-story window. She sustained severe spinal injuries that left her paralyzed from the waist down; she has remained in a wheelchair and has been held at a hospital facility.
- Patrick discovered her injured outside, called 911 (the recording captures him finding the children and saying “She killed the kids”), and first responders confirmed the scene. Lindsay Clancy (a former labor-and-delivery nurse) has not disputed that she killed the children.
- She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Her defense centered on lack of criminal responsibility due to postpartum psychosis (and related mental-health issues), while the prosecution argued she acted intentionally and with planning.
No one is disputing that Lindsay killed her children. Well, a few unhinged folks are, but they are just that, unhinged. Neither the prosecution nor the defense even attempted to dispute that Lindsay strangled her three children. That’s fact.
I don’t know if you’ve ever played around with those exercise bands. It would be difficult to kill someone using them because of their stretchy nature. In fact, evidence suggests that Lindsay found the first two bands she used to be not useful in her murder of her children, and had to switch to stronger ones. While one might argue that invites you to believe there was a lack of planning, I believe more that it was a lack of understanding of the tool at hand. You can plan something and plan it poorly. That is how it appears to me. This is my opinion.
I haven’t watched the trial, nor have I looked over the evidence. Instead, I asked myself… If I had temporarily gone insane and killed my own children, then regained my sanity (even in a small way), I would WANT someone to put me in jail and never let me out. The act of killing children, as she did, is so heinous that it is not forgivable.
I wasn’t on the jury, however. My opinion doesn’t mean squat. I am, at best, an armchair critic. However, I will say that the “lone holdout,” as he’s being called, is a very brave man. It cannot be easy to stand strong when so many others disagree with you. Even if he’d been on the opposite side of the issue, I would say the same thing. I can disagree with someone and still respect them for holding strong to their opinion. In this case, the juror’s opinion appears based in fact, though we do not know that for certain.
At this point, said juror is being raked across the coals. I am guessing he’s going to lose his job, have to move, hide from folks… I’m sure some Karen is going to dox him sometime soon. And why do I think that? Because that is what the Left does when it doesn’t get its way. I hate saying that, but it’s true.
We need to protect jurors better, quite frankly. When the public can destroy a person because they made a call based on their beliefs, while working on a jury, then we cannot even pretend that we have unbiased juries. If every jurist has to spend all their time wondering if they’ll be persecuted or prosecuted for their honest service on that jury, we’ll run out of jurists soon.
Jurists are picked randomly (or so we’re told). They should be anonymous, as well, in my very strong opinion. Clancy’s case has pushed that home, in a big way. Anyone who leaks who a jurist is should be arrested. Juries should be sequestered until cases are complete. There should be a non-disclosure agreement signed by each that lasts at least a couple of years past the case’s conclusion (including any appeals). Jurors should not be allowed to profit off telling their stories.
My understanding of the Clancy case is that the jury was being asked to find Lindsay guilty (with a possibility of death penalty, not a thing in Mass), guilty (no possibility of death penalty), or not-guilty by reason of insanity. To be found insane, you have to “appreciate the wrongfulness or criminality of the conduct (this means meaningful understanding of its legal or moral wrongfulness—not just bare intellectual awareness that it was illegal or wrong), or To conform their conduct to the requirements of the law (i.e., they could not control their behavior even if they knew it was wrong).” (from Grok)
Once the insanity defense is on the table, the prosecution is required to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the person was and is sane enough to participate in their own defense (mens rea, I believe) and that they were criminally responsible. It’s a high bar, but an important one.
I’m not a lawyer. I’m fairly certain that committing suicide (or faking it) is an indication that you know what you did was wrong. Moreso, Lindsay was a nurse, and was well aware of what would cause her to die. If she truly wanted to commit suicide, I suspect it would have happened. Since it didn’t, that’s a further indication of guilt. If she didn’t feel guilt (which comes when you know you’ve done something wrong), then she wouldn’t have felt the need to dispatch herself… or to fake it.
On top of all that, though, she did several things (internet searches, sending her husband off, etc.) that prove she was thinking about it all in advance. That indicates she was aware of what she was doing. You can’t plan something unless you’re self aware.
The problem in all of this, with this jury and frankly with all juries right now, is that figuring all this stuff out requires you to “logic” it. Most folks today can’t logic their way out of a wet paper bag. I’ve watched grown men and women who were unable to make their own doctor’s appointments, never mind figure out whether someone was in their right mind.
At what point do we nullify the entire jury system because we simply don’t have intelligent and logical enough adults to man the jury??
I’m not without sympathy for Lindsay, for what it’s worth. I have been in that deep, dark hole that sometimes overtakes you. It sucks, in many ways. It sounds like, at least to some extent, she was attempting to get help. So it might be that this case is not just a murder case, but a wake-up call to the medical and mental health profession. It is entirely possible to be both. When you have a nanny, a stay at home dad, and family helping you with your kids, and you still lose it and murder the kids… that speaks to a system that failed her, as much as she failed her kids. That failure does NOT absolve her of her guilt, however… no matter how much some folks would like it to.
She murdered her children. There’s just no coming back from that. One, maybe… I could maybe see murdering one and then realizing and freaking out. But not all three. Not with one watching. That’s criminal, and there’s just no walking away from that fact. That’s a fact.
I’ve seen two interviews with Clancy jurors: one with three ladies who show their faces and names, and one with one lady who is not showing her face or name.
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The former, with the three ladies going public, cast that “lone holdout” as an obstinate man who was unwilling to work with or listen to anyone.
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But the latter, with the anonymous woman, casts some doubt on that view. She indicates that she wasn’t totally convinced, either, and implies there may have been others on the jury that weren’t as sure but were feeling pressure — from the demonstrators outside, from the known-desired outcome from the Left (and their reputation for doxxing and destroying people), and likely from other jurors like the three that went public — to vote the “correct” way.
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I applaud the “lone holdout” (who may or may not have actually been a “lone” holdout) for holding fast to his beliefs and his view of the evidence presented, in the face of pressure to acquit (based on insanity). It’s unfortunate the whole thing ended in a mistrial (no verdict) and will likely need to be re-tried with a new jury — with all the expense and time necessary to make that happen — but that is the nature of our adversarial legal system.
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Personally, I agree that in high-profile, politically-charged cases like this (or any criminal case these days; they’re ALL politically-charged), the jury should be anonymous and sequestered, and any attempt to unmask, doxx, or influence them should be met with STRONG criminal charges for jury tampering/interference/intimidation (exact verbiage varies from state to state).
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Finally, as an aside, I applaud Lindsay’s attorney, Mr. Reddington, partly for taking this wild and complex case and arguing it to the best of his ability, but mostly for standing up for Patrick and his new family in public statements. Much of the pro-Lindsay crowd seems hell-bent on convincing everyone that Patrick is the real murderer and dragging his name and reputation through the mud, but Reddington is publicly naming Patrick as a victim here — the man lost everything and had his life torn apart in the space of an hour — and warning that people who continue to slander him as a murderer can (and probably should) face legal consequences. Reddington appears to me a decent and honorable human being for doing that, and I for one appreciate him for it.
At this point though, its very difficult to actually get a good jury for this particular case. Not saying everyone knows about it, but enough people do who have well enough developed opinions and who would likely try to get on the jury if they had the sense it was for this case in particular. The problem here by and large is not ability to sequester the jury (though we should do that better and can do it better in most cases), but having a caliber of juror who can set aside his biases and assume the appropriate frame of mind for this kind of job.
Anonimity would help but I don’t think it would solve the problem. I worry that there’s a lot of effort to avoid jurors who would be good like this, lawyers are incentivized to pick, to the extent they can, people who they think are going to stack the deck for them.
Honestly though the entire premise of not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity is insanity by itself; the entire trial is absurd. If no one contests that she’s a three times infanticide the judge’s only job is to schedule her execution.
I am curious to find out what the Judge’s instructions to the jury actually were.
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Having done jury duty more than once, I know the juror instructions can definitely sway the deliberations. What exactly where they instructed to determine? Certainly not whether she did or did not commit the act, but was it as simple as “was she insane or not?” Place that within a legal framework and making that determination becomes much more difficult. What is the legal definition of “insane” in MA? What is the standard of reasonableness for it?
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I doubt anyone would think she should be free to walk away, but that is what happened because of… as you describe it, a lack of logic. Emotions were in charge in this trial from what I can tell. And, emotions make people do absolutely stupid things. I, frankly, expected more, but curiously, I am not surprised to see a mistrial.
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