A son stabbing his mother and father to death. A young man killing his pregnant partner in their home. A nurse administering lethal injections to multiple infants. There are certain crimes, incomprehensible to the average person, that prompt the tangled moral question: Was this person insane or evil?
But it’s been a long time since one of them captured the internet’s attention in the way that Lindsay Clancy’s actions have in recent days. Three years ago, she strangled her three children to death. She does not deny it. In her trial, which began a few weeks ago and is being watched live by hundreds of thousands of people, her defense team asserts that she was so incapacitated by postpartum depression that she cannot be held accountable for murder.
Online, there has been an outpouring of support for her. Women are claiming “I could have been Lindsay Clancy,” presenting her as the innocent victim of a medical system that failed. A GoFundMe, set up by Clancy’s parents, has raised $800,000—and counting. And then there are those who claim that Clancy’s ex-husband framed her for the murders; TikTok is replete with women pointing to random details from the trial and saying it’s evidence he’s abusive, as well as videos of him doing ordinary things, overlaid with spooky music, that supposedly prove he is a psychopath. These have tens of thousands of likes.
At the same time, there has been an outpouring of disgust. Clancy has been called a “monster,” and influential people have said she “deserves to die.”
In her essay today, Kat Rosenfield argues that all these people are trying “to box up and file away an act so incomprehensibly evil that it’s virtually intolerable to look at directly, unshrouded by either the veil of compassion or the excitement of a mystery to be solved.”
But the truth here is something far, far more complicated. —The Editors
In the matter of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the following facts are not in dispute: that it was the evening of January 24, 2023, when she was found on the frozen ground outside her home, back broken, bleeding from wounds on her wrists and neck, which she had inflicted on herself with a knife before jumping from a second-story window. That on this same night, her children Cora, Dawson, and Callan—ages 5, 3, and 8 months, respectively—were found in the basement, strangled with exercise bands. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the scene; Callan died three days later after a brief hospitalization. That Clancy confessed to the killings and has been on trial since late last month, now confined to the wheelchair in which she will likely spend the rest of her life, paralyzed from her chest down by the fall.
The question before the jury is not whether she did it, but whether she was sane enough at the time to be held accountable. Prosecutors, who have argued that the killings were premeditated and coolly executed, are seeking life in prison without parole; Clancy’s defense team says that she was incapacitated by postpartum psychosis, and hence not criminally responsible.
What is in dispute, at least according to the internet, is just about everything else.
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