Three innocent children were strangled to death.
Why shouldn’t the person who did it — their mother — face first-degree murder charges?
In the case of Lindsay Clancy, defense lawyer Kevin Reddington argues that because the Duxbury woman was in the throes of postpartum depression, overly medicated, and experiencing deep psychosis, she should not be held criminally responsible. He argues that the mental health system and how it treats women in Clancy’s state of mental anguish should be put on trial, not Clancy.
The brain fully understands Reddington’s argument and accepts it. The heart is another matter. As an article in Medium on the eternal tug-of-war between the two explained about the heart, “it doesn’t think — it feels.” What it feels in this case is absolute horror over the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan. For me, with that horror comes an urgent and somewhat irrational desire to hold a person — not a health care system — accountable.
That is what Clancy is up against in the court of public opinion, and in the courtroom too. Brain versus heart. Rational, dispassionate thinking versus pure emotional response to the awfulness of a mother killing her three young children.
“I’m conflicted myself,” Dan Conley, a former Suffolk County district attorney, now a special counsel at the Mintz law firm, told me in an interview. “It’s a true fact. Mothers don’t kill their children unless something is seriously wrong. Whether that illness, such as post-partum depression, qualifies for a condition that will make [Clancy] not criminally responsible, that’s a question the jury has to grapple with.”
It’s not surprising that Conley, a former prosecutor, does not think it’s wrong for Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz to put that question before a jury. A prosecutor’s job, Conley said, is to “seek some level of justice for victims,” who in this case are Clancy’s children. Prosecutors are led by the facts and the law, and with this case, he said, “They have concluded Lindsay Clancy was not suffering from a debilitating mental illness, such that she could not understand the lawfulness of her conduct or conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.”
But given the history in Plymouth County, as revealed in great detail by Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham, it’s not quite that simple. After prosecuting Latarsha Sanders, a poor, Black Brockton mother found guilty of first-degree murder in 2022 for killing her two youngest children, how could Cruz not prosecute Clancy, a white labor and delivery nurse who lived in Duxbury? If he had struck some deal under which Clancy would not be charged with murder but confined instead to an institution, there probably would have been public outcry, on two fronts — on behalf of Clancy’s children as victims, and on behalf of the idea that justice should be pursued equally, no matter the race, ethnicity, or social and economic status of the defendant.
Of course, the urge to make up for a past prosecutorial mistake is no reason to make another one.
Now the burden is on the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy is criminally responsible, that she understood the wrongfulness of her conduct and could conform her conduct to the requirements of law. The prosecution will present its evidence. Is it enough to convict a profoundly troubled and psychotic woman who tried to take her own life after killing her children by jumping out the second-floor window of their home and who now sits paralyzed from the waist down before the jury? Reddington will do all he can to paint the prosecution as ill-conceived, at the very least, and, as he told the jury, “not righteous.”
Am I arguing for and against this prosecution? Yes, I am.
From the outside looking in on the courtroom, I find myself fixating on accountability instead of mental health, which is the opposite of my usual response to crime. Typically, I reject descriptions of criminal defendants as evil and believe most suffer from mental health issues, whether diagnosed or not, which prison will not fix. I don’t think Clancy is evil, but the outcome of her actions certainly is. Prison is not the answer, yet I recoil at Reddington saying she will be punished forever, even if the verdict is not guilty by reason of insanity, which means she would be confined to a psychiatric facility until a judge decides it is safe to release her.
Clancy “will be paralyzed for the rest of her life,” he told the jurors on Monday. “She’s living her own hell. She knows what happened with those kids, and she wanted to die when she was in the hospital. … To this day, [she] wants to die.”
But she is alive and her children are not, which makes it hard to put brain ahead of heart.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.