Courtesy of Wesley Tingey
After weeks of deliberation by the jury in the triple murder case of Lindsay Clancy and her children, a mistrial was declared on September 4th. According to the jury foreperson, only one juror withheld the otherwise unanimous verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, sparking widespread outcry. Both the prosecution and defense admit Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands while her husband was picking up food and medicine for the rest of the family. Immediately after, Clancy then attempted to commit suicide by slitting her wrists and jumping out of a second-story window. The defense, however, charges that she was not in a conscious state of mind when she committed the murders.
Clancy had suffered from undiagnosed postpartum psychosis in the aftermath of her third child’s birth and reported violent, suicidal hallucinations after being overmedicated only a month before the killings to her husband and medical professionals. Still, Clancy remained adamant about staying with her children following a short voluntary stay in a psych ward and tried to raise them despite what she was going through, refusing voluntary separation as proposed by her husband in December of 2022.
Cases such as that of the Clancy family are far from straightforward in the judicial sense due to the nuanced nature of crimes committed whilst undergoing mental health episodes alongside the possible malpractice that Clancy and her husband charge against healthcare providers who wrongly prescribed and failed to treat her. Still, a mistrial remains nothing more than an abject failure of the judicial and medical system to provide proper treatment for a deeply unwell woman and her grieving family. Each day, Clancy and her husband had to enter hell on earth through their testimonies, reliving the worst day of their lives before the court in the fleeting hope that it would soon be over, but now they must continue this torture when the trial resumes again on September 29th. To make matters worse for the family, they have had to deal with a torrent of lies and slander by the digital masses of people who think they know better than the facts.
True crime has become a defining genre of the 2020s decade, blending traditional television storytelling with the allure of real-world criminal cases. NBC’s Dateline and numerous YouTube accounts have been at the forefront of this craze with long-form essays retelling infamous criminal cases, most of them murder. Often, the true crime community also rallies around an ongoing case, bringing national attention and sensationalizing it in the broader media. Unfortunately, this mostly leads to a blurring of the lines between fiction and reality, along with harassment of innocent parties, both of which have become true over the course of the Lindsay Clancy trial.
Many followers of the trial have cited a ‘maternal instinct’ or something simply being ‘off’ about the nature of the trial as reasons why Clancy could not have committed the murders, despite the fact that she has signed numerous sworn statements taking responsibility for the murders despite the state she was in. Some even go further, criticizing the ways in which husband Patrick Clancy grieves the loss of his children and his private life to charge that it was really he who committed the murders, an impossibility given his positioning at a restaurant at the time of the murders. These sorts of accounts only serve to spread fear and misinformation that further traumatizes the involved parties and creates a chaotic environment around an orderly process. Still, even these conspiratorial campaigns are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the disturbing vitriol Lindsay Clancy has been subject to from the wider world.
Women experiencing trauma or abuse have always been ignored and disbelieved by the justice system at large, with the National Institutes of Health reporting that 95% of sexual assault cases go unreported while nearly 20% of sexual assault cases that are reported wind up not being investigated. Mental health, too, has been dismissed as hysteria throughout medical history as an excuse not to give proper treatment and write off vulnerable women as simply begging for attention or being crazy. These same deplorable doubters have reared their head once again on social media to undercut the struggles of Clancy and call for truly disgusting retaliation.
I have personally seen cowards call for Clancy to receive the death penalty, compare her to Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden in polls meant to judge who users would rather leave their kids with, and call for the 19th Amendment (enshrining the female right to vote) to be repealed based on the actions of a single distressed woman amongst a population of millions.
Even politicians have gotten involved in the sordid affair, with Texas Senator Ted Cruz calling Clancy a “monster of a mother” and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis offering asylum to the juror who wished to convict her. I hope that these sorts of incidents are but a small facet of a more forgiving public than I realize, but the thousands of likes on these posts do not give me much confidence in that.
Whether the divisive fight over Lindsay Clancy’s case successfully leads to more women receiving treatment for postpartum psychosis and associated illnesses, there will always be the uncrossable hurdle of doubters and naysayers, undercutting the mental struggles of thousands because they see victims as weak liars. In the words of my father, who has witnessed the harm of mania and depression upon our own family, “Unless it happens to them, they’ll never understand.”
