What the Clancy Mistrial Exposes

Eleven jurors were reportedly ready to excuse her. A crowdfunding page has already raised $800,000 to celebrate her.

Friday, a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the nurse who admitted to strangling her three children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months—in the family basement in 2023.

• After 38 hours of deliberation over seven days, the jury told the court it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington claimed 11 jurors leaned toward finding Clancy not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis.

One juror, a man, would not agree. The defense wanted him gone. Reddington asked Massachusetts’s highest court to remove the holdout and finish deliberations with an alternate. His filing accused the juror of bias against people with “debilitating mental illness.”

• The court refused. The district attorney now decides whether to retry her.

The verdict among those gathered outside the courthouse was never in doubt. Hundreds of supporters demonstrated there throughout the trial, some raising more than $800,000 for Clancy, chanting that they loved her.

• Clancy’s guilt is certain. She pled guilty to the murders. A psychologist testified to premeditation. Still, a visible and vocal slice of the country has decided a mother strangling her own children deserves not horror and punishment but sympathy and support.

This case puts on full display how morally lost we become when we, like Eve in the garden, replace God’s definition of good and evil with our own.

• Throughout the Bible, God says abortion is murder. People disagreed. First, they reasoned abortion was OK in rare cases like rape. Then they said anytime in the first trimester. Then right up to birth. They defended abortion as an unalienable right, a virtuous freedom.
• Bereft of natural affection, they then defended infanticide: Democrats unanimously blocked legal protections for babies who survive botched abortions.

Yes, postpartum depression is real. The notion that it erases guilt for murdering children—and that the mother is to be cheered rather than condemned—is morally bankrupt. It highlights a moral sickness—and intensifies it.

• Previous similar murder trials have ended with the mothers committed to state hospitals rather than prisons because of postpartum psychosis. But those cases drew horror—not crowds raising funds and publicly chanting their love.
• And a Durham, North Carolina, mother has since been charged with killing her son; her lawyer cited Clancy’s case in his defense.
• The Internet is flooded with emotionally disturbed mothers empathizing with deranged, homicidal sentiments.

Human life is sacred in God’s eyes. Reasoning our way through the knowledge of good and evil truly has nightmarish consequences. The moral disease it causes has metastasized in our society—destigmatizing a growing range of truly wicked acts.

The only solution is to get back to the perfect, just laws of God.