Sympathy Is Not a Verdict

Matt Walsh posted an instant reaction Friday afternoon to a hung jury in the Massachusetts trial of Lindsay Clancy.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The clip is not a tour of five weeks of testimony. Walsh’s argument is narrower. The only reason the case did not end in an acquittal, he says, is one holdout juror — a man, on a panel of nine women and three men — who would not join the others in finding Clancy not criminally responsible. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asked the judge to remove him, told a single justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court the juror was biased against people with mental illness, and invoked the Americans with Disabilities Act. The court said no. Outside, Reddington said the other eleven had been “robbed by one man.”

Walsh puts that next to the Derek Chauvin jury. In Minneapolis, he says, jurors ignored the law and convicted Chauvin of murder because he did not inspire sympathy — even after, in Walsh’s telling, they understood George Floyd had overdosed. Deliberations are treated as closed, so the verdict stood. In Plymouth the pressure ran the other way: eleven ready to excuse the killings, and a public effort to pry out the one who would not. Walsh’s larger claim is the Massachusetts rule itself. The killings are not in dispute. The Commonwealth still has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible. He thinks no one can prove another person’s mind that way. A mistrial, to him, is only a relative win. His close is that the insanity defense should not exist.

The case underneath the clip is simpler than the argument about it.

Facts and Disposition

On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband, Patrick, out for takeout and medicine. She took their three children to the basement and strangled them with exercise bands: Cora, five; Dawson, three; Callan, eight months. Cora and Dawson were dead when Patrick came home. Callan died days later. She cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She is paralyzed from the waist down.

She was charged with three counts of first-degree murder. In Massachusetts that can be proved by deliberate premeditation, by extreme atrocity or cruelty, or both. The prosecution said she planned the window of time, separated the older children so one would not see the other and run, and kept going after each child went limp. She did not deny the killings. Her defense was lack of criminal responsibility: postpartum psychosis, and a claim that she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of the acts or conform her conduct to the law. The verdict slip also allowed second-degree murder and manslaughter.

After about thirty-eight hours over seven days, the jury told Judge William Sullivan it could not agree. Reporting after the mistrial is that the split was eleven to one against a finding of criminal responsibility. Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. That is not a conviction and it is not an acquittal. The murder charges remain. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has to decide whether to try the case again. A status conference is set for later this month. Clancy stays at Tewksbury State Hospital in the meantime.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

After the Mistrial

To be honest, I had been following this case only in snippets — on podcasts such as Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro, or even Fox News. There may be some sympathy with regards to postpartum depression. The main thing I want to illustrate is that postpartum depression, or even psychosis, is not a new thing. The oldest account that turned up went back at least thirty-six years, to the Los Angeles Times on Victoria Karter.

Watching the pressers after the mistrial showed women heckling the prosecutor, bellowing about consideration for the mother. The prosecutor’s statement was about the children who lost their lives. That was the right subject.

There is no militancy here from me about whether the mother needs help if she did suffer from postpartum depression. The live question is that three children are dead, and whether she was criminally responsible for that.

My suspicion is that the holdout was the one juror willing to hold Clancy accountable for the deaths. The others may have been more sympathetic to a mother who may well be mentally ill.

Still, at the end of the day, conviction or acquittal, Mrs. Clancy will have to sit with her actions.