The Lindsay Clancy Case: Two Things Can Be True at Once
On accountability, postpartum psychosis, and the cost of moving the goalpost.
The Lindsay Clancy case is the kind of story that refuses to be simple. A mother. Three children dead. A woman who survived the fall she intended to kill her, now paralyzed, wheeled into a courtroom in a wheelchair, living with what she did. The jury could not reach a verdict. The trial ended in a mistrial. It is heavy, and it should be.
Some of the women writing this are mothers. Some of us have experienced the hormonal upheaval of pregnancy and postpartum firsthand: the way your body becomes something you don't fully recognize, the way emotions can swing to places you didn't know you could go. We are not writing this from a distance. We are writing it because the conversation this case has ignited is one we think matters, and because we believe two things can be true at once.
The Empathy Is Real
Let's start there.
Something seemed to have gone badly wrong for Lindsay Clancy. By the available accounts, she was struggling: with her mental health, with her medications, with a level of distress that wasn't fully seen or adequately addressed by the systems around her. Her healthcare providers were not communicating with each other. The medication she was given may have intensified rather than alleviated the crisis she was in. She had a family who loved her, who were trying to help, who asked the right questions and got the answers that seemed to check out. And still.
It is entirely possible to hold all of that and still say: three children died. A mother killed them. That act has consequences, in a just society, regardless of what led to it.
One of us put it plainly during a conversation about this case: empathy and accountability are two separate processes. You don't have to choose between them. You can have enormous compassion for a woman in crisis and still believe that the line that says killing is not something a civilized society can simply excuse has to hold.
The Postpartum Psychosis Defense
The legal defense was that Lindsay Clancy experienced postpartum psychosis during an 18-minute window, during which she heard a voice telling her this was her last chance.
A few things about this are worth sitting with.
First: postpartum psychosis is real. It is not the same as postpartum depression or the more common "baby blues." It is a severe, acute psychiatric condition that can include hallucinations, delusions, and a break from reality. Most people, including many medical professionals, had never heard of it before this case. That gap in public understanding matters enormously, and we'll come back to it.
Second: the specific contours of the defense raise genuine questions. The voice appeared in testimony a week after the event. It was never mentioned before, and it has not been mentioned since. The psychosis, if that is what it was, lasted for approximately 18 minutes and applied specifically to the period of the killings, but apparently did not impair her capacity, in the immediate aftermath, to ask whether she needed a lawyer, or to make the deliberate decision to change her healthcare proxy from her husband to her parents.
Those are not the actions of someone who does not know what she has done. They are the actions of someone who knows exactly what she has done and is already, in the first minutes, making decisions about what comes next.
There is also something worth noting about the defense itself. If postpartum psychosis caused a complete break from reality during those 18 minutes, a break so total that she did not know what she was doing, then the expected aftermath of coming out of that state would be overwhelming horror. The recognition of what had happened. Massive, immediate remorse. What the defense describes, and what has been publicly presented, does not obviously match that picture.
Does that mean she is not sick? No. Does it mean postpartum psychosis is not real or is not serious? Absolutely not. What it raises is a question that is both legal and ethical: can psychosis be that precisely contained? Present for 18 minutes, absent for everything before and after?
The Precedent That Worries Us
One of us made an observation that we found uncomfortable in the best way: the defense in this case creates a door.
If you can claim a voice told you to act, and this is inherently unprovable and unfalsifiable in either direction, then that door is open for anyone. Any act, any circumstances, any perpetrator. It does not require ongoing psychosis, or a documented history, or a pattern of behavior. It requires a claim, and a sympathetic presentation.
Compare this to Jeffrey Dahmer. By most reasonable assessments, the evidence for consistent, severe mental illness in Jeffrey Dahmer's case was substantially stronger than the evidence in this case. He was not afforded an insanity defense.
One possible difference: gender. And the particular form of sympathy that a mother in visible distress generates in a jury, versus a man whose crimes left no room for that kind of identification. We are not certain that is the full explanation. But it is a question worth asking. If the same facts (the same crime, the same defense, the same evidence) were presented by a man, would the jury have been as divided?
Lady Justice is supposed to be blind. That means she should not see gender. She should not see demographics. She should not see whether the defendant is sympathetic or repellent. She weighs actions and evidence. When the verdict depends on how much a jury identifies with the person in front of them, justice is not blind. It is selective.
What We Are Actually Missing
Here is what we think is the real failure in this story, and it goes beyond Lindsay Clancy.
Ethics and legal standards exist as a consistent bar, applied to everyone regardless of age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, or how much our hearts break for someone. That bar matters precisely because it does not move. And when someone fails to clear it, when something terrible happens that maybe never should have, the right response is not to lower the bar. It is to ask: where did we fail this person? How do we build systems that support people so they succeed at upholding that standard, rather than failing it? And if they fail, how are we, collectively, responsible?
That is the question the Lindsay Clancy case should be driving. Not "should we excuse this?" but "how did we get here, and how do we make sure we never get here again?"
Part of the answer is embarrassingly basic. Until the 1990s, women were largely excluded from medical research. Men were the default study subject. The data, the treatments, the diagnostic frameworks, built around male physiology and male experience. Today, only about 10 percent of the NIH research budget goes toward women's health, in a world where women make up more than half the population.
Postpartum psychosis is a real condition that is poorly understood, rarely studied, and almost never discussed, until a case like this one makes it briefly unavoidable. We don't have good enough tools to identify it, to predict it, or to evaluate retrospectively whether someone experienced it. And so when a defense rests on it, we are all, the jury, the judge, the public, trying to evaluate something we barely have the vocabulary for.
That is a systemic failure. It is not Lindsay Clancy's fault that we don't understand this well enough. It is not her husband's fault. It is a failure of investment, of attention, of a medical culture that has historically treated women's bodies and women's minds as secondary. The right response is to fund the research. Train the providers. Create systems where a mother in that much distress gets the right help before she reaches a point of no return.
And to hold the line, while doing all of that.
What This Precedent Does to Women
One of us raised a point that we think deserves more attention than it has received.
If postpartum psychosis becomes a reliable path to reduced or no criminal responsibility, available to any woman who claims it and untestable in either direction, It does not help women. It creates a legal category defined by female biological vulnerability, one that judges women's culpability by their hormones rather than their choices.
That is not equality. That is the benevolent paternalism version of inequality: women treated as less than fully responsible agents, their actions excused because their biology is assumed to have overwhelmed their reason. It sounds sympathetic. It is actually the same move that has been used for centuries to limit women's authority over their own lives: the assumption that female physiology makes women less capable of rational action, and therefore less accountable for it.
A legal standard that holds women to a lower bar is not a victory for women. It is a category that, once established, can be used in ways we don't yet anticipate. True equality means being held to the same standard, and trusted to meet it.
On Confident Strangers and What They Know
We will say one more thing, and we say it from a place that is personal.
We know what it is like to be the subject of a confident public verdict, reached by people who have never been in the room, never spoken to us, never held the full picture. To have strangers, with access to a select number of media reports, a few dramatic quotes, a narrative shaped by people with their own reasons to shape it, decide they understand exactly what happened, what was true, what was felt, and what it all meant.
We are not drawing a parallel between our situation and Lindsay Clancy's. We are making a narrower point: confident strangers, working from limited information, are rarely as certain as they believe themselves to be. We cannot know what Lindsay Clancy thought or felt in that moment. What we can do is evaluate her actions against a consistent standard: the same standard that should apply to everyone, in every case, regardless of whether the person in front of us is easy to identify with or impossible to.
We don't know what happened inside Lindsay Clancy's mind on that night. We don't think most of the people who are certain that they do actually do. What we believe is that the legal system exists precisely so that certainty doesn't get to make the call. Evidence does, and a consistent standard does, applied the same way regardless of who is in front of it.
That standard is worth protecting. Even here. Even in the hardest case.
This is the Dossier Project. We are a group of women who have found ourselves the subject of confident public verdicts. We write to share our own story using our own voices, and we write about accountability, truth, and what it means to be seen accurately.
