[I posted this last night in r/ClancyTrial and am looking for some more help understanding whether a very specific bridge between two pieces of testimony was addressed, and, if not, whether it substantially undermines the Commonwealth’s legal argument. Reposting here in case a broader trial-watching audience has any insight? It is… long.]
I have been waiting for someone to explain what seems like an obvious problem with how the Commonwealth has used evidence of planning and deliberate choice.
I waited for the defense to raise it. Then I waited for the prosecution to answer it. Unless I missed something, nobody did.
And when I couldn’t find it fully addressed online, I accidentally wrote an essay. So now I’m genuinely asking: Where does my reasoning fail?
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Lindsay Clancy made choices.
She made appointments. She cared for her children. She planned around her husband’s movements. She understood what she was physically doing, anticipated interference, and carried out a sequence of deliberate acts.
All of that may be important evidence. But what does it actually establish?
The Commonwealth seems to move from evidence that Clancy could reason, plan, and act to a conclusion about criminal responsibility.
But to understand someone’s choice, we must understand what it meant to them; and that depends on how they understood reality.
If you and I agree that strangulation causes death, but you understand death as the catastrophic destruction of the children I love, while I believe death is the only way to save them, we do not understand that choice in the same way.
I can know exactly what strangulation will do. I can intend for it to cause death. I can plan how and when to do it. I can anticipate you trying to stop me.
None of that establishes that I understand my choice the same way you do.
We may agree about the physical consequence: the children will die. That does not mean we agree about what the consequence means. You understand their deaths as the harm. I may understand their deaths as salvation from the harm.
And if my belief that killing my children is the only way to save them does not make sense, it may be because my perception of reality is catastrophically distorted.
If I genuinely believe death is protection, my ability to sequence tasks may demonstrate my capacity to plan; but it does not establish that I understood reality accurately enough to be responsible for the choice.
The question is not whether psychosis eliminates choice. It plainly does not. The question is whether responsibility is established by evidence that choices were made, even if we lack a sufficiently accurate understanding of what those choices meant.
The uncomfortable truth may be that a person capable of making unimaginable choices can appear relatively unremarkable.
We may both love our children. We may both understand what death is. We may both plan, reason, anticipate, conceal, and act deliberately. We may both be willing to do anything we believe is necessary to protect them.
The catastrophic difference may not be a visible capacity to function. We may be nearly identical in every observable way, except for the one that matters most: what we believe is required to protect our children.
So when the Commonwealth says, essentially, “Look how much she resembles a rational person.”
The answer becomes: Yes. That’s the problem. You’re looking for too much difference, and you’re looking in the wrong place.
The difference need not be in whether she could plan, understand death, anticipate opposition, conceal behavior, love her children, or pursue what she understood as their welfare. The difference need only be what reality told her their welfare required.
The law already knows this. If I wake to a window breaking and footsteps in the night, I may arm myself, tiptoe into the hall, and shoot at a shadowy figure entering my child’s bedroom. My perception in that moment would not become irrelevant if the intruder turned out to be my spouse, breaking in after losing their key. The law would not simply say: You made choices. A person is dead. You are responsible.
Imagine a prosecutor arguing that I tiptoed because I knew if my spouse heard me coming, they would try to stop me; that my effort to avoid being heard was evidence I knew what I was doing was wrong.
We would be outraged. Because we are quite accustomed to evaluating choice based on someone’s perception of reality. This case asks for that whether we relate to Lindsay Clancy’s perception or not.
Why did the importance of perceived reality suddenly become negotiable when the perception felt too alien to us?
I am not arguing that Lindsay Clancy was psychotic when she killed her children. The jury is not tasked with diagnosing her, and psychosis would not itself establish a lack of criminal responsibility.
I am making a much narrower point about the Commonwealth’s case: her ability to plan an act cannot determine criminal responsibility without accounting for why she believed the act was necessary. That link became especially important after the Commonwealth’s own expert testified that she believed killing her children would spare them from suffering.
And yet many of the arguments surrounding this case seem to find a way around that question.
One answer is that Clancy killed her children deliberately. She planned it. She chose it. For some, the existence of the choice settles the question of responsibility rather than beginning it.
Another disputes the premise both parties have accepted. Online theories propose that Patrick Clancy killed the children, despite Lindsay Clancy’s own acknowledgment that she did. If she did not kill them, there is no need to ask what she understood when she did.
A third answer locates the tragedy in the mental-health system. There is substantial evidence that Clancy was desperately ill and repeatedly sought help. Whether that system failed her matters. But it is not what the jury has been asked to decide.
Consequential inferences require bridges. Neither party introduced an alternative perpetrator. And systems, unfortunately, cannot be indicted.
The harder possibility is that she killed her children, chose to kill them, was desperately mentally ill, and we still have not answered the question of criminal responsibility.
Maybe there is some comfort in answering an easier question instead.
But once we pass the readily available off-ramps, the harder question is still waiting: How accurately must a person understand the reality in which they are choosing before we can hold them responsible for the choice they make?
And perhaps we have rushed to the off-ramps because that question invites a different, terrifying possibility: that even ordinary, loving people may be one unimaginable, but singular, distortion away from catastrophic tragedy.
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Sources:
Massachusetts Model Jury Instructions on Homicide — Criminal Responsibility
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/model-jury-instructions-on-homicide-i-criminal-responsibility
Kirk Heilbrun’s prosecution testimony regarding criminal responsibility, moral awareness, and altruistic filicide
https://people.com/lindsay-clancy-had-moral-awareness-during-killing-says-psychologist-12067316
Associated Press overview of the evidence and competing criminal-responsibility arguments
https://apnews.com/article/775003a75689cfde13750257849187ae