I've tried to avoid the Lindsay Clancy trial. There's something uniquely disturbing about a story involving a mother who murdered her own young children, and for weeks I managed to look away from most of the coverage. That's no longer possible, because the story has stopped being only about what she did and started being about who is cheering for the woman accused of doing it.
Clancy strangled her three children to death inside the family's Duxbury, Mass., home. That fact is not even in dispute. Her attorneys argued she suffered from postpartum psychosis at the time and that she received inadequate care from her doctors.
But here's the problem: From what's been reported, Clancy had enough presence of mind to plan the killings in advance, which includes telling her husband to go out to pick up dinner and looking up online ahead of time how much time she’d have to do what she planned to do. That alone tells me the insanity defense doesn't add up.
Some may disagree. Fine, but I still can't figure out how that turns her into someone people are rallying behind like a persecuted saint.
And a persecuted saint is exactly what a lot of people, particularly liberal women, have decided to make her.
Clancy's defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, publicly displayed a massive pile of fan mail sent to his client, letters he told a local news station are arriving from "all over the world."
All over the world.
He said Clancy reads every one of them, though he wouldn't describe how she reacts. Reddington brought a fresh stack to her on a Thursday morning, not the first time he's done it, then handed a basket of the letters to her family in court. Somewhere out there, right now, people are sitting down to write fan mail to a woman on trial for murdering her three children.
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On top of that, the New York Times decided this week was the moment to publish a piece featuring mothers who say they "understand parts of her story." That's the framing a once-serious newspaper chose to run while a woman stands trial for strangling three children in their own home, and it says plenty about where sympathy is being directed.
I get that postpartum depression is a real and serious illness, and I don't doubt some of these women are speaking from genuine pain of their own. But understanding a feeling and excusing an act are entirely different things. Clancy’s supporters may sympathize with postpartum depression, but they don't seem especially disturbed by what she's accused of doing to her own kids. Somewhere along the way, a real slice of the public decided a woman on trial for killing her three children deserves fan mail from all over the world like she’s a celebrity.
The case has now ended in a hung jury, after just one juror reportedly held out for a guilty verdict. Just one? Still, the bigger question I have is: How did we even get to a place where a mom who killed her own children has become an icon to so many worldwide? It’s not a reflection of American culture; it’s a reflection of humanity as a whole. And boy, is that reflection ugly.
