To avoid misunderstanding, let me begin with a caveat. First, Lindsay Clancy will not be exonerated and freed from custody – if my recommendation is adopted. Second, I offer this analysis as a trained attorney, a two-time candidate for governor of Massachusetts, a pastor who founded a Massachusetts inner-city mission serving the mentally ill and homeless, and a man whose father was a criminally insane inmate of Northampton State Hospital in Massachusetts for two decades.
Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in Duxbury in January 2023, then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. The fall shattered her thoracic spine at T5 and T6, severing the cord. She is a permanent paraplegic: no voluntary movement or sensation below her navel, with medical needs a prison cannot meet. She admitted the killings. The dispute is not what she did. It is what the law should do with her.
No person in her right mind could have done this. That is self-evident truth, but the court’s task is to enforce statutes imposed by the legislature. The law demands proof of a specific mental state at a specific moment. The public looks at the whole act – three children, a mother, a jump from a window – and asks how any mind could produce that. No healthy mind could.
Planning does not change that as the prosecution argues. Psychotics have been among the most masterful planners of heinous crimes. Planning proves organization, not sanity.
Under Massachusetts law, the formal finding is not “guilty but insane” but “lack of substantial capacity to follow the law” under McHoul. My position is the same: Clancy lacked capacity because she was insane.
The case is being warped by politics. Radical feminists demand that postpartum depression qualify women for exoneration from child-murder – a frightening extension of the “abortion rights” mentality beyond even the literal infanticide that partial-birth abortion represents. They cast the patriarchy as the real defendant and treat an insanity verdict as a political trophy.
Law-and-order conservatives rightly fear that a Clancy acquittal could open a new Pandora’s box of child-killing: a standing invitation to treat maternal filicide as a medical event rather than a crime. But to get the result they want, they wrongly demand she be found mentally competent when she clearly wasn’t.
Both errors must be rejected. The radical leftist push for exoneration is a grave threat to our republic and our social order. It must not be facilitated by this case. By the same token, we must not surrender correct legal analysis simply to deny political opponents a propaganda victory.
On paper, an insanity finding does not open the prison doors. It triggers G.L. c. 123, § 16: observation, then a petition for civil commitment if the court finds she is mentally ill and likely to cause further serious harm. The first commitment is six months, then one year renewals if appropriate. That is the statute. The practice is another matter.
If found not guilty by lack of capacity, the next step is a post-trial hearing on placement or release. The medical professionals deciding that are, as a group, notoriously liberal. These days the old asylums are gone. Forensic beds are scarce. The culture of the helping professions in this Commonwealth leans toward release and “recovery,” not toward the recognition that some people must never again be at large. The risk of Clancy “walking” free is very real, perhaps even likely given the politics.
In contrast a first-degree murder conviction in Massachusetts carries life without parole.
My recommendation is that the prosecution offer a plea to accept whatever ruling will see Clancy incarcerated in a suitable medical facility for life. That honors both facts: she is insane, and three children are dead. It honors our social commitment to house her where her body and mind can be treated, not in a prison cell, which is not appropriate in her case.
She is a permanent paraplegic and a lifelong suicide risk. A person who has done what she has done cannot live a normal life in public. It is compassionate for the state to write that into the judgment rather than leave her fate to the next hearing and the next liberal evaluator.
If the defense will stipulate to life in a secure medical facility, the case has a far better chance of ending without another year of public trauma and without giving radical feminists a platform to pound their war drums against the patriarchy.
If not, and there is only the choice between two errors, a finding of guilty would do lesser harm to society than telling a society of women already comfortable with abortion at birth that the claim of postpartum depression can exonerate them from killing their older children.
In my view, God rendered His own verdict by rendering her permanently paralyzed and forced to ponder that for the rest of her life. I cannot think of a more just punishment.
Biblical homicide law actually supports this. Genesis 9:6 grounds murder’s gravity in the image of God. Exodus 21 distinguished killing with intent from killing without it. Numbers 35 and Deuteronomy 19 built the cities of refuge: the unintentional killer was removed from the community until the death of the high priest. He was not set free. He was contained. Modern insanity doctrine meets the same standard through medical language, so long as it includes confinement.
Either way, this case can advance President Trump’s goal of restoring the institutions America once had insane asylums. Liberals dismantled the old system, and the tragic result is visible in every city: the sick living as homeless addicts on the streets and in the woods – a terrible commentary on a nation that once took responsibility for its most vulnerable (like my father). Restoring those institutions would reverse those harms and renew the Christian redemptive view: that the mentally ill are not disposable; restorative justice means treatment and containment where needed; abandoning the sick to the streets is not compassion but neglect dressed up as liberation.
The Clancy verdict belongs to the law. Its lesson belongs to all of us.
