What Was in the Mind of the Holdout Juror in the Lindsay Clancy Trial? I Can Certainly Speculate.
Slate · L · trust 42/100
On Friday, the judge in the Lindsay Clancy case declared a mistrial after a week of jury deadlock. Clancy is charged with murdering her three children in what prosecutors say was a cold-blooded killing, and in what she says was a fit of psychosis after months spent seeking help and being put on a long list of drugs for her declining mental health. One juror was the holdout, refusing to vote for acquittal. He reportedly recognized that there was reasonable doubt as to her responsibility for her crime, but would not apply the appropriate legal standard.
The disarray and unsettledness that characterizes the end of this trial is unsatisfying but also in line with the whole of the Clancy saga. The story is a tragic one: Three innocent children dead, a family in shambles. And it’s also been a galvanizing one, as women the nation over have spoken out in Clancy’s defense, noting their own postpartum struggles; many have shown up at her trial to support her, clad in pink. And there has of course been a backlash, albeit a smaller one, of people who insist that a mother who kills her children must simply be evil, no other explanation necessary (or even possible).
It’s hard to know what was in the mind of the lone holdout juror, the one who wanted to find Clancy guilty of being in her right mind when she killed her children even as he realized the prosecution has not proven its case. I can certainly speculate: Some people want a simple story of good and evil. Some people need a punitive outcome to a horrific event, no matter actual fault or responsibility. Some people just want women punished.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a sharp gender divide in opinion on the Clancy case (and something of a political divide, too, though a far less pronounced one). The people demanding Clancy go to prison are overwhelmingly conservative men. Women, and especially mothers, are not cheering Clancy on, but are largely calling for some nuance and care. Not every mother struggles in the postpartum period. But many of us—most of us?—have experienced the brain-and-body altering effects of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing: Have felt our post-birth hormones crash, sending us reeling into despair; have felt bobble-headed and nearly insane after weeks or months of sleepless, cry-pierced nights, pulling from some reservoir of human survival we didn’t know existed within us to meet seemingly endless needs; have been pushed into unhinged rage and then profound shame by a defiant toddler. And then if you have more than one child, you may well be managing that defiant toddler while simultaneously experiencing the hormone crash, the sleeplessness, the bobble-headed feeling of the newborn period all over again. Most women are not saying “I understand why Lindsay Clancy killed her kids.” But I suspect that most of us know we don’t understand only by the grace of God or luck. Motherhood has taken many of us to new emotional lands—sometimes soaring heights, but sometimes far down into dark depths.
Postpartum psychosis, as Clancy says she experienced, is rare. But stunningly high numbers of women report having intrusive thoughts about harming their children—moments when their own brains betray them, when it’s clear that none of us are in total control over our own minds. According to one study , a new mom is just as likely to have disturbing thoughts of intentionally harming her child as she is to not have such thoughts. The women who have these thoughts are not bad or evil . They might, in fact, be excellent, caring mothers. But depending on the severity of the thoughts and their regularity, they may need help—which in the US, they might have a very hard time getting.
Much has been written about the women who support Clancy, including those who have descended into conspiracy theorizing. Less attention has been paid to those who are convinced that a suburban mom who was by all accounts deeply loving decided one day to kill her three kids, slash her own neck, and then climb out of a window, leaving herself paralyzed. The whole theory seems to be that she was just a selfish bitch who no longer wanted to be a mom. But that doesn’t quite make sense given her nearly-successful suicide.
I suspect, instead, that many people—especially people who have not borne children, especially people who put much stock in traditional gender roles, and especially people who take a more simplistic black-and-white worldview—simply cannot wrap their minds around the fact that sometimes, even good mothers can crack up with the most unthinkably awful results.
If your worldview separates women out into “good” and “bad,” with good women pursuing the natural and God-given path of marrying and procreating and dedicating their selfless lives to their children, and bad women working against nature to pursue their own interests or not put their children first, then a mother like Lindsay Clancy is especially destabilizing. She was squarely on the “good woman” side, and then she committed the worst imaginable crime. She always aspired to have lots of kids, her own mother testified , and even her career, as a labor and delivery nurse, was centered around bringing children into the world. The only explanation for the horrific turn her life took must be that she was secretly evil all along. To believe that even good women might see their minds betray them so spectacularly would be to rescind control over an entire ideology that helps organize your world.
There are also people who I suspect simply get stuck in the impossible space of wanting justice for three innocent children and finding no clear path to get it. “Justice,” in the parlance of the American legal system and true crime podcasts, generally means punishment, which generally means prison. How might justice be done for Cora, Dawson, and Callan if the person who killed them doesn’t spend the rest of her life behind bars? That she may have committed the crime but may not be actually responsible for it…
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