Never has a murder case been so dependent on subjective reaction. Whatever anyone says, the facts do not speak for themselves.

Fact: On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children — Cora, aged five, Dawson, three and Callan, just eight months old. Fact: She then jumped from a second-story window in an attempt to kill herself. Fact: She survived but was left paralyzed from the waist down. Question: Is Clancy criminally responsible for doing so?

The trial

The defense’s position is that Clancy was experiencing postpartum psychosis — a rare psychiatric condition that can cause hallucinations, delusions and a loss of contact with reality after childbirth — and so lacked criminal responsibility.

Prosecutors challenged that diagnosis. One prosecution forensic psychologist, for example, testified that Clancy didn’t have acute psychosis at the time she killed the children. Another witness, a psychiatrist, testified that he didn’t believe Clancy’s account that she heard a voice ordering her to kill the children.

After nearly six weeks of testimony, more than 80 witnesses and 300 exhibits, the jury deliberated for seven days. It reported repeatedly that it could not reach a unanimous verdict until, on September 4, the judge declared a mistrial. The case may go to another trial. The same question will remain.

Mental health changes blameworthiness?

We’re accustomed to thinking of criminal acts as behavior for which one or more people is culpable. There are mitigations, of course. Self-defense is an obvious one. Accidents present another. But what happens when an act is unambiguously intentional, yet the person who committed it lacks responsibility because of a mental condition? Does the mental disorder limit a person’s blameworthiness?

Postpartum psychosis is a genuinely severe mental condition. But agreeing that the condition exists doesn’t establish that Clancy had it at the time of the killings, nor that it lessens her liability.

In recent years, “mental health” has become an extraordinarily capacious category. Anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction and severe psychiatric disorders all appear in the same kaleidoscope of psychological well-being and distress. Obviously, mental health conditions vary significantly in their severity, symptoms and effects. Nor are they commensurate: People can function despite psychological distress, for example; psychosis, by contrast, can erode a person’s ability to function and distinguish external reality from perception.

Agency or addiction?

Paradoxically, two perspectives have dominated popular thought over the past several decades. Agency — the ability to act intentionally and produce desired results — has been central to the women’s movement, which has argued that, historically, women have been denied a voice in determining their own destinies. The insistence that women not only possess agency but should use it to leverage change in society is evident throughout feminism.

Yet there has been a parallel and contradictory tendency to surrender agency and explain unwelcome behavior as the result of dependencies, addictions or, to frame it simplistically, “demons.” This has become almost a default setting for habits and practices that seem obdurate and impossible to break. Addiction has become a modifier for sex, shopping, exercise, work, social media, coffee and even Netflix.

The problem confronting the jury was, and will be, whether there are circumstances in which a human being’s capacity for agency is so diminished that they can no longer exercise meaningful control over their behavior. In other words, was Clancy’s agency compromised irredeemably? Unless new revelatory evidence surfaces at the retrial, the next jury will face the same quandary.

Victims’ loved ones are always understandably angered when mental conditions are invoked. Often the judge spares the killer prison and refers them to a secure psychiatric facility for an indefinite period but with the possibility of review. Valdo Calocane, who killed three people in England in 2023, received an indefinite sentence to a secure hospital near Liverpool, after the court decided to accept a plea of manslaughter by diminished responsibility rather than a murder conviction (diminished responsibility is a concept in British law: The defense must prove that the defendant was suffering from an abnormality of mental functioning at the time of the offense). The victims’ families continue to challenge the decision.

Massachusetts uses “lack of criminal responsibility” rather than “diminished responsibility.” The legal question is similar — whether, because of mental disease or defect, the defendant lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or to conform their conduct to the law. Could they distinguish right from wrong and retain the capability to conform?

This is why the case has proved so insoluble. The prosecution’s argument didn’t require the jury to imagine Clancy as some kind of monster. It actually wanted jurors to entertain the unsettling possibility that she acted deliberately, according to motivations that were her own — even if those motivations were shaped, perhaps contorted, by severe mental illness. The jury couldn’t decide whether her illness so enfeebled her agency that she could no longer be held responsible for her actions.

Violating nature

There’s another way of approaching the problem. What if the behavior is not quite as incomprehensible as it first appears? Mothers killing their children is not as uncommon as many suppose, nor is it confined to one culture or one historical period. Mothers have killed their children in circumstances ranging from abuse, resentment and unwanted pregnancy to poverty, desperation, revenge and the desire to escape an intolerable situation.

Sometimes the mother has been mentally ill, sometimes she hasn’t. The circumstances differ, but the underlying fact is stubborn: Motherhood doesn’t guarantee maternal devotion. This is difficult to acknowledge because we’ve invested motherhood with powerful moral and emotional significance. We like to imagine the mother as the person who protects the child for no other reason than her being the mother. We treat maternal love almost as instinctual, something stronger and deeper than culture and society — unconditional. A mother who kills her own child seems to violate not merely the law but nature itself.

Perhaps we need to turn this assumption inside out. Not all mothers experience motherhood in the same way. Some are devoted to their children; some are indifferent; some resent them; some abuse them. Some find motherhood fulfilling; others experience it as burdensome, isolating or even intolerable. These differences don’t make maternal love meaningless. They make it human.

Psychiatric explanations

Once we accept that, Clancy’s actions remain abominable but become less metaphysically mysterious. We no longer have to begin with the assumption that a mother could only kill her children if something had gone catastrophically wrong in her mind.

Psychiatry searches inside. Sociology, my own subject, searches elsewhere: in relationships, institutions, culture, history and the circumstances in which people live. The two approaches can produce different, even conflicting, accounts of the same behavior. One asks: What pathology was operating in the individual? The other identifies the social conditions under which the individual acted. Neither cancels the other.

Contemporary explanations of troubling or transgressive behavior often seem to move agency away from the person and toward an abstract force inside the person. Addiction is responsible. Trauma is the cause. The “demons” did it. The language can sound compassionate and is sometimes clinically justified. But it can also leave us with an odd inversion: The more completely we explain a person’s behavior, the less of the person appears to remain as an agent. This is not an argument for abandoning psychiatric explanations. But we might wonder how much they affect our conception of responsibility.

The Clancy jury had to navigate this territory. Was she a person making choices in terrible circumstances? Or had her mental condition so fundamentally disrupted her capacity for agency that responsibility could no longer properly be attributed to her? And what if the answer to both questions is yes?

No sociologist claims their frame of reference is the only one in which social events can be examined. The botanist viewing a chrysanthemum has no reason to dispute the poet’s right to look at the same flower in a completely different way. The Clancy jury had to do something rather more difficult.

So what happens when a jury receives psychiatric evidence that a defendant’s mental state may have greatly undermined her agency, while being reminded that she was also a member of a social world that shaped her — in ways most of us find repugnant, perhaps unrecognizable, but grimly real?

Both things can be true. Clancy may have been chronically ill. She may also have been an agent acting in social circumstances beyond her control. The law has to decide how those truths relate to responsibility. That’s the question the previous jury couldn’t answer and any future jury will somehow have to.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.] 

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.