Why the Lindsay Clancy case terrifies me for America’s future

 I have spent my career as a statistician telling people not to get emotional about numbers. This week, I’m breaking my own rule.

Our son is 13 months old. He has just figured out how to walk, which means he has also figured out how to fall. I spend most of my day catching him. So forgive me if I couldn’t read the coverage of the Lindsay Clancy trial with the cool detachment of a statistician.

In January 2023, Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan, in their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. This is not disputed — her defense team never asserted that she didn’t do it. Rather, they argued that postpartum psychosis made her not criminally responsible.

After a seven-week trial and 85 witnesses, 11 of 12 jurors agreed with this defense. One man held out, and on Sept. 4 the judge declared a mistrial.

Now let’s look at the numbers, because that’s what I do.

YouGov asked more than 23,000 Americans what the right verdict would be. Among men, 51 percent said guilty of murder. Fifteen percent said not guilty by reason of insanity. Among women, it was 41 percent guilty and 26 percent not guilty. Among Democratic women, only 27 percent viewed it as murder.

I’m a statistician before I’m a columnist, so let me be fair. A 10-point gender gap is not the war of the sexes some corners of the internet have made it out to be. Most women did not side with Clancy, and “guilty” was still the most common answer among women overall. But when more than one in four women in this country can look at a mother who strangled three little children and conclude she shouldn’t be held responsible, that isn’t a rounding error — that’s a signal.

And no, I’m not dismissing postpartum mental illness. I have lived through the sleepless haze of the first year, and struggling mothers deserve far more help than they get. But compassion for an illness and absolution for an act of murder are two very different things. We seem to have lost the ability to tell them apart.

That to me, is what’s wrong with America right now.

Start with the number that surprised me most. It wasn’t the gender gap. It was the party gap.

Sixty-one percent of Republicans said Clancy was guilty of murder. Among Democrats, it was 34 percent. That’s a 27-point gap, nearly three times the gap between men and women. Three children were strangled in their home, and somehow even that got sorted along party lines.

When the killing of an 8-month-old becomes a question you answer by checking your team, we’ve lost something we can’t poll our way back to.

Part of what we have lost is a shared moral vocabulary. We used to have words like “wrong,” “guilty” and “responsible,” and we used them without apologizing. Now, we reach for clinical language instead. We talk about “trauma,” “triggers” and “systems.” Diagnosis has quietly displaced judgment.

Mental illness is real, and the law rightly makes room for it. But when every terrible act gets explained by a condition, no one is ever responsible for anything. And a society where no one is responsible can’t protect anyone.

We have become a country where feelings count as evidence. There are countless other examples. Take Luigi Mangione and the murder of the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson. But this one just goes too far. The most sympathetic story in the room wins, and the question “Who is the victim?” gets answered by whoever has the most compelling narrative, not by innocents who lost their lives.

Cora, Dawson and Callan don’t have a legal team or a narrative. They don’t have a hashtag or a team of experts explaining their inner world. Somehow, in so much of this conversation, they became supporting characters in their killer mother’s victim narrative.

We have also lost our nerve about personal responsibility. Context matters; I spend my whole life adding context to numbers. But when context becomes a universal excuse, accountability starts to sound like cruelty, and judgment starts to sound like bigotry.

Look at how we have treated the holdout. He has been publicly criticized by his fellow jurors for refusing to go along, doxxed by the larger community and is now even being investigated. The lone dissenter is exactly who the jury system was designed to protect, yet society has recast this hero as the villain.

As a mother, what frightens me most is that my son will grow up in a country that is learning to confuse empathy for justice. Empathy is a beautiful instinct, but a society that pours its sympathy onto the person who did the killing, while the children who died become an afterthought, has its moral math backwards.

I tell my students that data never tells you what to feel — it tells you where to look. These numbers are telling us to look hard at ourselves.

When I put my son to bed tonight, I will be thinking about three children in Duxbury who deserved someone to speak for them.

The least the rest of us can do is remember their names.

Dr. Liberty Vittert Capito is professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/6108239-postpartum-psychosis-verdict-gap/