The recent trial of Lindsay Clancy, in Massachusetts, ended without a verdict, the jurors failing to reach unanimity. The defendant does not dispute having caused the death of her three children at the family home. The question put to the court turned fundamentally on her criminal responsibility, that is, on her capacity to understand the nature, the unlawfulness and the consequences of the acts committed. This matter should not be reduced to a dispute between left and right, between conservatives and progressives. What is at stake is a fundamental question of humanity, individual responsibility and common sense. Three children were killed by their own mother. No political allegiance, ideological construct or clinical interpretation can alter the objective nature of that reality.
Mental illness is a serious, complex and painful clinical reality. It must be diagnosed, treated and duly weighed by the courts when supported by consistent expert evidence. A civilized society cannot ignore the psychological disorders associated with the postpartum period, including the rare and particularly severe cases of postpartum psychosis.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between explaining a behaviour psychologically and eliminating all responsibility arising from it. Psychology seeks to identify the cognitive, emotional and psychopathological processes that may contribute to a given course of conduct. It is not for psychology to turn an etiological explanation into a moral or legal acquittal.
It is precisely in this distinction that common sense appears to be being abandoned.
Cora, aged 5, Dawson, aged 3, and Callan, only 8 months old, had no capacity whatsoever to defend themselves, call for help or flee. They were killed by the very person whose first and most elementary duty was to ensure their protection, their integrity and their survival. This is not an accident, an episode of mere negligence or a misfortune with no one responsible. This is an act of extreme violence against three utterly defenceless children. Whatever clinical explanations are put forward, that reality cannot be relativized, diluted or removed from the collective conscience.
We are witnessing today a troubling moral inversion: the person who commits the crime receives attention, understanding and solidarity, while the victims are reduced to a footnote. Explanations are sought for everything, except for society's growing inability to tell right from wrong.
This displacement of empathy deserves deep reflection. Empathy is the capacity to understand another person's emotional experience, but it must not be exercised selectively. When all of society's compassion is directed at the person who committed the acts, leaving the victims all but forgotten, empathy ceases to perform a humanizing function and begins instead to feed a moral distortion.
Have we lost the capacity to feel empathy for the true victims?
We can acknowledge Lindsay Clancy's psychological suffering without minimizing the terror and the vulnerability of her children. To admit the existence of a severe psychiatric disturbance does not oblige us to turn three murdered children into a footnote in a narrative focused exclusively on the mother's mental health.
It is equally impossible to overlook the jury's institutional responsibility. After weeks of trial and several days of deliberation, the jurors proved unable to reach a unanimous decision. Each of them has, of course, a duty to weigh the evidence independently and to apply the law rigorously. That responsibility requires, however, that the materiality of the facts and the identity of the victims are never lost from view.
When a jury remains divided in the face of the confessed killing of three children, it is legitimate to ask whether certain clinical concepts are not being construed so broadly as to obscure the reality of the acts. Psychopathology may affect the degree of criminal responsibility, but it must not lead to the disappearance of every form of accountability.
Whatever Lindsay Clancy's mental state, three children died as a direct consequence of her acts. I therefore hold that she should be held accountable and subjected to the most rigorous consequences the law permits. Her psychological condition may determine the nature and the place of her confinement, whether in a prison or in a high-security psychiatric institution, but it must never eliminate the consequences of what she did.
Should the court conclude that the defendant was suffering from a disturbance severe enough to compromise her criminal responsibility, she must be guaranteed psychiatric treatment under strict and lasting confinement. The possible absence of full criminal liability cannot mean the absence of social, institutional and moral responsibility.
Justice does not exist solely to examine the mental state of the person who commits a crime. It exists also to protect the innocent, to recognize the dignity of victims and to reaffirm the normative limits without which there is no social cohesion. When those limits become excessively relative, justice risks losing its moral authority.
One does not need to belong to any party or political current to grasp this principle. It is a conclusion founded on reason and on the most elementary common sense. A truly civilized society must be capable of reconciling clinical treatment, public safety and accountability proportionate to the gravity of the conduct.
Nor is this about vengeance. Vengeance is an emotional reaction; justice is an ethical and institutional requirement. Its purpose is to name the wrong that was done, to protect society and to preserve the memory and the dignity of the victims.
Motherhood is one of the most profound of human responsibilities. A child depends entirely on its parents for protection, security and affection. When that relationship of trust is destroyed in the most brutal way imaginable, society has a moral duty to speak on behalf of those who can no longer speak for themselves.
We may lament Lindsay Clancy's illness, acknowledge possible failures in the clinical care she received and accept that she was profoundly disturbed. None of those considerations, however, alters the fact that three children were killed at the hands of their own mother.
When a jury loses sight of the victims, justice loses part of its moral authority. And when a society shows greater concern for finding justifications for the person who killed than for honouring those who died, we are not witnessing a manifestation of intellectual or humanitarian progress. We are witnessing a grave moral disorientation, and madness at its worst.
Cora, Dawson and Callan were innocent children. They deserve to be remembered by their names, by the lives taken from them and by the justice still owed to them. Their brutal murder cannot be relativized, excused or forgotten.
Clinical understanding is not moral absolution. Psychological explanation does not eliminate responsibility. And the brutal death of three children can never be treated as a tragedy without consequences.
César DePaço
Businessman and Philanthropist
Consul ad honorem of Portugal from 2014 to 2020
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Nutritionals International Inc.®
Founder and Chairman of the Board of The DePaço Foundation
Unwavering Defender of Law Enforcement and Conservative Principles