Things are not as simple as the Babylon Bee would have us think. Ethics Alarms already posted two essays on this case, here and here. The latter, a Comment of the Day by Tim Levier, concluded by describing the protesters and demonstrators thusly:
The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone with whom they have no prior connection.
These people are deranged and one has to question where they came from and who has time to commit to such folly at a time when everyone and their mother is complaining about the cost of things. Why would anyone protest due process? She’s making her case in a court of law and the fair process will play out resulting in a judgment. This isn’t an area for “opinions” and to influence an outcome. Its meddlesome and the act of a narcissist that believes in one’s own “greatness” or “importance” over that of an impartial judicial institution.
Clancy’s trial, presumably the first of two (at least), ended in a mistrial yesterday due to a hung jury. A single juror, widely believed to be one of the three men on the 12 juror panel, was apparently refusing to budge from his unshakable belief that the woman who has confessed to murdering her three children is guilty of murder. I dunno, that seems like a defensible verdict to me, but I wasn’t in the courtroom during the trial.
But I digress. Here are recent ethics-related developments and observations:
Ethics Alarms 
If the majority of women will excuse a woman who murders all of her kids, then there is an open question about whether women (at least in the West) should be allowed to serve on juries. They were not weighing psychological testimony that vitiated intent or an understanding of the rightness or wrongness of the action.. They just saw the word “postpartum” and blamed everyone else BUT Clancy.
Although, on a side note, I think most of the psychological profession is corrupt and absurd, so one positive out of this trial hopefully is a diminished respect for it overall.
All of this “same Lindsay” stuff is insane. We have to have an honest conversation about what’s going on with women in this country. They vote for the right to kill their own children and think that it’s empowerment. Something is deeply wrong.
I wonder how many of the women on the jury would accept hormonal issues with pedophiles or rapists.
It would seem to me that the defendants behaviors immediately prior to the crimes would be enough evidence to demonstrate rational thought.
That is the prosecution’s theory.
I counter what the defense attourney said with what the judge said to the jury
He did address it to the whole jury, but I want to think that he’s speaking to the one holdout when he was saying the words: “ Winston Churchill was the prime minister for England when England pretty much stood against Nazi Germany alone.“
I’m hopeful the judge will do two things:
Be aggressive in his defense of this one juror. Treat any attempt to go after him as it should be, criminal.
Sanction the defense attorney and make him recant in public. Have him sit in jail until he’s ready to recognize the errors of his ways. The line of aggressive defense ends when it comes to threatening a specific juror.
Right now the only ones not acting tribal in America are white and asian males. Women are acting incredibly tribal right now, and this case is the prime example of this behavior. So are black Americans. Stoking that is a key pillar of the democrat party.
Donald Trump is the first part of the backlash. If they keep it up, men will react. They will rue the day that men become tribal back, but they really only have themselves to blame.
Right now the only ones not acting tribal in America are white and asian males.
That is changing, by the way. The Presidential election of 2024 showed that the strongest preference for Trump were young white males. They are sick and tired of all the male bashing and anti-white bias in the education system, and the effect of DEI on their chances of being admitted to college or hired for a job. This has the undesirable side effect that they become very open to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and become radicalized. They care very little about history lessons about slavery, Civil War and Jim Crow as they see that as left wing propaganda used to put whites in their place. There is also traction for the idea to repeal the 19th Amendment that gave women the right the vote.
The 2020 hiring data for the top companies in America showed that they hired 38% of the minority college graduates that year, but only 1% of the white college graduates. That is going to make some people upset. Now, the media will say that anyone who claims that the system was rigged against them is lying, but much like Trump in that situation, many are not going to believe it.
Do we actually know at this point a) who the jurors are b) what their motivations are behind how they voted on whether the defendant is guilty? Maybe I am behind on the news as I am spending a lot of time on the road and in national parks this week, but unless I know more I do not consider myself qualified to comment on this jury.
I see on X that many commenters both liberal and conservative seem to feel differently; I am calling out Sean Davis with his comment on TikTok Karen’s on the jury.
The only think I want to mention is that being the single holdout on the jury for six days takes a lot of moral courage. I rewatched 12 Angry Men recently to see why holdouts can be critical to achieving a just verdict.
Hi CVB,
you are so correct that none of us was in that courtroom and did not hear all the evidence. A lot of information has been relayed in the news and by legal commentators. For me there are elements that raise questions.
Lindsay Clancy is a sympathetic woman and so many new mothers can relate to sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, fear. It is overwhelming to care for three young children while recovering from childbirth. And you could conclude that no loving mother would kill her children, so she must be crazy and, therefore, innocent by reason of insanity. Enter toxic empathy. If postpartum stresses, fatigue and depression are valid reasons to murder your children – buckle up. None of these is psychosis, and certainly not an excuse for murdering babies.
The jury is supposed to weigh facts and evidence and evaluate with respect to the law. It seems that eleven of the jurors were swayed more by emotion and empathy than by evidence. Her tiny victims have been nearly forgotten in this drama. That is most likely why we are seeing so much outrage.
I want to caveat everything that follows with this: the GPS data for sending the husband away, the denial of suicidal ideation, and the letting go of the nanny would be hard for the defense to fight, were I a juror in this trial. I would likely (but not necessarily, as I don’t know all the facts) vote guilty.
However, I heard a report from a psych-something (I’m a little fuzzy on the difference between psychology and psychiatry and tend to mix them up at best) that was rather convincing along with some things I have heard from people on psych medication. This woman was purportedly given 18 different prescriptions for PPD over the last several months. Even if she was only on two at the time, she could have still been under the influence of many of the others. Some of the meds she had been on require weaning and if you are not weaned properly, can cause psychosis. The fact that she got so many scripts so fast shows that she was not weaned properly from at least some. I personally have little doubt that there could have been some medicine induced psychosis, and such things can last not seconds or minutes, but days, according to some people who have experienced psych med psychosis.
I do not know how I would have voted, not knowing all relevant details as these jurors did. This is especially the case as I certainly feel the three dead children, as well as some of the publicly discussed circumstances, are details that cry for attention and detract from the psychosis defense. While I do not deny the possibility of toxic empathy, I think it is healthier, overall, for us to assume that the prosecution did not prove its case adequately. Any other assumption (and pretty much all we can do is assume, I think) indicts the entire justice system, and I don’t think we want to go there without a preponderance of evidence that the justice system really does fail. In addition, a guilty person going free is indeed a point of success for our system as “it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer”. (I struggle more with the Chauvin case than this one.)
The long trail of internet searches on how to kill the children is also telling. From what I have heard of the trial, she was on a lot of medications, but she took very few of them. The defense questioned the husband about it and demanded to know if he was aware that she had only taken 3 of these or 4 of those. The husband said he wasn’t sure the exact number (from 3 years ago), but that they were trying different things and that she had been started on several medications with rapidly changing dosages. So, some of the 18 medications included possibly 4 different doses of the same medications, each of which was taken only a few times. He had a big bag of the unused medications that he had been meaning to take for proper disposal. So, it is very possible that she had never been on any of those medications long enough to need to be weaned off and/or that she was just switched to a different dose of the same medication.
Many comedians are commenting, “The history books will say this is the point where women lost the right to vote”.
You can’t demand responsibility and also state that you can’t be held responsible.
Just comedians????
I hate to be the nitpicker – but I believe the Prosecution’s burden in the Clancy case was to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that she was legally sane. That’s what the whole trial was about. She stipulated to the underlying crime with that defense. (See LIBS? That’s how an underlying crime works!)
…and even if I’m wrong on that standard, I’d challenge you to swap out “predominance” with “preponderance” in that sentence. 😉