“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
—Kellie Farina, one of the three jurors interviewed following the mistrial called in the Lindsay Clancy murder case, after the jury deadlocked 11-1 with a single hold-out male juror refusing to vote for acquittal.
That may end up being an iconic unethical quote, one that echoes through the years as America comes to realize how shattered the values of American women have become in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The especially nice touch is the use of “viciously,” don’t you think? ‘Imagine, this idiot was somehow stuck on the fact that a mother murdered her three small children viciously! What’s the matter with him?’
I’d like to know what’s the matter with anyone who can “get over” the fact that three children were murdered by their own mother “viciously.”
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:
I’m getting this Comment of the Day by Tim LeVier up about a week late. Fortunately, I was reminded of the topic because essays and articles about the weird outpouring of support for a child-killer keep coming. Here’s the beginning of one I read today in The Free Press:
“Struggling, sleep-deprived moms are propping up their phones in their bathroom, hitting the record button and throwing ice at it while screaming for a whole minute. “Instead of having a screaming match with my toddler,” one mom wrote in a social media post, “I throw ice into my tub. It allows me to feel angry without being destructive.” Moms are also setting up ring lights to film themselves hysterically sobbing in front of their small children. Others are filming their crying babies with the caption “Me too, Lindsay,” in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mom who killed her three children—ages 5, 3, and 8 months—and is currently on trial for murder. This brain rot has spread like wildfire, as the algorithms made sure it would, and in the momosphere—the network of TikTok moms and mommy influencers and mom bloggers—it has been almost universally embraced as a healthy, liberating way for mothers to exhibit their rage.”
Tim’s analysis is as useful as I found it to be last week. Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “On The Lindsay Clancy Support Movement: ‘What’s Going On Here?’”….[Oh…I know it’s foolish and biased to judge people by countenance, but boy, if I were casting Medea—or Lizzie Borden—that face would be irresistible.]
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I have to break down any comment by the groups involved:
1. L. Clancy – She’s on trial. She did the deed. By her plea, I would say that’s an admission of being the one to have done the deed, her defense is not that she didn’t do it, her defense is that there’s disagreement to the severity of the charge due to her mental health. That is a proper question and should be settled by the courts / justice system.
2. The Parents and their Fundraisers – As I had heard it, money was being raised to support her parents through this and provide them with a place to stay because 3 years of motel rooms adds up.
It is a noble enough goal for the parents to attend the trial and confront the facts and reality of what is determined regarding your child. The people legitimately raising funds and supporting only this goal are probably showing some kind of exemplary ethics in being able to overlook the “Ick Factor” of the case and demonstrating a duty to care. How much easier would it be for the parents to not confront reality and wipe their hands of their daughter?
3. The Grifters – Ostensibly, there must be online grifters that have their own interests in play. They find hot button issues to sell some t-shirts and signs and whatever else will turn them a profit. They’ll lie about donating money and they’ll fan the flames to market and sell their wares.
These people are scum and not real people. They likely use AI generated video characters to fan these flames and profess their own special kind of virtue.
4. The Protestors / Defenders / Supporters – Providing financial and material support to someone 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.
There has been so much weird, impulsive, counter-intuitive and counter-factual support for frauds, knaves and evil-doers on the ideological left that I have had a hard time keeping up with it—or maybe my brain is just rejecting what it regards as bad juju. An astounding number of young Democratic-Socialists lionize Luigi Mangione, who shot an insurance exec in the back in an alley. Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Abdul El-Sayed, now the Michigan Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly expressed his approval of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I have several Trump-Deranged friends who would have sent metaphorical flowers of thanks to any of the recent failed assassins whose target was President Trump. The support for Jason Arday and his sanctification as a victim is also part of the trend.
But this latest example is special. Hundreds of women, dressed in pink, protested last week outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts to show their support for Lindsay Clancy, the former nurse being tried for the murder of her three young children.
The mob wore shirts reading “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Clancy, 36, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023. Her defense now is that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and severe mental illness and therefore should not be held criminally responsible. Okay. That’s the defense’s job in a case like this, and surely any mother who would murder her own kids, or any children for that matter, has a strong argument that she was legally insane. However, in 1994 when Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons, three-year-old Michael and one-year-old Alexander, by strapping them in their car seats, and rolling her car into a lake, there was no such public sympathy for her. The defense’s insanity defense was rejected by the jury.
Social media, of course, is part of the difference, and the Clancy episode may stand as a perfect example of how the internet warps values, perception and ethics. The murderous mother’s sympathizers have followed the livestreamed trial daily, often analyzing witness testimony in real time. TikTok has viral videos with legends like “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” often showing the poster holding her own infant. (I would think such videos justify visist from child protective services.) “I Stand With Lindsay” merchandise—shirts, hats, stickers, mugs, socks and bags —-are being sold on line. A GoFundMe established for Clancy’s parents had 31,000 contributions by the end of last week, raising over a million dollars.
This woman murdered her children, remember, and there is evidence that she planned it; she didn’t just “snap.”
So Ethics Alarms has to ask the threshold question to begin an inquiry into so many ethics problems: “What’s going on here?”
Ethics Alarms 