Adam Smith said that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. Perhaps no quote better illustrates the recent mistrial of Lindsay Clancy. Clancy admitted to killing her three children (five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan), but 11 of the 12 jurors were prepared to find her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Clancy’s defense attorney said she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and is therefore not responsible for her actions. And in post-trial interviews, it is clear that this defense effectively captured the sympathies of the jury.
In an interview with NBC10 Boston, jurors testified that where the prosecution was cold and callous, unable to see things from Clancy’s point of view, the defense attorney was “compassionate” and “entertaining”—even getting laughs out of some of the jurors.
One of the jurors, Paula Devlin said, “His compassion towards Lindsay was amazing.”
But this raises serious questions as to the role of sympathy and compassion in the judicial process. Clancy was not on trial for speeding tickets or jaywalking, but for the triple-murder of her own children.
To have mercy on Clancy is not to overlook some small legal infraction, but to withhold justice from her now-deceased children. The party deserving of our sympathies is not the cold-blooded murderer, but the innocent victims of her senseless violence.
But those victims were not in the courtroom that day, instead, as they lay in their graves, the perpetrator of their deaths was there—alive and claiming to be misunderstood.
Apparently this strategy worked, and not just in the courtroom. Hundreds of women showed up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts to show their support for Clancy, and countless thousands more took to social media to defend Clancy’s actions and even to attack her ex-husband—blaming him for the murders that Clancy herself admits to having committed.
But the fact that Clancy admitted to the murders didn’t seem sufficient evidence for 11 jurors that she should be punished.
In fact, Kellie Farina (one of the jurors) was upset that the prosecuting attorney “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
This quote, perhaps more than any other, shows just how misplaced the sympathies of the jury were. Clancy admitted to strangling her small children, was on trial for doing so, and a juror is upset that a prosecutor would get so hung up on that fact.
However, the Clancy case is not an isolated event. Misplaced sympathies are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. From fanfare over Luigi Mangione, the ruthless killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the widespread support of abortion as a path to freedom for trapped women, it is clear that misplaced sympathy rules our modern, therapeutic world.
In each of these cases, the victim is dehumanized, therefore allowing for the justification of the perpetrators of violence. In the case of Thompson, he was seen as less than human for running an insurance company, and therefore “had it coming” according to Mangione.
In cases of abortion, the unborn child is seen as less than human, despite possessing all scientific indications of life from the moment of fertilization, and therefore taking his or her life is not really murder.
In far too many cases, the victim of violence is essentially invisible to the eyes of the masses—whether that victim is a five-year-old girl, the CEO of an insurance company, or an unborn child in the womb.
What all too often garners sympathy is the charismatic defender of evil—whether that be a suave attorney, an Ivy League-educated software engineer, or a doctor or politician claiming the child in your womb is merely a “clump of cells.”
This is not to overly simplify often complicated cases. Clancy could very well have been experiencing serious postpartum psychosis (though that was not proven in the trial). But even if she did, the fact remains that she killed her children. She is not a victim, but a perpetrator. And mercy to Clancy is injustice to her innocent children.
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