Cora Clancy.  Dawson Clancy.  Callan Clancy.

A person killed them.

There is no elegant way around that sentence, which is precisely why we ought to begin there.  We can 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 discuss them, but there is a peculiar danger in allowing explanation to become so elaborate that the person who committed the act begins to disappear from the story.

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That is the question beneath this case.  What happens when an act is so horrifying that assigning responsibility to the person who committed it becomes psychologically unbearable?  Do we begin searching, almost instinctively, for something else to blame, not because the evidence necessarily leads there, but because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate?

The Horror Problem

The defense does not have to persuade a jury that the killings did not happen.  Everyone knows they happened, and nobody disputes who physically carried them out.  The more difficult proposition is that the woman who killed her children was, at the relevant moment, so profoundly affected by postpartum psychosis that she lacked the criminal responsibility ordinarily attached to her actions.

That argument presents the jury with a peculiar psychological dilemma.  The defendant is not some remote stranger whose conduct can be contemplated with clinical detachment; she is a mother accused of brutally killing her own children.  The horror of the act itself may therefore become an argument about the condition of the actor: Surely a mother could not knowingly do something like this.  And if the mind finds that proposition impossible to absorb, it searches for an explanation that makes the unbearable slightly more bearable.

This is where the defense theory becomes rhetorically powerful without requiring anyone to behave improperly.  The more incomprehensible the conduct appears, the more compelling the proposition becomes 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 begin moving backward through the chain, searching for the point at which responsibility can be transferred from the mother to something that seems less morally horrifying.

Follow the Chain

The medication questions are therefore important, but perhaps not for the reason most often suggested.  The relevant question is not merely what doctors prescribed, but what Clancy actually took, what she was instructed to stop, what she was instructed to begin, whether medications overlapped, whether doses changed, and whether she followed those instructions consistently.  A prescription record describes an intended regimen; it does not necessarily establish the regimen that actually existed inside the patient’s body.

Clancy herself has acknowledged that she did not always take medication precisely as prescribed.  That does not establish intentional manipulation, and it certainly does not establish that she understood what a particular combination might do.  But it does make the distinction between prescription and ingestion important, particularly when the defense asks the jury to attribute her behavior to the pharmacological and psychiatric consequences of her treatment.

There is another question we should be willing to ask without pretending to know the answer.  If someone has repeatedly experienced the effects of different psychiatric medications, could she learn that particular drugs, doses, or combinations produced particular sensations or states, and could that knowledge influence what she chose to take?  Perhaps.  But an intriguing possibility is not evidence of intent, and a responsible article should not convert an unanswered question into an accusation merely because the accusation would make the theory more dramatic.

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The larger issue is what happens once the investigation begins moving upstream.  Perhaps psychosis contributed to the killings; perhaps medication contributed to the psychosis; perhaps physicians contributed to the medication regimen; perhaps the medical system contributed to the physicians’ failures.  Each link may deserve investigation.  Yet if we keep traveling backward, we eventually encounter a peculiar paradox: The more completely we explain the circumstances surrounding the act, the easier it becomes to forget the person who actually performed it.

When Responsibility Flows Uphill

This phenomenon is not confined to criminal defendants.  Consider the recent legal reckoning surrounding Meta, where allegations against Facebook and Instagram have centered on whether the company deliberately created features that encouraged compulsive use and contributed to harm among young people.  The principle involved is perfectly intelligible: If an institution creates conditions that foreseeably produce harmful consequences, responsibility may properly travel upstream to the institution that created those conditions.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that principle.  The difficulty begins when tracing responsibility upstream becomes so reflexive that we forget to ask whether the person at the end of the chain still possesses agency.  Call it flow-through responsibility: We begin with the act, then move backward through mental state, circumstance, treatment, institution, environment, and history until we arrive at an explanation sufficiently distant from the defendant to make the original act psychologically easier to comprehend.

Sometimes that journey produces legitimate legal responsibility elsewhere.  Sometimes it produces nothing more than an elaborate explanation.  The jury’s task is not to determine which explanation makes the tragedy easiest for human beings to bear; it is to determine what the evidence establishes about criminal responsibility.

That is why the horror itself deserves examination.  The jury must not confuse its inability to imagine a mother doing something with the defendant’s inability to understand what she was doing.  We can acknowledge psychosis without assuming that every terrible act committed by a mentally ill person was beyond that person’s control.  We can investigate medication without turning medication into an actor, examine medical care without turning doctors into 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 follow it so far upstream that the person who committed the act disappears beneath the accumulation of explanations.

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Cora Clancy.  Dawson Clancy.  Callan Clancy.

A person killed them.

That person is Lindsay Clancy.

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