There was a time when civilization understood a distinction that modern America seems increasingly determined to erase: explaining evil is not the same thing as absolving it.
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That distinction sits at the center of the Lindsay Clancy case, but the issue is much larger than one Massachusetts courtroom, one defendant, or even the almost incomprehensible deaths of three children. The deeper question is whether we remain capable of acknowledging human suffering without allowing suffering to consume the very concept of moral agency.
Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan. That basic fact was not disputed at trial. The battle was over criminal responsibility. Her defense argued that postpartum psychosis had so thoroughly compromised her mind that she could not be held legally responsible. Prosecutors argued that her behavior demonstrated deliberation and an understanding of what she was doing. After weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberation, the jury could not unanimously resolve that question, and a mistrial was declared.
I have followed this case closely, and what has disturbed me almost as much as the facts themselves is the cultural conversation surrounding them.
Somewhere along the way, compassion became confused with exoneration.
We have developed an extraordinary capacity to explain the perpetrator while scarcely pausing to contemplate the dead. We analyze medications. We discuss diagnoses. We examine trauma, hormones, relationships, childhoods, social pressures, economic circumstances, and every conceivable environmental variable that might explain why somebody committed an unspeakable act.
There is nothing inherently wrong with doing so. Indeed, civilized people should want to understand the origins of destructive behavior. Psychiatry matters. Neuroscience matters. Postpartum mental illness is real and can be devastating. A society that dismisses serious psychiatric disease as weakness or imagination is neither compassionate nor intelligent.
But there is a dangerous philosophical leap between saying “I understand how you arrived here” and saying “therefore you bear no responsibility for what happened here.”
Those are not the same proposition.
This is where modernity collides with an older understanding of morality. Christianity begins with the uncomfortable proposition that human beings possess moral agency. Scripture does not pretend that temptation, anguish, weakness, fear, anger, despair, or even profound suffering cease to exist. Quite the contrary. The Bible is populated by profoundly broken people.
The prophet Jeremiah described the human heart as desperately wicked. Paul wrote about doing what he hated while failing to do what he knew was right. Christianity therefore recognizes something modern therapeutic culture increasingly struggles to articulate: human beings can be wounded and morally accountable simultaneously.
Nietzsche approached the matter from an entirely different theological direction, yet he also understood the danger of societies that continually reconstruct their moral vocabulary according to convenience. Once morality becomes infinitely negotiable, judgment eventually becomes a contest of narratives rather than principles.
That is precisely what concerns me.
We are drifting toward a civilization of situational morality in which the question is no longer simply, “What happened?” It becomes, “Whose circumstances make what happened understandable enough that we are uncomfortable judging it?”
That road has no logical endpoint.
If mental suffering automatically eliminates moral responsibility, where precisely is the boundary? Depression? Addiction? Trauma? Personality disorders? Childhood abuse? Poverty? Rage? Neurological abnormality?
The public response to the Clancy case is revealing. The mistrial reportedly resulted from a profound division over whether the evidence established criminal responsibility, with the controversy eventually focusing heavily upon a single holdout juror. The judge declined efforts to remove that juror, and the jury ultimately reported that it could not reach unanimity.
I find something almost archetypal in that image: one human being sitting in a room while enormous pressure builds around him, apparently unwilling to surrender his judgment merely because almost everyone else has reached another conclusion.
I cannot know that juror’s heart. Neither can anyone else outside that deliberation room. I will not pretend that disagreement automatically makes him heroic, any more than agreement would automatically make the other jurors cowardly.
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But I will defend his right to remain unconvinced.
That is not a defect in the jury system.
That is the jury system.
A jury is not supposed to function like social media, where consensus is manufactured through repetition, emotional pressure, and fear of ostracism. Twelve jurors are not assembled so that eleven may eventually exhaust the twelfth into intellectual submission.
Each juror is supposed to confront the evidence individually and answer to conscience.
There is something deeply American about that.
There is also something deeply unfashionable about it.
We live in an age in which moral conviction is increasingly treated as psychological pathology. Certainty is called intolerance. Judgment is called cruelty. Standards are called oppression. And increasingly, accountability itself is portrayed as evidence that the person demanding it lacks compassion.
I reject that formulation.
Compassion without standards eventually becomes indulgence. Standards without compassion become brutality. Civilization requires both.
I can feel profound compassion for a person suffering from catastrophic psychiatric illness while reserving even greater compassion for innocent human beings who lost their lives. I can demand vastly better maternal mental-health treatment while simultaneously believing that the deaths of three children cannot become secondary characters in the psychological biography of the person who killed them.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
Their lives matter independently of every political, psychiatric, feminist, conservative, or cultural narrative subsequently constructed around their deaths.
That is what troubles me most about contemporary moral discourse. We increasingly begin with identities and work backward toward principles.
Who is the defendant?
Who is the victim?
Which group sympathizes with whom?
Which political tribe has claimed the story?
A moral principle that changes according to the identity of the person standing before it is not a principle. It is preference.
Modern culture wants grace without judgment, forgiveness without repentance, understanding without accountability, and compassion without moral boundaries.
The Lindsay Clancy case therefore matters far beyond whatever ultimately happens in a Massachusetts courtroom. Prosecutors may retry her. Her attorneys may continue seeking a judgment in her favor. Another jury may eventually reach the unanimous conclusion this jury could not. Those are legal questions that should be resolved according to Massachusetts law and the evidence presented, not according to my emotions or anyone else’s. A September 29 hearing is expected to determine more about what comes next.
But America faces a different trial:
Does objective morality still exist?
Can something be tragic and wrong?
Can somebody be mentally ill and still possess agency?
Can we sympathize with suffering without allowing sympathy to dictate truth?
Can we acknowledge circumstances without worshiping circumstances?
Most importantly, can we look upon three dead children and resist our compulsive modern desire to make the person who killed them the central object of our compassion?
Once right and wrong become infinitely negotiable, they eventually cease to mean anything at all.
A civilization cannot survive indefinitely on therapeutic language alone. It requires boundaries. It requires conscience. It requires mercy. It requires justice. And sometimes it requires the courage to say something our increasingly relativistic culture considers almost primitive: Some things are simply wrong.
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