{"id":5404,"date":"2026-08-30T09:45:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T09:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5404"},"modified":"2026-08-30T09:45:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T09:45:44","slug":"has-the-horror-of-the-act-itself-become-the-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5404","title":{"rendered":"Has the Horror of the Act Itself Become the Defense?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Cora Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Dawson Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Callan Clancy.<\/em><\/p>\n

A person killed them.<\/p>\n

There is no elegant way around that sentence, which is precisely why we ought to begin there.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.<\/p>

Read more The Manifester In Chief<\/a><\/p>\n

That is the question beneath this case.\u00a0\u00a0What happens when an act is so horrifying that assigning responsibility to the person who committed it becomes psychologically unbearable?\u00a0\u00a0Do 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?<\/p>\n

The Horror Problem<\/h1>\n

The defense does not have to persuade a jury that the killings did not happen.\u00a0\u00a0Everyone knows they happened, and nobody disputes who physically carried them out.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

That argument presents the jury with a peculiar psychological dilemma.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0The horror of the act itself may therefore become an argument about the condition of the actor:\u00a0Surely a mother could not knowingly do something like this.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0And if the mind finds that proposition impossible to absorb, it searches for an explanation that makes the unbearable slightly more bearable.<\/p>\n

This is where the defense theory becomes rhetorically powerful without requiring anyone to behave improperly.\u00a0\u00a0The more incomprehensible the conduct appears, the more compelling the proposition becomes that something must have happened to the person who committed it.\u00a0\u00a0Psychosis offers one explanation, medication another, medical treatment another, and institutional failure another.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

Follow the Chain<\/h1>\n

The medication questions are therefore important, but perhaps not for the reason most often suggested.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0A prescription record describes an intended regimen; it does not necessarily establish the regimen that actually existed inside the patient\u2019s body.<\/p>\n

Clancy herself has acknowledged that she did not always take medication precisely as prescribed.\u00a0\u00a0That does not establish intentional manipulation, and it certainly does not establish that she understood what a particular combination might do.\u00a0\u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n

There is another question we should be willing to ask without pretending to know the answer.\u00a0\u00a0If 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?\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps.\u00a0\u00a0But 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.<\/p>

Read more Canadian Broadcasting Corporation urges staff not to call 9\/11 terrorists \u2018terrorists\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

The larger issue is what happens once the investigation begins moving upstream.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps 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\u2019 failures.\u00a0\u00a0Each link may deserve investigation.\u00a0\u00a0Yet 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.<\/p>\n

When Responsibility Flows Uphill<\/h1>\n

This phenomenon is not confined to criminal defendants.\u00a0\u00a0Consider 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.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

There is nothing inherently wrong with that principle.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0Call it\u00a0flow-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.<\/p>\n

Sometimes that journey produces legitimate legal responsibility elsewhere.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes it produces nothing more than an elaborate explanation.\u00a0\u00a0The jury\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That is why the horror itself deserves examination.\u00a0\u00a0The jury must not confuse its inability to imagine a mother doing something with the defendant\u2019s inability to understand what she was doing.\u00a0\u00a0We can acknowledge psychosis without assuming that every terrible act committed by a mentally ill person was beyond that person\u2019s control.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.<\/p>\n

We should follow responsibility upstream wherever the evidence takes us.\u00a0\u00a0But we must not follow it so far upstream that the person who committed the act disappears beneath the accumulation of explanations.<\/p>

Read more John McCain and Sarah Palin\u2019s long strange trip<\/a><\/p>\n

Cora Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Dawson Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Callan Clancy.<\/p>\n

A person killed them.<\/p>\n

That person is Lindsay Clancy.<\/p>\n

\n

\"<p><em>ImagePxhere.” class=”wp-image-5403″ width=”640″ height=”472″ \/><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Image via Pxhere.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cora Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Dawson Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Callan Clancy. A person killed them. There is no elegant way around that sentence, which is precisely why we ought to begin there.\u00a0\u00a0We 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,1924],"tags":[2150],"class_list":["post-5404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthcare","category-lindsay-clancy","tag-related-topics-lindsay-clancy"],"yoast_head":"\nHas the Horror of the Act Itself Become the Defense? - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5404\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Has the Horror of the Act Itself Become the Defense? - Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cora Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Dawson Clancy.\u00a0\u00a0Callan Clancy. 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