Christian Post has a history of publishing radical feminist content, and it would be one of the few Big Eva outlets to address the Lindsay Clancy trial where The Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today have not. But they would take the side of the harpies on the jury who acquitted a child murderer. Former Southern Baptist Convention first vice president Jay Adkins would pen the piece Lindsay Clancy trial: Insanity defense isn’t a loophole but justice. Adkins comes from the ultra liberal SBC Voices bloc.
What does Christianity require of us when a mother kills her three young children?
Justice seems like the obvious answer. But what does justice mean when there is no question that something unimaginably evil happened, yet there is profound doubt about whether the person who committed it possessed the mind necessary to be morally responsible for it?
Adkins does not think in categories that exist in Scripture. But he will argue in favor of the insanity defense in the case of Lindsay who he believes had postpartum psychosis.
Here is where I have landed. If the evidence establishes that postpartum psychosis deprived Lindsay Clancy of the capacity for criminal responsibility, then I do not believe justice requires we send her to prison. I believe justice requires we treat her. That is not the same thing as setting her free.
I am a lawyer, a former prosecutor, a Christian and the father of four children. Each part of me sees this case a little differently.
The father sees three children who should still be alive. The former prosecutor believes deeply in accountability and punishment. But the Christian keeps coming back to a harder question: What is godly justice?
All three of these identities should be fairly aligned on this open-and-shut case. The appeal comes from the audacity to make up a defense of postpartum psychosis several standard deviations from when average postpartum psychosis presents itself in patients.
There is no dispute Lindsay Clancy killed her children. Her defense argued postpartum psychosis had so profoundly distorted her mind that she lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions or conform her conduct to the law. Prosecutors argued she understood what she was doing and deliberately planned the killings.
That is the factual question with which the jury wrestled. But beneath it lies a question Christians should be particularly interested in: Does the horror of an act itself establish the moral culpability of the person who committed it?
Scripture suggests the answer is no.
Modern criminal law recognizes the concept of mens rea, the “guilty mind.” We do not ordinarily determine criminal responsibility simply by asking what happened. We also ask what the defendant intended, knew and understood.
Scripture makes similar distinctions.
Adkins disputes the moral culpability of someone who intentionally murdered three children because they were allegedly mentally incapacitated. But Scripture does not recognize this a question of moral culpability. In the eyes of God, those kids were murdered. No one else did it. There cannot be a murder without a murderer. So the moral culpability of Lindsay Clancy is indisputable. The degree in which she is morally culpable is perhaps. But the binary of moral culpability is disputed with everyone else in the case: the husband, the doctors, etc. (I do not think any other party is morally culpable, but this is where the hypothetical culpability debate applies).
The horror of the act does not determine Clancy’s moral culpability. The fact that she did it does. But the horror of any event has led to ancillary involvement being prosecuted, in general, like the parents of school shooters.
The guilty mind has to do with intent, not a retroactive psychoanalysis of the accused.
Consider Deuteronomy 19. Moses describes two men who go into the woods to cut timber. One swings his axe, the head flies from the handle, strikes his neighbor and kills him. A human being is dead, and another man’s actions caused his death. Yet Scripture does not treat him as a murderer. The law allows him to flee to a “city of refuge” because he had not previously hated his neighbor.
Numbers 35 similarly distinguishes the killer who acts “in hatred” or “lies in wait” from someone who kills “suddenly without enmity” and without intending harm.
In Luke 12, Jesus distinguishes between the servant who knows his master’s will and disobeys it and the servant who acts wrongly without knowing.
The physical outcomes are the same. The moral culpability is not.
I concede none of this establishes a biblical insanity defense. But it does establish something important about biblical justice: God does not judge outcomes in isolation. He considers the heart, mind and will behind it.
And that brings me back to Lindsay Clancy.
The Bible recognized that there is intentional and unintentional homicide. So first or second degree is all the same because of intent, and unintentional is manslaughter. What Jay Adkins fails to understand is that a person commits a sin in doing either murder or manslaughter.
Not all sins are equal; hence, the earthly punishment is not the same. Manslaughter (Deuteronomy 19) does not provide a Scriptural basis for an insanity plea, something Adkins admits.
That should matter to us. Even if it does not automatically absolve Clancy of responsibility, it should cause us to ask whether we are adequately equipped to identify and treat mothers suffering from severe postpartum psychiatric illness before desperation becomes catastrophe.
It should also make us ask what punishment would accomplish if the defense’s account of Clancy’s mental condition is true.
Deterrence makes little sense if a woman is experiencing a psychotic break. Someone incapable of rationally processing reality is not weighing the consequences of a potential prison sentence.
Incapacitation is different here too. If Clancy’s actions resulted from an extraordinary psychiatric collapse associated with childbirth, this is not the conventional case of a dangerous offender seeking victims who must be removed from society to prevent the next crime.
That leaves retribution.
And this is where the Christian in me becomes most uncomfortable.
Adkins argues against punishing Lindsay Clancy because mental health. But there is a biblical category for punishment without moral culpability. “If an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall surely be stoned and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall go unpunished.” In Exodus 21:28, the ox does not bear moral culpability for goring a person, but it is still promptly put down. This is the biblical rationale for punishing Lindsay Clancy and others with insanity defenses because the innocent blood demands it.
There is something deeply understandable in wanting punishment when three innocent children have been killed. I feel it too.
But justice and vengeance are not synonyms.
If Clancy understood what she was doing, appreciated its evil and deliberately chose to murder her children, punishment follows naturally from culpability.
But if a psychotic break had so profoundly fractured her mind that she could no longer appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing or conform her conduct to the law, what exactly are we punishing?
Perhaps that is why the insanity defense exists.
I said earlier that I have come to see this backward. Here is why: “Not guilty by reason of insanity” sounds to many people like a loophole, a mechanism through which someone who unquestionably committed a horrific act escapes justice. But in the rare case in which it genuinely applies, it is not an exception to justice. It is an expression of justice.
Adkins misunderstands the role of government. The state exists as an avenging angel to deliver justice on earth. This is public vengeance, not private revenge which Scripture prohibits. By his logic, no crime should be punished by the state if Clancy cannot be punished.
Punishing Clancy also is not for her. It’s for the dead children, whose blood cried out to God. It’s for the broader society, which cannot in good conscience permit Clancy to live.
Our law recognizes something Scripture recognized thousands of years ago: an act alone does not completely establish moral culpability. That is why we distinguish murder from manslaughter, recklessness from negligence and intentional conduct from accident. In the most extreme circumstances, we also recognize that mental disease can so profoundly impair the human mind that a person can commit an otherwise criminal act without possessing the mental capacity necessary for criminal responsibility.
That does not diminish the victims. Nor does an insanity verdict mean Clancy simply walks out of the courthouse. Massachusetts law provides for psychiatric commitment following a finding that a defendant lacked criminal responsibility.
There is, however, a profound moral difference between confinement because someone is mentally ill and potentially dangerous and imprisonment because we believe she deserves punishment.
Christians should understand that distinction.
Manslaughter is a sin and thus is morally culpable. Hard to imagine that a deranged mind committing homicide is also not a sin. But if Clancy is acquitted, the state must petition to keep her locked up every year which is unlikely to last very long. Adkins therefore wants Clancy to get away with it and face no punishment for triple homicide.
Christianity demands that we look directly at that evil. But Christianity demands something harder too. It requires us to look at their mother alongside them.
God sees the act, but He also sees the mind, heart and will behind it. Our courts cannot see those things as perfectly as God does.
Justice requires that they try.
The Massachusetts jury tried for seven days and could not unanimously answer the question. That deadlock does not establish Clancy’s legal innocence. But 11 jurors reportedly concluded that the Commonwealth had not proven her criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
I increasingly find myself in the same place.
Adkins wrote this after touting the children as the real victims of the story. Lindsay Clancy saw fit to ensure that she is not a mother anymore. And then he concludes that he too would side with the boomer harpy women over the lone holdout Chad.
The insanity defense is sometimes caricatured as an escape from justice. In a case like this, I believe it can represent something closer to justice in its purest form: the refusal to punish someone merely because the horror of an act makes us desperate for someone to pay.
Scripture gives me no easy verdict for Lindsay Clancy.
The prophet Micah tells us what the Lord requires: to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God.
Justice requires us to remember three innocent children. Mercy requires us to see the profoundly broken woman who killed them. And humility requires us to admit that those truths can exist at the same time.
In the case of Lindsay Clancy, humility may be the hardest command of all.
The only reason this case was difficult is that the jury selection process failed miserably. Christian Post should feel ashamed for arguing that a child murderer should be acquitted and claiming that this is even remotely a difficult case.
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One Response
“…it should cause us to ask whether we are adequately equipped to identify and treat mothers suffering from severe postpartum psychiatric illness before desperation becomes catastrophe.”
Desperation.
Desperation is the emotional response of a lucid mind to circumstances causing emotional disturbance.
Lindsay Clancy hated being a mother, hated the role of mother and wife, and wished to be free, but feared the social opprobrium of walking away. Hang her.