At Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts, the trial of Lindsay Clancy is entering its final week. Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children — Cora, five years old, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months — strangled in the basement of the family home in Duxbury on the evening of January 24, 2023, during the roughly twenty-five minutes in which her husband was out picking up medicine and takeout.
She does not dispute that she killed them. Afterward she cut her own wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down. The defense does not dispute the facts either. It argues one thing only: that criminal responsibility cannot be imposed on her, because at the hour of the act she was not a person.
This is one of the hardest cases there is, and it is not my intention to make light of it. But precisely for that reason it must be said clearly: it is not only the act that requires examination. The public response to it requires examination as well. Outside the courthouse, supporters have gathered through the trial — women in pink, some of them traveling from as far as Florida and Tennessee, holding up hearts and calling for better care for mothers. Online, an entire movement has been built around her. Something in our culture broke here, and it broke in the eyes of all.
The Alibi Built in Advance
Let us suppose for a moment, as a purely mental exercise, a man who seeks to murder. He is not stupid. He knows how the system operates. A few years of appointments, diagnoses, prescriptions, hospitalizations, ten medications and a thick file — and then the act. And in his hand, from the outset, a finished alibi.
I am not claiming that this is what happened in Duxbury. I am claiming something more severe: that the legal structure is not capable of distinguishing. The doctrine of absence of criminal responsibility produces an incentive it has no ability to supervise, because its central evidence is the documentation itself. And when the existence of a file becomes the acquitting factor, the file becomes an asset.
In Massachusetts the matter is several times sharper. In most states, once the insanity claim has been raised, the burden of proof passes to the defense. In Massachusetts the burden remains on the prosecution, and it must prove beyond reasonable doubt not only that the defendant did the act, but that she was responsible for it. That is: the state is required to prove sanity. And anyone who has ever held a medical file knows how easy it is to cast reasonable doubt on a person's sanity, and how impossible it is to prove it.
The Third Party
But the deep problem is not evidentiary. It is theological.
The insanity claim takes the act out of the interpersonal plane. It inserts a third entity between a person and the death of his fellow: the illness. The voice. The medication. The episode. These become the acting characters, and the person becomes an arena in which they acted.
This is not a scientific conception. This is demonology. Demons and spirits in a white coat. And this is exactly the conception the Torah went out against: "And surely your blood of your lives I will require... and from the hand of man, from the hand of a man's brother, I will require the life of man" (Genesis 9:5). From the hand. From the hand. Not from the circumstances, not from the forces, not from the evil spirit — from the hand that did it. Monotheism cleared the space between man and man of every intermediary, and by that alone founded the concept of responsibility. He who returns acting entities to that space has returned us to paganism, and it does not matter in what terms he formulates it.
And let us suppose, for the sake of the matter, that there indeed was a psychotic episode. Fine. Then who is responsible — the episode? The episode has no will, no address, no soul from which an accounting can be demanded. If neither she did it nor he did it, then three children died in an event lacking a doer. This is not a moral fact that a person can live with. Responsibility is not a report on internal mechanisms; it is the name of the relation between a person and what came out of his hands.
The Knee and the Soul
And here is the strongest argument, and it is so simple that it is hard to believe no one raises it.
Let us suppose that my knee is shattered. Disabled, limping, God forbid. My body is defective with a real defect, documented, organic. If because of that defect I injure my fellow — will I be acquitted? The law will ask whether I was negligent, whether I should have foreseen, whether I should have avoided being there. It will not ask whether my knee knew how to distinguish between good and evil.
But when the defective organ is the soul, a door of absolute exemption suddenly opens.
Why? This asymmetry can be understood only on one assumption: absolute dualism. That the body is a mechanism and the soul is the I; that a defect in the mechanism is a circumstance, whereas a defect in the I is the disappearance of the I. This is Descartes with a hospital tag. And beneath Descartes, a medieval theology of separation between matter and spirit.
And here is the contradiction: modern psychiatry declares itself to be completely materialist. Brain, receptors, serotonin, chemistry. There is no soul there, there is tissue. But at the moment of truth, the moment the question of guilt is raised, it needs the most radical dualism ever invented — since only that dualism makes it possible to say that the person was not there. One cannot hold both. Either the soul is an organ, and then its injury is judged as the injury of the knee; or the soul is the I, and then psychiatry deals in souls and not in chemistry.
Why is the contradiction preserved? Because it is useful. It is the only device capable of converting an offense whose sentence is death into a diagnosis. This is a rebellion against the Torah in modern language, on the foundation of medieval assumptions.
He Who Rules Death Rules Life
Foucault taught us to ask about the psychiatric establishment not what it knows but what it rules. And here one must be precise: the moment an establishment holds the key that determines who bears the guilt of blood, it holds a power that has no equal — not the court's and not the priest's. It rules life because it rules death.
But the real question is a different one: did that power have to pass through the acquittal of shedders of blood? Let us suppose that the aim of the establishment was to establish itself as the master of life. Why, for that purpose, must it claim that it is in its power to cleanse murderers of the guilt of death? Perhaps because there is no display of sovereignty more impressive than this. There is no proof of authority sharper than the power to declare that death had no doer.
What Stands Outside the Courtroom
And from here — and I do not say this inadvertently — it is no wonder that the radical feminist movements stand there, in quiet rows, outside the courthouse.
They and the psychiatrists have one framework. Both are social at their foundation, and both do not see the transcendent. Life, for both of them, is a relative function — a social value, a product of conditions and support and systems. And if life is a social product, its taking too is a social failure; and a failure has causes, not culprits. There is no blood. There are circumstances.
And here is the irony no one bothers to note: this defense denies her all subjectivity. A movement whose entire existence rests on the moral sovereignty of the woman arrives at the courtroom in order to argue that this woman was not sovereign at all — that she was an instrument, a medium, a conduit through which a voice acted. This is not a defense of a woman. This is her erasure. Precisely the traditional conception, the one that demands an accounting from her, is the only one that relates to her as a whole person.
And note where the last detail delivered in the courtroom landed: a man's voice, a hospital chaplain testified Clancy had described to her, a persistent voice, telling her that if she did not obey, neither she nor her children would be safe. Psychosis too, it turns out, is told in the key of the culture. The man commands, the woman carries out, the responsibility migrates outward. I do not know what was said in the hospital and what was not. I know very well why the thing is accepted so easily.
In Sorrow You Shall Bear Children
There is a decree in the Torah, and it is said openly and without consolations: "In sorrow you shall bear children" (Genesis 3:16). Motherhood is bound up with suffering. This is the most ancient text on the subject, and it does not promise otherwise and does not apologize.
A culture that is not capable of holding a decree of pain without converting it into an injustice will in the end convert its results too into an acquittal. And this is what is taking place before our eyes: an attempt at normalization, on the claim that society did not provide, that the system failed her, that the medications poisoned, that the voice commanded — all so that the simple thing will not be said.
And the bond coming apart here is not one bond among many. The bond between a mother and her child is the place where civilization learned for the first time that weak life obligates strong life. That is the foundation, not the upper story. He who normalizes its breach out of an abundance of compassion has not softened the law — he has removed the floor.
Empire
A society in which children die and a learned class explains why no one is guilty has already existed in the world. It built temples and installed priests and developed a precise language to explain why the blood that is spilled is not blood.
And he who comes and says simply that this is bloodshed will be called cruel, primitive, benighted, devoid of compassion. That too is part of the mechanism. Calling by names is not a response to an argument — it is a substitute for one.
And Nevertheless
Compassion is not the problem. Compassion toward a woman who is broken, paralyzed, who has lost everything and herself along with it — is an explicit Jewish obligation. There is no obligation in the Torah to hate the murderer.
The problem is a compassion that demands that there be no act. That has no power to exist unless the doer is erased. The way of the Torah is otherwise: to judge and to have mercy, to punish and to spare, to see the break in its fullness and never to say that nothing happened.
Three children were killed. Someone killed them. All the rest is commentary.
