Support for Lindsay Clancy, from pink T-shirts to conservative stars

News Analysis

For the past month, in an obsessively watched trial testing the insanity plea, Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington has argued that his client murdered her children in a state of postpartum psychosis brought on by the negligence and mistreatment of her medical overseers. The position has found an overwhelming degree of public support — largely among women who have identified with Clancy despite the severity of her illness and the barbarous nature of her response.

Hundreds have shown up outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to rally for Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse whose psychiatric care was so uncoordinated, the defense maintains, that doctors subjected her to “horrific overmedication,” leading to dangerous auditory hallucinations. “Any one of us who have dealt with mental health, anxiety, depression, postpartum — I think we just know that any one of us could be sitting in her chair,” Renee Kimball, the lead organizer of the rally, told a local news outlet. The gatherings were inspired by a call she posted on social media asking people to “stand in peace for Lindsay.”

Online a kind of consensus certainty quickly emerged around the notion of Clancy’s victimization. Any serious reckoning with the central brutality — that Clancy strangled her daughter Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callen, 8 months, with exercise bands in their basement — has been subordinated to the compassion for her underlying anguish.

In some corners of TikTok and Instagram, where charitable feeling for Clancy is at a high pitch, unhinged conspiracy theories — born perhaps of the challenge in believing that a mother could do such a thing — suggest that maybe it was someone else behind the killings, even if Clancy has admitted to them.

On Etsy, there are at least 25 different kinds of pro-Clancy T-shirts available for sale. (“Team Lindsay!” reads one.)

The sympathy extended to Clancy recalls the allegiance offered to Luigi Mangione, who has admitted to killing Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, on his way to a meeting in midtown Manhattan. Many found the source of Mangione’s professed rage — an insurance industry perceived to be enriching itself on a hilltop of denied claims — all too relatable. As it is with Clancy, supporters regarded the system as a greater danger than the violence itself.

Part of Clancy’s care was undertaken at McClean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, considered one of the world’s leading psychiatric facilities. But confidence in American institutions across the board, sits at record lows, and in the medical system at its lowest point since 1993, according to a recent Gallup poll. To some extent, that baseline of skepticism may challenge any effort to consider that Clancy’s doctors might have been doing their best.

In the instance of Mangione, reaction tended to groove with political leaning, the right regarding any support for him as debased — another instance, arguably, of society’s shift toward anarchy. But opinions about Lindsay Clancy have fallen along less predictable ideological lines. “Lindsay Clancy is obviously not guilty,” right-wing podcaster Candace Owens announced recently. “There are a fleet of doctors who should be imprisoned for what they put her on.” Owens used the opportunity to condemn drug companies, a current scourge in parts of the right, claiming that “they get away with murder all the time.”

The day before she posted her views on taking children to drag shows — a practice she called “disgusting” and a threat to youthful “development” — Tiffany Smiley, a former Republican Senate candidate in Washington, faced a backlash for comments she had made on Fox News and on Facebook. “My heart breaks for Lindsay Clancy,” she had written. “Our healthcare system has failed women.”

When right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh expressed outrage over sentiments like these, arguing that postpartum psychosis should not exist as a defense and that maybe some mothers were just too “selfish” to deal with difficult babies, he seemed to be standing on an island nearly all his own. “It should not be controversial to say that a person who methodically executes three children strangling each to death while the others watch in horror is a person who must be punished to the full extent of the law, crazy or not,” he said. Facing criticism from women on the right — as well as from conservative commentator Ben Shapiro — Walsh doubled down, later calling for Clancy’s execution.

The Clancy case also underscores how inconsistently both legal and social judgments are rendered when violence collides with psychological suffering. Four years ago another Massachusetts woman, Latarsha Sanders, was found guilty of killing her two sons, though evidence outlining the full breadth of her troubled psychiatric history was never presented to the jury. Earlier this month, she was granted a retrial.

In June 1984, after 24 hours of deliberation, a federal jury determined that John Hinckley Jr. was not in his right mind when he tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, thus rendering Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity. A chief defense witness, a psychiatrist named William Carpenter, testified that Hinckley was a schizophrenic whose emotional delusions — he believed that assassinating the president would win him the attention of Jodie Foster — outweighed his capacity for reason.

An ABC poll conducted the day after the verdict revealed that 83% of people surveyed believed the jury made the wrong decision. Hinckley spent the next 35 years in a psychiatric facility.

Before the Clancy trial, another high-profile case involving a potential insanity defense played out in Los Angeles, where Nick Reiner was accused of stabbing his parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, to death in December. Despite his own history of mental illness, Nick Reiner has not received a similar outpouring of understanding in his defense. Reiner, who has pleaded not guilty to the murder charges, turned to a public defender when he could no longer pay his lawyer. Like Clancy, he had struggled with changes in his medication not long before his arrest, according to reporting on his health.

After Clancy strangled her children, she threw herself out of a second-story window, which left her partially paralyzed. If the jury sides with the defense, she will be remanded to a psychiatric hospital; if not, she will spend the rest of her life in prison without the possibility of parole. In cases like this, Paul Mones, a longtime criminal defense lawyer who has represented survivors of child abuse, said there was a tendency among jurors to relate to the frustrated parent, to understand how unmoored young children can make you. It is a tendency that he has found “despicable.”

During moments in the Clancy trial, language surfaced that seemed itself devised to blunt dark realities, emerging not even from the defense. Testifying for the state, one psychologist suggested that Clancy might have known exactly what she was doing — killing her children in a twisted effort to protect them from some unknown malevolence. The term for this was “altruistic filicide.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.