Presenting darkness as light and light as darkness is contagious — and it has become an epidemic. This is Isaiah 5:20 thinking. “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” “Woe” can be seen here as a warning. The New Living Translation puts it like this: “What sorrow for those who say that evil is good.” The NIV Reader’s Version says, “How terrible it will be for those who say that what is evil is good!”
A significant portion of Americans have lately shown a tendency to justify and even celebrate evil. Lots of Americans cheered the assassination attempts against President Trump. Luigi Mangione, the accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, became a celebrity-hero with thousands of adoring fans. For many on social media, the murder of Charlie Kirk has become a joke — something to delight in.
Against a backdrop of Americans treating human life as cheap and violence as an easy solution, came the story of Lindsay Clancy and the brutal killing of her three small children. The jury deadlocked 11-1, with the majority favoring a “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict. I try not to judge juries too harshly. They sat through the grueling evidence, not me. They heard an orderly presentation of the facts, and I heard only news accounts — often sensationalized in the form of clickbait.
The one advantage those of us outside the jury have in our favor is that it may be easier for us to keep sight of the big picture. An anonymous juror told CBS, “The prosecution didn’t have a figurative smoking gun. There was not a single moment throughout the presentation of that case where you could say, ‘Yup, 100% I’m certain she did it.’”
Yet all sides agree that “she did it.” She killed the children. The question is about her state of mind. Maybe that’s what the juror was talking about, but that’s not at all how she said it. Most states and the federal government say that because insanity is an “affirmative defense,” it must be proved by the defense. But in Massachusetts, it falls on the prosecutors to prove that the accused had “the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct” — no easy task.
To me, the fact that she used errands to purposefully keep her husband out of the house while she killed the children, demonstrates an awareness of the “wrongfulness of her conduct.” He would see it as wrong and stop her, so she kept him away. But I’m neither a lawyer nor a psychiatrist. I can’t begin to understand the pain of postpartum depression, much less postpartum psychosis.
We lean toward psychiatric explanations because it’s unnatural for a mother to cold-bloodedly scheme ways to keep her husband out of the house, then, over a period of eighteen minutes, take her three precious children, one at a time, to the basement of their home, and strangle each one. Moms don’t do that. Moms don’t violently kill their kids — unless the child is still in the womb.
And that, more than anything else, is what worries me. Is this case an extension of abortion, if only subconsciously? Do some people side with a mother who killed her children because they want to avoid doing anything that might limit the right of mothers to end their children’s lives? Have we come to that?
The jury foreperson came across as an activist rather than someone sworn to render an impartial verdict. She told the media how excited she became when she thought they were about to return a verdict of not guilty. She said that if there is a retrial, she will be there in support of Clancy. The majority of jurors became incensed with the one holdout. Even if he didn’t express himself particularly well, he had a legal and moral obligation not to surrender an honestly held conviction merely to reach unanimity. That’s how the jury system works. Another juror said the holdout “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
That statement is the central fact of the case — “Lindsay viciously killed her children.” Has abortion desensitized people to the taking of human life in general and children’s lives in particular? Where does this road lead? Proverbs 17:15 says, “He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, Both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.”
