The Comprehension Gap

On September 4, after six days of deliberation, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy. The jury sent him a note: “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision, and we will not be able to.”

The jury was nine women and three men. Eleven of them were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible. One was not. Her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, put it this way outside the courthouse: “They know that they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the lives of these other jurors. So I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

Hold onto that, because we are going to need it at the end.

Clancy, who uses a wheelchair as a result of injuries sustained when she went out a second-story window on the night of January 24, 2023, was returned to Tewksbury State Hospital. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has said his office will decide soon whether to retry her, possibly on lesser charges. Her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, were five, three, and eight months old. They are still dead. Nothing about the mistrial changes that, and nothing in this essay is an argument that it should.

What the mistrial did was end a public argument that was never really about Lindsay Clancy.

Jurors were given five options: not guilty by reason of insanity, not guilty, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter. To choose among them, they had to do something specific. They had to hold two facts in the same hand at the same time: that three children were killed by their mother, and that their mother may have been, at that moment, incapable of knowing what she was doing. The law does not ask you to pick one. The law asks you to hold both, and then decide what follows.

That is the whole test. And for the better part of two years, an enormous number of adults have been announcing, loudly and on the record, that they cannot pass it.

What the supporters are actually asking

Before going further, it is worth correcting the premise that the commentary rests on, because the commentary has the position wrong.

The women outside that courthouse were not a single bloc arguing a single thing, and a great many of them were not arguing about insanity at all. They were asking a different question, and it is an accountability question: how does a woman get to January 24, 2023, having passed through that many hands?

Here is what the trial established about the care she received.

In the four months before her children died, Lindsay Clancy was prescribed thirteen psychiatric medications. They came from multiple providers who were not the same kind of provider: psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, emergency department physicians, and the staff of an inpatient psychiatric program. The list included Zoloft, Seroquel, Valium, Klonopin, Lamictal, Remeron, and Ativan.

Rebecca Jollotta, the psychiatric nurse practitioner who exchanged messages with Clancy regularly through a patient portal, testified that she had never communicated with Dr. Jennifer Tufts, Clancy’s psychiatrist. Reddington put the gap to her directly: “Would it surprise you if I told you that she saw Dr. Tufts 14 times.” Jollotta had also never accessed Clancy’s records from Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, or from McLean, the psychiatric hospital where she had been admitted.

Dr. Tufts met with Clancy exclusively over Zoom. She did not recommend a hospital evaluation.

On Remeron, Clancy reported: “I really don’t like the way I feel on the Remeron. I started having very intrusive thoughts that I never had before.” At discharge she was advised to come off Seroquel, despite documented warnings that stopping it could produce “worsening of mood, worsening of sleep.”

None of that is a theory. It is testimony, given under oath, in a courtroom, in front of a jury.

And notice that a verdict on Lindsay Clancy answers none of it. Whether she was criminally responsible on the night of January 24 and whether thirteen medications from uncoordinated prescribers over sixteen weeks constitutes competent psychiatric care are two entirely separate questions. A conviction would not have made the prescribing record acceptable. A finding of not criminally responsible would not have made it acceptable either. The trial was never structured to ask, and no one has been asked since.

That is what a substantial share of the people in pink were actually there about. Not “she should walk.” Closer to: somebody wrote these prescriptions, somebody declined to hospitalize her, nobody called anybody else, and not one of those people has been asked a single question under oath about it.

And the part we have to say out loud

There is a second strand, and honesty requires naming it, because this essay is about who can process evidence and that standard does not get suspended when the conclusion is one we would prefer.

A significant volume of online material about this case is not asking about prescribing records. It asserts that Lindsay Clancy did not kill her children at all, and that her husband, Patrick, did: that he drugged her, put her out the window, and strangled three children. The Boston Globe has reported these claims as baseless. CNN covered the groundswell directly. A trial attorney interviewed about the rumors stated there is no evidence Patrick Clancy was involved.

There is a reason the vacuum exists. Because Clancy’s defense agreed to a stipulation of facts, prosecutors were not required to present all of their evidence in open court. The trial was televised. The gaps were visible, and content creators filled them. That is a real and predictable mechanism, and it explains the theories without excusing them.

It should not need saying, but it does: a man who buried three children owes the internet nothing, least of all a theory. Nor was the Commonwealth’s case frivolous. Prosecutors presented evidence, including search history described in court filings, and argued that Clancy planned the killings and understood their wrongness. Two sets of expert psychiatrists examined the same woman and reached sharply opposed conclusions. That is a genuinely hard case, which is precisely why it hung.

So there are two claims circulating, and they are not the same claim. “The system that was treating her failed catastrophically, and no one has answered for it” is documented in the trial record. “Somebody else did it” is not documented anywhere. The first deserves an investigation. The second deserves the same scrutiny we are about to apply to everyone else in this essay.

Keep that distinction in hand, because it is the one the commentary refuses to make. Every person on the ladder below treats the woman asking about prescribing records and the woman posting a theory about the husband as the same woman, and then treats that composite as evidence about all women everywhere.

The argument that proves the opposite of what it intends

The most common line deployed against sympathy for Clancy goes like this: do not feel sorry for her, she had more support than most.

It is true. Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse. She had a husband, a house in Duxbury, health insurance, a professional understanding of the postpartum period, and access to care that most American mothers will never see. She was, by the standards of maternal risk in this country, about as protected as a woman gets.

The people making this argument believe they are closing a door. They are opening one. If a labor and delivery nurse with resources, insurance, a partner, and clinical literacy can still end up in postpartum psychosis, then postpartum psychosis is not a failure of effort, character, or circumstance. That is not a rebuttal to the illness. That is the clinical description of it.

Postpartum psychosis affects roughly one in one thousand women. It typically arrives in the weeks after birth. It presents as hallucinations, delusions, confusion, agitation, and an inability to sleep, and it can be almost invisible from the outside. Wendy Davis of Postpartum Support International puts it plainly: “Someone could be hearing voices and doing their laundry, talking to a neighbor, ordering food.”

It is also, as Dr. Lauren Osborne of Weill Cornell Medicine says of every perinatal mental health disorder, “a temporary, treatable condition.” Most women recover with hospitalization, lithium, and antipsychotics. That is worth sitting with, because it means the outcome in these cases is very often determined by whether anyone catches it in time.

The system is not built to catch it. Postpartum psychosis does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Dr. Veerle Bergink, who directs the Women’s Mental Health Center at Mount Sinai, calls that absence “scandalous.” Neither psychiatrists nor obstetricians are required to study reproductive mental health in training. There are almost no mother and baby inpatient psychiatric units in the United States.

Nancy Mace and the quiet part

On September 2, two days before the mistrial, Representative Nancy Mace posted on Facebook:

“If postpartum mental illness becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card for murdering your children, then by that logic, anyone diagnosed with it should lose custody of their kids. You cannot blame this murder on anyone or anything else.”

Mace has said elsewhere that she experienced postpartum herself, and has framed her position as one of individual responsibility. Read her sentence again anyway, because she has accidentally written down the mechanism.

She presents custody removal as an absurd consequence, a reductio meant to expose the other side. It is not hypothetical. It is already the operating condition of American motherhood. Maternal mental health advocates describe women masking symptoms and declining to disclose precisely because they fear their children will be taken. One of the largest documented barriers to a woman reporting postpartum psychiatric symptoms is the belief that reporting them will cost her her kids.

Mace proposed as a punishment the exact fear that keeps sick women silent until it is too late. She did not invent a deterrent. She endorsed one that is already running, and that already produces outcomes like this one.

There is a straight line here, and it is not subtle. Threaten mothers with the loss of their children for being ill, and mothers will hide the illness. Hide the illness long enough and some very small number of cases will end in a courthouse in Plymouth with three coffins and a woman in a wheelchair. Then, on the courthouse steps, threaten the next round of mothers with the loss of their children. This is not a policy position. It is a closed loop.

Mace also went after the supporters. Speaking to TMZ, she dismissed the women gathered outside the courthouse, many of them wearing pink, as a “pink mob,” and argued they would not be there if Clancy were Black: “Liberal white women aren’t going to support a Black woman who murdered her kids.”

The racial disparity in maternal mental health is real and worth naming. Black women are up to three times more likely to experience postpartum depression than white mothers, and are less likely to be screened, believed, or treated. That is an indictment of the system, and it is an argument for extending the standard of care, not for withdrawing it from the woman currently in front of us. Mace used a true observation about whose suffering gets recognized as a reason to recognize less suffering. That is not an anti-racist argument. It is a lever.

When the sympathizer becomes the defendant

The women outside the courthouse, and the women posting “same, Lindsay” videos alongside footage of themselves with their own children, were not endorsing filicide. They were identifying with a documented and extremely common experience of postpartum mental illness, one that carries enough stigma that most women who have it never say so out loud. That is what the content was. Reading it as an endorsement of killing children is not a moral stance. It is a failure to parse a genre.

But the misreading did not stay a misreading. It became the charge.

Follow what the ladder does. It moves the defendant’s chair. Lindsay Clancy is no longer the only one on trial. The mother filming herself in her kitchen saying she understands how someone could break is now a person whose fitness is in question. Her sympathy is submitted as evidence against her, and the proposed sentence, by the bottom of that table, is her citizenship.

Now run it on men

Two tests. The first is about sympathy. The second is about evidence.

Test one: who is allowed to sympathize with a parent who killed children

On August 28, 2014, in Lexington County, South Carolina, Timothy Ray Jones Jr. killed his five children: Merah, eight; Elias, seven; Nahtahn, six; Gabriel, two; and Abigail, one. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His defense argued that a man with an already tenuous grip on sanity had been undone by his wife’s infidelity, by raising five children, and by self-medicating with alcohol and synthetic marijuana.

At trial in 2019, his own relatives took the stand and asked the jury to spare his life. The children’s grandfather appeared in court displaying tattoos of the murdered children.

The jury rejected the insanity plea after six hours of deliberation across two days, and returned a death sentence in one hour and forty-five minutes. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld it.

Now notice what did not follow. Nobody suggested that the relatives who begged for his life had revealed themselves as unfit to be near children. No member of Congress proposed that anyone who credits a father’s mental illness claim should lose custody. No pastor concluded that the family’s plea demonstrated a defect in men as a category. No podcast was built around the grandfather. Their sympathy was understood as grief, which is exactly what it was, and it cost them nothing at all.

Nor is the verdict Clancy’s supporters wanted unprecedented or unthinkable. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston. She had documented postpartum psychosis. Her first conviction was overturned, and at her second trial in 2006 a Texas jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity. She was committed to a state hospital, where she remains.

That is the outcome now being described as the collapse of the social contract. It already happened, in Texas, twenty years ago, for five children rather than three. The republic survived. Nobody proposed removing women from juries in 2006, and nobody proposed taking the vote.

There is one more thing to say here, because it cuts against the easy version of this argument and it should be said anyway.

The claim that courts go easy on mothers is not baseless. A 2024 study in Child Abuse and Neglect examined 298 filicide cases in Ontario between 1985 and 2018 and found that maternal perpetrators were less likely to be convicted, less likely to be convicted of murder, less likely to receive a prison sentence, and received shorter sentences than fathers. Jones was sentenced to death. Yates was sent to a hospital.

But read the mechanism the researchers identified. Outcomes for mothers turned on how closely they matched stereotypes of female non-violence and nurturing, and departures from those stereotypes were pathologized. Mothers who kill get processed as mad. Fathers who kill get processed as bad.

That is not mercy, and it is not a favor. It is the denial of agency, arriving from the opposite direction, and it is Webbon’s premise wearing a robe. American and Canadian courts have been quietly operating on “women have less agency” for decades. Webbon merely proposes to finish the sentence and take the rights too.

So here is the actual asymmetry, and it is not about sentencing.

When men extend sympathy to a father who killed five children, it is grief, and it is free. When women extend sympathy to a mother who killed three while in a documented psychiatric crisis, it is submitted as evidence of what women are, and converted within two weeks into a proposal about what women should be allowed to do.

One is a feeling. The other is a diagnosis. The difference is not the act. The difference is who performed it.

Test two: who is allowed to disbelieve a court

This is the sharper one, because it is about evidence rather than feeling.

The charge against Clancy’s supporters is that they are refusing to accept what a court established. So apply that standard evenly.

In May 2023, a federal civil jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her, and awarded her five million dollars. In January 2024, a second jury awarded her an additional $83.3 million in the related defamation case. Trump appealed the first verdict as far as it can be appealed. In late June 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear it. On July 9, 2026, he paid: $5,625,005.48. He continues to challenge the $83.3 million judgment.

That is a finding of fact, tested by a jury, affirmed on appeal, refused review by the highest court in the country, and satisfied in cash. In the American system there is no more settled a civil finding available. And a very large number of the people on the ladder above regard it as something that did not happen.

Now set the two cases side by side.

The Clancy case produced no verdict at all. It produced a hung jury, a mistrial, an unresolved medication question, contested psychiatric testimony, and a district attorney still deciding whether to retry. Wanting a fuller investigation of an unresolved case is not a refusal to accept a finding. It is the ordinary and legally correct posture toward a case in which nothing has been found. That is what a mistrial means.

The Carroll case produced a finding, and then survived every appeal available to the losing party.

Two groups are declining to treat a court’s output as final. Only one of them is actually doing it, and only the other one is facing a proposal to take away its vote.

The proposal nobody makes

Let us take the ladder seriously for a moment, entirely on its own terms.

The argument at the bottom of that table is that a demonstrated pattern of impaired judgment, dangerous instinct, or moral incapacity within a category of people is grounds for reducing that category’s autonomy. Webbon states the premise: less agency, therefore fewer rights. Todd states the remedy: take their rights away. The anonymous accounts apply it to juries and to the vote.

Fine. That is a testable standard. So test it.

Men are about 79 percent of those arrested for violent crime in the United States, and 88 percent of those arrested for murder and non-negligent manslaughter. Globally, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime found that roughly 90 percent of people brought into formal contact with police for intentional homicide in 2021 were men. Of the individuals in the National Institute of Justice’s half-century database of public mass shootings, 97.7 percent were men. Roughly 89 percent of child sexual abuse perpetrators identified by child protective services are men. Every major war of the last several centuries was declared, commanded, and overwhelmingly fought by men.

And filicide, the specific crime at the center of this specific panic?

Brown University’s analysis of thirty-two years of United States arrest data found that fathers accounted for about 57 percent of parents who killed their children. Mothers accounted for roughly 40 percent.

The country has spent two weeks arguing about whether mothers, as a category, are too unstable to be trusted with a jury box or a ballot, and the occasion for that argument was a filicide case. Fathers commit more filicides than mothers do. They always have. In the entire history of this country, nobody has once suggested that this fact raises a question about whether fathers as a class should be permitted near children, or in a voting booth, or on a jury.

The sympathy test compounds it. If extending sympathy to an offender reveals an unfitness to be around children, then look at who actually does that. A family took the stand to ask a jury to spare the life of a man who had killed five children, and one of them wore the children’s faces tattooed on his body while he did it. More than a hundred film industry figures signed a petition on behalf of a man who pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old. Two actors wrote to a judge calling a man convicted of raping two women a role model. A very large political movement maintains that a man found liable for sexual abuse by a federal jury, upheld on appeal, refused review by the Supreme Court, and made to pay $5,625,005.48, simply did not do it. By the standard currently being applied to a woman who posted a video in her kitchen, none of those are opinions. They are disqualifying revelations of character.

So by the ladder’s own arithmetic, the case for stripping men of the vote is not close. It is not even interesting. It is the most statistically obvious policy proposal in American public life.

Nobody makes it. Not the men on that ladder, and not, for the record, me.

I am not proposing it, and that refusal is the entire point. I have just assembled a far stronger evidentiary case than anyone on that ladder has managed, using federal arrest data, United Nations crime statistics, and a peer-reviewed analysis of three decades of filicide arrests rather than a jury whose composition somebody disliked. And it arrives at a conclusion that every reasonable person recognizes instantly as monstrous.

It is monstrous because collective punishment on the basis of category membership is monstrous. It is monstrous when the category is men, and it does not quietly become reasonable when the category is women. The reason no one runs this argument on men is not that the numbers fail. The numbers are overwhelming, and they are not in dispute. The reason is that men are understood to be individuals, whose crimes belong to the individual men who commit them.

The fault line is not where you think

It would be tidy to end on left and right. The record does not support it.

The right split badly over this case. Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, colleagues at the same outlet, traded jabs in public. Tomi Lahren observed on her podcast that a great many of the men holding forth will never give birth. The conservative influencer Abby Libby, who believes Clancy deserved the death penalty, still told Walsh that his commentary had “begun to extend in a cruel way to women who have brought life into the world and struggled.” Candace Owens went further toward Clancy than most liberals did, and took heavy fire from her own side for it. And Nancy Mace, who has had postpartum, landed on custody removal.

So the comprehension gap is real, but it does not map cleanly onto party. It maps onto something more uncomfortable: whether a person is reasoning from a body or from a category.

People who have been inside a postpartum body, or who have sat with someone who was, tend to understand immediately that the mind is not a fixed thing, that it can be altered by an event happening inside you, and that this can be true at the same time as a horror is true. People reasoning from a category need the category to stay clean. A mother is good, or a mother is a monster. Introduce a woman who was, for a period of weeks, neither in command of herself nor absent from herself, and the category breaks.

Rather than expand the category, they eliminate the woman. And then, having discovered that women do not fit the container, several of them proposed a smaller container, and wrote its dimensions down where anyone can read them.

Eleven people were capable of holding two true things at once. One chose not to. All of us that watched it are out here arguing with miniature incels and pick-me women about very different topics, neither of which comprehend the breadth of the discussion.

Read the companion essay: The Reenactment