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What does it mean to be “crazy?” I’ve spent much of the past few days stewing on the story of Lindsay Clancy. For context, she is a mother who, in the throes of postpartum something-or-other, whacked her three kids. Killing your own offspring is, on its face, an unambiguous evil. Only the most fanatical (and likely also psychotic) of anti-natalists would suggest otherwise. Clancy has not been characterized as an unambiguous evil. The exact nature of her mental illness is still at issue in the trial, but many figures have converged on the idea that Clancy was not of sound mind and thus is not culpable the way you or I would be. I suspect that no matter what her sentence is, a vocal chorus of mental health advocates will decry it as excessive. I sympathize here — having worked with the severely and persistently mentally ill, living with acute psychosis is hardly living at all.
I think this case is an interesting segue into something I’ve noticed more and more about how we adjudicate moral harms in the public sphere. I’d like to soapbox for a moment. Cool? Thanks. The experience of harm, at least colloquially, is limited to two parties: the offender and the victim. These people experience the qualia of the situation with their own eyes, ears, limbic systems, pain receptors, and memory banks. Unless we were physically present, the rest of us schmucks don’t have that privilege. We can only experience the event through language. We describe what happened. We ideate on the nature of the harms, the observed damages, and the more latent impacts. Most importantly, we construct a theory of mind for those involved. We daydream about what they might have been thinking, or, in cases like Clancy’s, if they could think at all. Bluntly, we want to know if we should treat them harshly or if there are, say, intervening factors that reduce their culpability. All of this is mediated by language.
Many of these intervening factors can be modeled on a spectrum. Someone can be more or less psychotic, more or less cognitively impaired, more or less ignorant to their situation. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Clancy experienced severe psychotic symptoms. In this case, minimal gymnastics are required to describe her nature as such. Clancy is psychotic → therefore she didn’t know what she was doing → therefore she’s off the hook. Thus, it is written. However, how should we treat someone who was a little less psychotic? How about a little less than that? What if they had psychotic symptoms, but they were subclinical or didn’t neatly fit diagnostic criteria? This is where language fails us. Human qualities may be modeled on a spectrum, but language is discrete. And so, the spectrums get “sticky,” and the labels gain outsized importance. A line must be drawn. The person must be sorted.
These sticky spectrums exist for a variety of traits. If you’re “just” poorly socialized and have a blind spot for a particular social norm, you’re expected to do better. If you’re diagnosed neurodivergent, it’s more tolerable to break the norm because you “can’t control it.” If you’ve had a few drinks and crack skulls in a bar fight but are otherwise a normal chap, you’re probably on the hook for assault. However, if you’re a person in the throes of capital-A alcoholism, you can break into a family’s home, sleep on their child’s bed, and avoid charges because you’re burdened by a sickening disease. If your IQ is 70, you can be sentenced to death. If your IQ is 69, you’re much too intellectually disabled for that to be fair. In each of these cases, the mental states at the time of the offense are similar if not near-identical, and yet resulting judgments vary based on how we categorize the offender’s nature. We don’t adjudicate based on “sort-ofs” and “somewhats.” In common parlance, either you’re an alcoholic or not. Either you’re intellectually disabled or not. Either you’re culpable or not. This strikes me as unfair.
I suppose I’m advocating for the spectrums to be less sticky, or for words to have less of a gravitational pull. Clancy will likely receive a modified sentence based on her state of mind. Yet, what ought we to do with people in the midst of mild, manageable psychosis who may still yet have impaired judgment? Maybe they don’t get away with a full insanity defense, but their sentence could be modified accordingly. This is why I oppose mandatory minimum sentencing. The job of the court — and the court of public opinion for lesser matters — is not just to determine what happened, but to determine the appropriate consequence. The question is whether or not this is a utopian suggestion. Is human nature too punitive to implement this mindset at scale? Are we interested in justice or just blood?
Relevant Scott: The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories
As I mentioned in another subthread earlier this week, Clancy had sufficient presence of of mind to send her husband away on an errand to give herself the time needed to kill the children. From what I've seen/heard of the trial, there is absolutely evidence that she was suffering from mental issues, but in my judgement not nearly severe enough to completely strip her of her agency and free will in deciding to brutally strangle her children (including an infant).
As I also argued in the other subthread, if women's hormones are strong enough to cause them to murder their own flesh and blood against their own free will, that's one of the strongest arguments imaginable against women's rights and female autonomy you could come up with. Testosterone causes its own problems for men, but nothing like this.
I didn't read the previous subthread, so I can't speak to the discussion you all have had there. I'd just like to point out that you're displaying the behavior that I described in my post. You acknowledge that she has some degree of mental issues - in other words, her cognition and impulses are different from yours, perhaps more distorted or reactive. Yet, because she isn't "completely" stripped of agency, you are choosing to categorize her as "culpable," which is likely the moral matrix in which you would regard yourself. Of course, what she did is monstrous and she is culpable in some form. But why does it have to be an either/or?
I think suggesting that a short-term medical anomaly affecting 1-2 in 1000 women is representative of baseline female hormonal function is quite dishonest. When people are in the throes of mental illness, we do deprive them of autonomy and rights temporarily (5150's), but once their mental normalcy returns, their rights return in tow.
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The problem with discussions like this is always the same thing, we can't decide on what exactly punishment (and jailing someone in particular) is meant to be for. Is it revenge? Deterrence? Rehabilitation? Is it just keeping known dangerous elements locked up? It's all of those to some degree, but also kinda none of them either.
Like imagine for instance a virus is created that causes .5% of the population with a rare biomarker to go and kill the nearest person. They can't control themselves and once they kill they go back to normal and build up an immunity so they can't be infected again with it. These are known and proven results, no amount of willpower can resist it and no one with the killing virus has ever done it a second time. Should we still punish them? I think there's a fair argument towards no, that they are perfectly fine and good people who had their sense of reason momentarily snatched away from them.
Ok now imagine it's say schizophrenia, extreme enough that they engage in violence and murder but we invent a long term cure and 95% of these violent schizophrenics are no longer violent and won't reoffend, should we let them out of jail early since the problem is solved? Are they not too fine and good people who had their sense of reason snatched away, and now restored?
Or what if we believe there's a high chance that a mentally ill killer won't reoffend again if we put them in a nursing home and just have them watched all day? What if the postpartum depression mother, overwhelmed by uncontrollable thoughts and feelings, won't ever hurt anyone else again and with some careful watching of any future pregnancies won't be able to reoffend? Should we punish those people still if the problem is solved?
Of course the real world isn't so clean and simple as thought experiments and erring on the side of caution is what I'd do for real world scenarios, but there's definitely a lot of fair discussion to be had.
Prison has always been a bad solution. Per a comedian on a recent Kill Tony, 1/3 of the people in prison should really be in a mental hospital, 1/3 should be in drug rehab, and 1/3 should be taken out back and shot because they are irredeemable.
Unfortunately, our system of justice has to be 'blind', because society is too large and varied for subjective judgements about people. We can't look at a whole person, their life in the community, their past and future, and determine how best they should be dealt with to make them a useful part of society (even if judges do have some leeway on this). We have to look at the specific crime or law they've broken, and decide how to punish them for that. We have created a system that is as 'fair' as we can make it, even if the end result is a disaster for the individuals in it. In other words, our modern justice system is fundamentally bureaucratic over and above useful or even just.
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I believe in punishment for deterrence and prevention.
Prevention: will she have future kids? Will she get some future hormone imbalance that makes her go on a killing spree? Maybe she should be monitored and given therapy, and to prevent this situation happening in other parents, we should monitor and give therapy to those suspected with PDD. But prison is overkill.
Deterrence: this justifies some kind of prison, someone who regrets having kids may fake PDD and kill them for similar release. But I still think a long sentence is excessive, prison is miserable and giving up your kids for adoption should be less.
More generally, the US has such long prison sentences, does it have any effect on crime? For frequent (3x) offenders I support the death penalty (with strong evidence), but for others I think it’s wasteful and unnecessarily cruel.
I believe in punishment for punishment's sake. It is a necessary component of justice and a simple extension of the golden rule: as a person harms another, so too they also shall be harmed. I find that a lot of people express a belief that punishment is a vicious necessity, to be minimized whenever and wherever possible and used only to the extent needed to serve other material ends (especially with respect to women). I don't agree with this at all, and I think it undermines the goal of justice to eliminate righteous punishment for the guilty.
That's not the Golden Rule, that's the lex talionis ("Eye for an eye") principle. An ancient and venerable principle of justice to be sure, but not the same principle at all.
It's a simple logical extension of the principle. In logical terms:
Do unto others → done unto you.
By modus ponens, harm unto others → harm unto you.
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I had the same thought, but then had this idea: there's also an element of mental rehabilitation. If Clancy is now in her right mind, she probably wants to be punished for what she did. Maybe not in an explicable way. But anyone who does something so heinous, whether they were in psychosis or not, will feel they deserve punishment, and will not be mentally whole until they get what they feel they deserve.
I don't necessarily stand by this as a theory of law, but thought it was interesting enough to share.
Im of the strong opinion that findings of insanity should mean treatment until youre sane enough to be punished, then punishment should begin. Hinkley should have begun the normal sentence for an assasination once he was released from the mental institution.
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My thoughts were similar. I believe pretty firmly that filicide is a crime worthy of death. I believe it firmly enough that if I ever murdered my children, I would probably administer the punishment myself if the state refused to. The only wrinkle is that I also believe suicide is immoral—but does a self-administered death penalty really count as suicide? I’ve come to think no.
Does the immorality of suicide cause the self-administered death penalty to be more justified, due to how it punishes not only your life but also your sense of self and identity compelling you into a sort of morally contradictory situation where you feel like you have no choice but to do something you consider immoral, or does it cause it to be less justified, due to how it would require you to commit yet another immoral act? I can see the argument for both.
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Hence a prison sentence is justified regardless of sanity. The if she wants more “punishment” she can administer it to herself, ideally by community service.
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She is both crazy and unquestionably murdered her three kids. Whether she spends the rest of her life in jail or a mental hospital is kinda irrelevant; it’s not really a question of ‘deserves’.
If Lindsay Clancy receives her preferred verdict she will be acquitted of the crimes for which she was tried. The involuntary commitment that follows this verdict is not, legally speaking, a punishment. A commitment to a mental health facility is not for the protection of society, but an acknowledgment that the verdict logically allows the state to confirm a mentally ill person is no longer mentally ill. That commitment is not to be used to lock away people who the state or an institution may consider dangerous beyond any danger that is tied to ongoing mental illness which requires treatment.
People want to believe the system will not treat her as acquitted of these crimes. I am sure this belief is validated in some cases. Medical professionals are probably skeptical of releasing the infamous from the looney bin even if they have no need for treatment. That is an injustice according to our legal fiction, but it's probably true that it happens.
A person who was somewhat crazy for a couple months, but very crazy (due to failed treatments) only for a 60 minute window where they strangled their own babies might only require treatment for a little craziness and depression now. For this reason I think we should rework the legal fiction and allow the state the option to pass down real sentences with this type of verdict. An individual can opt to transfer from the looney bin to prison to complete their sentence once they are deemed mentally fit if they so desire.
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Except people found "not guilty for reasons of insanity" can get weekend passes from their care facilities... https://wtop.com/fairfax-county/2026/08/man-found-not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity-in-fairfax-co-killing-flees-on-one-way-flight-while-on-hospital-pass/
I think there's a problem if we think a insanity verdict is a lesser sentence, instead of a heavy sentence where you are still locked up, and additionally subject to medical treatments against your will.
I think the main issue is that the system HAS to make a binary determination that either makes the person completely irresponsible or completely responsible, and only has imperfect expert testimony to go on to make that determination. Everything flows from the fact that we have to make a hard choice, and the perverse incentives are inevitable in that context.
Sure, the current system does. But as philosophers here, we could muse about alternatives. What about a fractional responsibility regime?
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Correct, this binary distinction is precisely what I'm talking about in my other examples.
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If her condition is treatable or self-limiting (as post-partum psychosis normally is) it makes all the difference in the world, because if she successfully pleads an insanity defence she will be released when she gets better.
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Of course - legally speaking, she has minimal wiggle room and the consequences will be unquestionably severe. Her case just got me thinking more about how attitudes toward moral transgressors develop generally. Should we regard someone with derision, pity, anger, fear, or another emotion? What makes something a "troubling mistake" or an "act of depravity?" Should they be treated with dignity or cruelty, punished or reformed? All these questions are at play based on what the cultural apparatus deems is the person's nature, and I think language isn't doing us any favors.
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