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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Very meagre for a top-level comment, I know, but I felt it was worth sharing because it's peak culture war: it turns out the sole holdout in the Lindsay Clancy case was a Black man.

(For those living under a rock: Lindsay Clancy was the woman who killed her three young children, pleaded non guilty on the basis that she suffered from post partum psychosis, and the murder trial ended in a mistrial because only 1 out of 12 jury member found her guilty.)

I think this revelation will end the debate about whether the jury failed to reach the right verdict. Although ostensibly the discussion revolved around what level of proof was provided (Massachussets has an unusually low bar for insanity defenses, in that the prosecutor must prove that the defendant was capable of discerning right from wrong beyond reasonable doubt, rather than the defense proving their client was incapable at least to the level of preponderance of evidence, as is the case in most jurisdictions.)

In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.

I didn't see anybody point this out.
Despite all the worship they were doing in 2020, if George Floyd goes on a jury against White Karen, White Karen wins.
Is this the white supremacy I've been hearing about?
Is the solution to the police brutality controversy just female cops?
Bonus

I am very unsettled by how much we know about this guy. Yes, he's no longer a member of an active jury, but I feel like it's unheard of for a juror to be practically doxxed and berated publicly, even if he was obstinate or unreasonable. I can't even begin to imagine the chilling effect this will have on jurors assigned to future high profile cases. I'm extremely disappointed in our media for fueling this extravaganza.

It is jury intimidation. The members of the next set of jurors will know that they will be targeted by the public if they find the witch guilty.

I heard somewhere three of the woman jurors wore that stupid pink outfit, sometimes women just conspire to confirm your worst inkling prejudices. Frankly I wonder if they'll soon dox him completely.

I heard somewhere three of the woman jurors wore that stupid pink outfit

Not only are they not even trying to beat the meme gender allegations, it’s like they’re actively working to perpetuate them.

See also: “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” Who said women can’t be funny? Albeit unintentionally and without self-awareness.

sometimes women just conspire to confirm your worst inkling prejudices

It’s just some crazy women on Tik Tok on the internet outside the courtroom in the jury box so you and everyone else should stop talking about it lest it fuels misogynistic talking points *crosses arms, turns away*.

I’ve seen the Smithers meme resurfacing as a reaction to the Clancy supporter developments. It also reminds me of old manosphere sayings like “men don’t redpill men; women do” and “the redpill is the easiest movement to be a part of; women do the recruiting for you.”

I think many people (perhaps most) believe he was not unreasonable

By MA law, the women were probably in the right to find not guilty by reason of insanity, but that doesn't seem to be their motivation for finding her not guilty. The law just happens to conveniently work in their favor in this instance, but they would very much want to find her not guilty anyway. This significantly complicates the story.

I don’t think the women were correct at all and the idea @it’s just the laws fault” is not correct. Again I think people are short cutting NGRI to “was Clancy in her right mind.”

The standard is not “was she crazy.” The standard is did she know what she was doing was against the law and did she have the capacity not to do the act. There is ample evidence she knew what she was doing was not legal and that she had the capacity to not act.

Moreover the standard beyond a reasonable doubt is not 99.9%. It is a high standard yes, but it leaves room for small doubt. The preplanned murder of kids showed control of faculties and an attempt to hide the attempt. The phone call that interrupted the event also shows that. Is there a 5% chance she somehow was super crazy but still tactically rational? Maybe. But 95% sure is sure enough to convict.

The standard is not “was she crazy.” The standard is did she know what she was doing was against the law and did she have the capacity not to do the act. There is ample evidence she knew what she was doing was not legal and that she had the capacity to not act.

I think these two standards are very slippery, especially when you're dealing with a jury of people who habitually default to an external locus of control. They take "mental health" very seriously, by which they mean that aberrant behavior is, in general, best understood as a kind of mental malfunction that is in some sense external to the true self of the person who is suffering from it. When you adopt this frame, it's very easy to satisfy those standards, especially if motivated by ulterior goals.

I don’t blame them. I think the over-emphasis on mental health is a disaster. It’s basically a strong dose of learned helplessness applied globally. I find my issues and quirks to be much easier to deal with and fix when I think of them as just a normal brain that does X sometimes (for me, mostly anxiety) and that the thoughts are not reality. When it’s just that you somehow picked up a false narrative of reality and that you can unlearn it, you can work around it. But modern “mental health” narratives do the opposite and turn temporary issues into permanent ones and make living with it harder.

It also, for those inclined, serve as an excellent excuse for doing all kinds of shitty things to people. You have trauma so you get to treat people like crap. You get to demand special privileges. You get to cut your family out because of some mental health issue. And the claim can be used to avoid responsibility for crimes committed if you can cry mental health to a jury.

The disturbing thing about this case is that a lot of what she did seemed so calculated to making an insanity plea after the fact.

Sure. I agree that’s what they think. I believe them to be wrongheaded and their logic leads to all crime being unpunished as a mental health issue.

In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.

The whole thing is rather surprising to me. First (probably like everyone else) I assumed that the holdout juror was some white MAGA Republican type. Second, I would have thought that once it came out that this guy is black, things would die down but instead I am learning that the mainstream media published a hit piece on him. I am aware that the progressive machine can be pretty ferocious when it comes to people who stand in its way, but I would have thought that a black person would have been accorded more deference.

The situation continues to develop and the dynamics are interesting. The mainstream media line seems contrary to your predictions. In short, NBC investigations report he is no angel:

Court documents and interviews with family members reveal a history of domestic violence allegations. We discovered a pending eviction case tied to months of not paying rent.

According to a police report, the juror's 13-year-old nephew called 911 after he said his uncle grabbed his wife by the throat and threw her into a dresser. The report says the juror's mom repeatedly screamed, "You're evil!" as police arrested him.

Last year, that same teenage nephew referenced in the 2021 incident took out a restraining order after he said the juror pushed him to the ground and repeatedly punched him in the face. The teen wrote in his affidavit that his uncle then said, "You ruined my (expletive) life," for calling the police and added, "You've had this coming your way for a long time."

Whatever the broader issues are, rent delinquents should be shot.

Aren’t we supposed to not dox jurors?

He’s a terrible person with bad judgement, but is it surprising those people end up on juries? Lindsay Clancy will almost certainly not be convicted as would happen without this man, and for convictions the system still seems to work: The US has the 5th highest incarceration rate, under El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. Obviously the US needs crime reform but in enforcement, changing trials won’t fix the main problem of low-level nuisances because they’re not getting arrested in the first place.

I know norms and systems are falling apart, and I don’t expect this one instance to affect much, but breaking them without any clear reason, I have a gut feeling it’s bad for everyone in the long run (except this guy, he’ll get a GoFundMe or podcast).

Obviously the US needs crime reform but in enforcement, changing trials won’t fix the main problem of low-level nuisances because they’re not getting arrested in the first place.

Then put the booking station in the middle of nowhere, ideally in the places where it's illegal for anyone but the government to build. (Employees work 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out.)

Oh, what's that, Madame Prosecutor, the interests of justice require he not be charged? Oh, what a shock, better luck next time- you're free to go then. The public transportation back to your city runs once, on the second week of the month. The bus is free. It's 3 hours, one way, due to the length of the route and budgetary restrictions.

Naturally, if you're going to take that transport, our bus stop is very well-stocked. There are rooms with cots for rest, and along with the food, they are free until the next bus leaves. It's well-maintained by transit staff and secured by transit police.

If you're going to have a revolving door the least you could do is make it actually inconvenient. Perhaps somewhere you aren't legally prohibited from leaving, but unless you have someone from your place of residence that can vouch for you (and is willing to drive 6 hours to retrieve you), you are now in a state that is legally, but not meaningfully, indistinguishable from exile. Your "bail" is now collected by physics (the money/time/effort it takes to retrieve you).

Issues with this being a political prison are avoided simply because it's not actually a prison (the prison is coincidentally right next door to house those the prosecutor will charge, and this branch of public transit has a convenient labor-sharing agreement with them). You can just straight up go and visit if you wanted to audit the place, as it's public. (No overnight parking or camping, though.)

If you have someone who will help you, you'll be back home very quickly; I figure that the more people you can call on who are willing and able to help you in this way, the less of an anti-social element you were. You'll wear them out quickly with repeated use if you're truly an asshole anyway.

It's all very reasonable, safe, and consensual... while at the same time just being the modern version of transportation-as-punishment, and maximally frustrating external efforts to defeat this purpose. (It's true that, for example, George Soros has the power to simply send every criminal an Uber or fund busses of his own, but now he'll have to fund more than just the prosecutor to do that.)

Your proposal works as well on the actually innocent as it does on the criminals released because the prosecutor likes certain sorts criminals, and for that reason among many others there is absolutely now way it would fly in the courts.

Yes, usually individuals with extensive contact with the criminal justice system don't get picked for juries.

Obviously the US needs crime reform but in enforcement, changing trials won’t fix the main problem of low-level nuisances because they’re not getting arrested in the first place.

They get arrested quite often. The first level of major breakdown in the system seems to be the "decision to press charges" stage.

and for convictions the system still seems to work: The US has the 5th highest incarceration rate, under El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. Obviously the US needs crime reform but in enforcement, changing trials won’t fix the main problem of low-level nuisances because they’re not getting arrested in the first place.

I don't see how any of this follows. The conviction rate is not the same thing as the incarceration rate, so just saying "look at how many people there are in prison" feels neither here nor there, and if the low-level nuisances aren't getting arrested, you don't know whether that's the cause of low convictions or it's effect.

It would be strange that the US has the fifth largest incarceration rate and isn’t incarcerating enough people. They could be convicting the wrong people (via plea bargains) but I’d need evidence of obvious criminals (including discovered later) who get off trial (and this case isn’t obvious because 11 of 12 jurors voted to acquit).

I agree. The incarceration rate is too high. Not enough executions.

I actually am pro death penalty for people who are irredeemable i.e. repeatedly commit obvious crimes. Or send them to some confined area where they can't hurt anyone else, which is prison in a way, but not to punish them and would not waste resources doing so.

Long prison sentences don't make sense to me: a short sentence is enough deterrence, and prevention needs to be something permanent (which could be a behavior change motivated by prison, but again, I doubt a long sentence is more motivational than a short one, especially when "short" means weeks or months).

I’d favor shorter prison sentences combined with whipping. Continued crimes then leads to executions.

I would genuinely support something like

  • First offense = warning
  • Second offense = corporal punishment
  • Third offense = execution

with convictions only given to people who are obviously guilty of widely-accepted-to-be-severe crimes. Mild crimes may have mild corporal punishment and/or exile instead of execution. A separate system would handle ambiguous crimes, that ensures either future crimes are either prevented or not ambiguous.

“It would be strange that the US has the fifth largest incarceration rate and isn’t incarcerating enough people“

I would expect a country with a high incarceration rate to have a lot of crime. This is essentially saying it’s weird people use a lot of Air Conditioning in the summer.

But does the US have more crime than e.g. India, Russia, and South Africa? Or are those countries also not arresting enough, or do they instead use the death penalty?

Per Wikipedia (take as many grains of salt as you think you need), the intentional homicide rate in the US is 5.763/100k, compared to 2.716 in India, 7.821 in Russia and 39.719 in South Africa. Intentional homicide rate is generally considered a reliable proxy for crime rate in general.

No expert on those countries. I just see plenty of criminal cases where I think the person deserves more jail than less.

America has a lot of crime and it ruins the commons.

The fifth-richest country in Africa still isn't particularly rich.

The US has the highest incarceration rate among first world countries and democracies, as separate subsets? But the USA isn't an outlier in low crime rates. There's obviously another variable.

But it’s not Africa, it’s the entire world including non-Western nations. Although I suppose some are greatly underreporting.

No, I'm trying to illustrate the flaw in your argument by way of analogy. Just because a given country is the fifth-highest in $metric, doesn't mean it's objectively high. Just because the US has the fifth-highest rate of incarceration in the world, doesn't mean that everyone who ought to be incarcerated is. There's no contradiction between "this country has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the world" and "lots of people in this country aren't sent to prison even though they ought to be".

It would be strange that the US has the fifth largest incarceration rate and isn’t incarcerating enough people.

No, it wouldn't. It would be absolutely unremarkable with a high enough base crime rate in the US, and/or dysfunctional enough criminal justice systems in other countries with high crime rates. All the "the US has (one of) the highest incarceration rates in the world" are meaningless because of this.

Hard agree all the open petty crime shows the US isn't imprisoning enough people.

It's near impossible for something to make me have a lower opinion of journalists than I already do, but doxxing a juror managed to.

He should embrace his grifter arc, get a million dollars in donations or whatever, and pay his rent.

The Platonic idea of a jury is that it consists of one's peers.

This man was absolutely Clancy's peer, perhaps the only one there that truly was.

Another aspect of the fallout of the trial is all the jurors giving interviews are inadvertently revealing they themselves did not follow the law in the least during deliberations. Several of them have consistently used the line that they didn't think the state proved she killed the kids. This was not properly at issue. Others have admitted to inserting themselves as pseudo medical experts on the jury (the nurses of course). That is not proper during deliberation. Several others have used the phrase "100% sure" which seems to have been a mimetic phrase in the jury room. This is not the same standard as "reasonable doubt."

Others have admitted to inserting themselves as pseudo medical experts on the jury (the nurses of course). That is not proper during deliberation.

In a technical sense, no, but it's inevitable, and difficult to prevent. Either of us would make terrible jurors because our training and experience would mean that the jury would be looking to us for clarification and interpretation. If I say that the burden of proof isn't met it means more than if some rando says it, because it's presumed that I would know more about the burden of proof than the average bear. Suppose a case involves a trucking accident, and a prospective juror used to be a trucker. You can voir dire him all you want but unless he says something like he quit because trucking companies never follow safety protocols or that normies don't know how hard it is to drive a truck and if a passenger car got hit by one it's because they were probably doing something stupid, you're not getting the juror disqualified for cause. If he merely says something to the effect of some trucking companies don't care about safety and some truckers don't care about safety but some do, and he can't make a determination on the case until hearing the facts, then he's on the jury unless you use a peremptory, and you might not want to do that; the guy is a wild card, but you may need to save your challenges for ones who are obviously bad. So the guy gets on, and when it comes time to deliberate he's going to tell the jury what the standard of care is, that the plaintiff's/defendant's expert is full of shit, and the jury is going to give him more weight than the expert.

And I'm not going to blame the trucker for this. If he knows from 20 years of experience that you're never supposed to do something, I can't expect him to forget that and give my expert who says it's okay to do that sometimes as much credence as someone who knows nothing about trucking. And if I'm a juror who knows nothing about trucking then I'm going to give the guy in the room with me who has 20 years of trucking experience more credence than some expert who was bought and paid for.

Sure. I think the big problem is claimed expertise when there is none. Not sure for example that a nurse is an expert in the pharmacology of different drugs depending on their dosage.

I agree. In my limited experience nurses frequently talk outside their wheelhouse and feel they do as much as (and often feel they know more than) doctors. It does not strain credulity that a nurse might claim that because she is a "medical professional" (a weasel term, in my view, that we'd do better without) that she should be granted ascendancy in matters of health, even mental health (or pharmacology as the case may be). This is a personal bias of mine but it's been borne out in conversations many times.

Putting all the other crazy things about this trial beside, I can't understand why she is even going with a defense at all. If I had done what she did, I'd want to be dead. I'd long for death. Sure enough, she did try killing herself.

Because of this, I can't really shake off thinking that painless MAID is the the solomonic solution here; If she did do it during a psychotic break and now genuinely regrets it, she deserves the release from her unfathomable pain. If not, death is perfectly appropriate as well. It literally doesn't matter.

Sure enough, she did try killing herself.

No she didn't. She's a nurse who made some cat scratches across the road and then threw herself out of a second floor window. Very obviously a fake attempt to provide cover for her triple homicide. The only thing she didn't plan was actually hurting herself in the fall.

Is it not reasonable that because her home was two stories, she just flung herself out of the highest window she had immediate access to?

Seems hard to blame her for not jumping out of a four story or eight story window like you say when she had no access to that.

That doesn't really matter. If she had easy access to a much higher window and chose the 2nd floor one, then that would be strong evidence of faking it. But you can find her address easily. The house is literally on Zillow. The only second floor windows I see drop onto grass. I literally used to jump out of those for fun when I was a kid.

The point is, that drop is rather implausible as a method of suicide when you could have just turned your knife 90 degrees, like most adults and damn sure every nurse knows.

The house is literally on Zillow.

I wonder what the discount (premium?) on a murder house is.

But yes, the window to the lawn was her way for suicide? As a nurse she surely could have gotten something to inject or why not some old fashioned hanging.

But yes, the window to the lawn was her way for suicide?

It had to have been, right? The only other windows are over top of that first floor roof.

We briefly rented a murder house growing up. It was considerably under the going rate at the time - cheap enough that we could afford to live there.

People survive falls from that high often enough. It’s doesn’t usually result in death, and doesn’t even always result in paralysis. It’s seems to assume a lot that a person who was a nurse and knows how to actually kill herself is just not doing that well, especially given that a lot of common household chemicals could easily be fatal. Heck, I’d be willing to bet an OD of the right drugs in the average medicine cabinet would be pretty lethal, especially in combination.

I have no firm opinion as to whether she intended to survive, but the argument in your comment seems self-contradictory. Surely her medical expertise wasn't worth that much if she failed to foresee that the fall could paralyze her.

Four story fall seems to be the 50% fatality point. Eight story fall is 90%. I would guess that a two story fall has a fatality rate well below 25%. The bigger flag is the wrist-slitting. She used a huge kitchen knife and managed to only give herself minor wounds going the wrong way. You'd think that if a nurse knows anything, it's where the wrist veins are.

I would hazard a guess that the majority of healthcare workers have encountered a patient who experienced life altering injury, paralysis, and even death from a fall of two stories or less.

It's not certain, but it can easily and obviously be quite bad.

She used a huge kitchen knife and managed to only give herself minor wounds going the wrong way.

Side to side for attention, up and down for results. And honestly, yeah, that's a lot more damning than anything else as a consequence (and reflects even more poorly on a jury that had other persons with the same kind of medical expertise).

One might argue that slashing yourself that way requires you to do something actively painful to yourself, while more passive methods are arguably preferred since the invocation of potential energy (gravitational, chemical) or toxicity doesn't actually hurt by themselves.

But the fact remains that she injured herself in the "the adults will know I was serious" way, not the way that actually kills you; one would expect an economy of pain commensurate with actual results from someone who was serious about it working.

It's not like she can argue she didn't consider asphyxiation as a method, of course.

She jumped from a second story window, right? Breaking a spine from a second-story window jump seems unusual to me – although I am not sure if it was a lawn or, say, concrete, and exactly how high it was, and exactly how she jumped. I think most people in their thirties could probably walk away from a 15-foot jump onto soft soil. A 20-foot jump onto concrete is a different story.

How did she land is the bigger variable, I think.

Yeah even onto concrete it seems like a "correct" landing would preserve your spine.

I think the ground was frozen so acted like concrete

In practice, the issue seemed to be mostly framed in terms of identity politics, along the lines of “mistrial caused by obstinate man who refused to listen to reasonable majority of mostly women”. Substitute “black man” and “white women” and this loses its cachet: suddenly it reads like a proud person of color bravely standing up against a group of Karens trying to browbeat him into submission.

I'm surprised at which side of the culture war this falls on. Alternate incendiary explanations: black guy was too dumb/lawless to understand that his purpose on the jury was to apply the particular oddities of MA law when it comes to insanity and instead just nullified the law?

If Xitter can have an endless circle jerk about how online white women are making sexual bigoted arguments for why women should be treated like infants because of their hormones, why can't they also make racial bigot arguments for why black people can't weigh complex topics in a jury box? The white people upheld law and order. The black guy went with his gut.

Since we're rehashing the case, do see Throwaway05's comment from the other week:

  • A common response to the media conversation around this case is to criticize women for brainless takes that do not engage with the information about the case or expert commentary. This includes me, I've been frustrated.
  • It seems like actual experts in this field are landing on a psychotic process (most likely postpartum psychosis) as the explanation of events. That is to say she is legitimately not guilty by reason of insanity. This moved the needle for me. How can I criticize women for being retarded and not listening to actual information if I don't listen to experts and people with specific knowledge of the case.
  • As a legal matter, it sounds like the expectation from knowledgable parties has been a hung jury or not guilty by reason of insanity because of structural, jurisdiction specific aspects of this type of defense in MA.

As a legal matter, a dumb juror might just well say "fuck all that shit I'm not letting you use a bunch of fancy words to try to trick me into saying that bitch walks"

I don't believe this myself. I'm not sure what I believe. I barely followed this case. But the culture war spectacle around it is fascinating.

Nothing dumb about it (in the abstract; I can't know what the man's reasoning actually was). I'm an Ivy League-trained lawyer and "fuck all that shit I'm not letting you use a bunch of fancy words to try to trick me into saying that bitch walks" is more-or-less what my position would be as a juror. If the job of a jury was merely to mechanistically apply facts to law as described by the judge, there would be no point to a jury trial. The entire point is to substitute the common man's inherent sense of justice for the cold pronouncements of a distant bureaucrat. You're sitting in judgment of the law as much as the defendant. It is the only context where "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" is your absolute, unalloyed, constitutional right.

actual experts... What? The defense called 6 psychiatrists, the prosecution 3. Not a one said her behavior was consistent with post-partum psychosis, or any psychosis, for that matter. The hospital declined enrollment in a post-partum program because, you know, the diagnositc criteria is 4 weeks, not 8 months/3 years/5 years/whenever and whereever a woman feels like claiming it. Reddington, a lawyer, was the one who floated post-partum depression/psychosis

Any "experts" claiming this was psychosis are either a) lying about their expertise, or b) shamelessly lying (a la Sapolsky on neuroscience) about the state of the field for ideological purposes.

Wait, this is the active yt channel of the last psychiatrist?

Indeed it is. He really went out of his way to not promote it, and only recently just tweeted a link to it. Last upload is like a year ago, sadly.

  1. There are no true experts—the psych field is a mess scientifically and predisposed to view everything aberrant as mental illness.

  2. The legal experts expected a hung jury in large part because of the support for Clancy.

  3. It is really hard to look at the facts and not get to beyond reasonable doubt. To explicate:

A. The standard is that Clancy either didn’t know what she was doing was criminal or she was incapable of not engaging in the activity.

B. The evidence is:

I. Clancy had thoughts of harming her kid for awhile. II. Clancy planned out her murder if the kids including making sure the husband was out of the house. III. Clancy in the middle of the murder spree took a call from her husband and was not demonstrating any signs of craziness. IV. Clancy only heard a voice allegedly once and only once.

C. So here we see that she had desires to commit the crime previously and was able to not commit the crime.

D. The defense would have to make the argument that she had a mental break (instead of just fighting off the intrusive thoughts) that means she either no longer knew it was wrong or lacked the capacity to not commit the act.

E. But the defense has a problem. She acted with forethought before the murders. So she was able to deter the compulsion to murder for a time and was trying to hide it suggesting she knew it was wrong. Also the planning indicates she still retained some thinking (ie didn’t have a full break with reality). While there is an argument that in very abnormal situations crazy people can remain perfectly rational in their actions towards their crazy goals, the standard is beyond reasonable doubt; not beyond any doubt.

F. But to make it even worse, the phone call that interrupted the murders seems to again undercut that she was incapable.

G. So here the defense has to argue this wasn’t a continuation of her prior ideations AND that notwithstanding her tactical rationality both before and during the murders she didn’t know what she was doing or could not control her actions.

H. Add to that the oddity of hearing the voice once and only once (pretty convenient).

I. The standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. The common example is better ten guilty go free than one innocent go to jail. That suggests about a 90% certainty.

J. Given these facts, it is really hard to say there is more than 10% doubt that Clancy could not control her actions or didn’t know they were wrong

The standard is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Normally, but Clancy's lawyers were using the NGMI defense which in Massachusetts puts the burden of proof on prosecutors to overcome it. And as Reason writer Binion pointed out, it's a difficult question with no clear answers to determine when mental unwellness crosses over into psychosis. https://reason.com/2026/09/04/the-lindsay-clancy-jury-was-tasked-with-an-impossible-question/

Also not really in dispute is that Clancy was mentally unwell leading up to the killings—she had begged for help from those around her, gone to the emergency room, tried to check herself into a mental health facility, and said she was afraid to be alone. She was prescribed a laundry list of medications. She was, by all accounts, floundering. Did she ultimately plunge into a state of psychosis? Or was she just deeply anxious and depressed?

There's some pretty difficult to overcome evidence towards her defense as well.

  1. She harmed herself and tried to commit suicide after, ending up permanently disabled (so we can't even say it was clearly a fake attempt or something).

  2. Expert witnesses existed on both sides, but since the burden of proof is on the prosecution even just showing the medical field is divided is a plus for the defense.

  3. She was undisputably mentally unwell beforehand, so they have to show that it couldn't have crossed over into something worse.

And then there's other factors not even discussed in the article, like prosecution has to overcome the possibility of drug interactions causing it for instance.

She harmed herself and tried to commit suicide after, ending up permanently disabled (so we can't even say it was clearly a fake attempt or something).

Yes we can. A nurse making scratches on her wrists in the wrong direction, and jumping from the 2nd floor, has all the signs of attempting to alibi herself and go for the insanity defense after deliberately killing her kids. She sent the father out of the house before doing so, even. All these acts are those of an evil person who knew what she was doing.

She harmed herself and tried to commit suicide after

Kind of. I don't have stats on the survival rate of falling out of a 2nd story window, but it must be very high. If anything her spinal injury is an unusually bad outcome for such a short fall.

I wonder how she did it. I (and I suspect other men) have jumped off of a single story dwelling's roof with zero injury.

Would you deliberately try to throw yourself down headfirst or the like to make suicide possible?

Edit: Breaking fall by landing on bended knees and transitioning into a roll.

Yeah, this is basically the Parachute landing fall, which is generally needed when using round canopies; your speed when landing is similar to jumping off a single-story building.

Yeah this is pretty much intrinsic. It's like climbing trees. You just can't not do it.

Edit: Breaking fall by landing on bended knees and transitioning into a roll.

This is The Way. Once upon a time a young teen-aged me climbed up the side of a stack of drying lumber on a dare, probably about twenty feet high, perhaps higher. It was an easy climb, with plenty of room for my feet between the layers of lumber, and I quickly ascended almost to the top. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't thinking at all about the properties of the pile that I was climbing, and so when the shim that my right hand had grabbed onto came right out of the side of the pile thanks to all of the force I had just exerted on it, I had nowhere to go but down. I had exactly enough time on the way down to think to myself, "oh, shit," and that I should break my fall in exactly this way before I hit, and I did so in an instant. I didn't do it perfectly, because my back hurt like Hell for the next couple of days, but I was otherwise unharmed.

Is it not reasonable that because her home was two stories, she just flung herself out of the highest window she had immediate access to?

Kinda hard to blame her for not jumping out of a third floor that didn't exist.

I think you are discounting how hard it is psychologically to commit suicide too much. It reads to me more like a botched attempt by someone who used escalating social bridge-burning to overcome her subconscious desire to live without actually having a thought-out plan and thus defaulted to a "Hollywood" plan when that threshold was finally reached after she murdered her kids.

The bar for "tried" here isn't related to success rates, but to whether she thought it would be effective. It is, admittedly, a more difficult thing to prove either way.

Except you know I stated what the standard was. Binion is an idiot by the way.

None of what you said is relevant. Her harming herself is consistent with being overwhelmed; murder suicide is pretty common. As already explained, expert witnesses aren’t dowry because the field is bunk. Moreover, her being mentally unwell is not the question. Of course she was mentally unwell. That isn’t the standard. The standard is could she control her actions / did she know they were not compatible with the law.

Finally the toxicology report showed she had small amounts of drugs in her system.

Binion is an idiot by the way.

How so?

I’ve read his writing and find him to be generally retarded

I really try not to follow this story, but it seems like a really high bar for the prosecution to meet, in any case. If I'm a juror, I have a hard time imagining any evidence the prosecution could bring to make it beyond a reasonable doubt, short of a recording of the defendant bragging that they were faking it.

Wait, did you just take my post from last thread - where I used that very example to mock people claiming it's impossible to prove intent - and "YesChad" it?

No, that is not the MA standard, because that's not what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means. If it were, then every defense attorney practicing in MA for the past 60+ years should be disbarred for gross negligence by not using this One Weird Trick to get every criminal defendent off the hook. That this has not happened, that no-one has apparently discovered this One Weird Trick to Get Out of Jail Free in all these decades should cause one to question whether they truly understand what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means, right?

So, what is a fact pattern that would support a valid defense in this jurisdiction, but would not in others? The "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard is clearly(?) a stricter standard than in other places.

The psychiatrists advising "her behavior isn't consistent with typical psychoses, but we can't rule it out" instead of "this is not psychosis" Her every action not screaming "I am deliberately planning all this!" such as:

*waking up in the hospital and saying almost anything other than "where is my lawyer?"

*previous mentions of this "command voice"

*the murders being somewhat spontaneous, possibly after a triggering incident, not after an extended search for locations to keep the husband as far away as possible.

*demonstrated issues during the post-partum phase, instead of well outside the window.

I'll concede your point, though I do still believe adopting a more conventional standard would make it easier to get a real conviction in a case like this (and that would be a good thing).

The very crime itself would be prima facie evidence of insanity. By reversing the burden of proof, it effectively makes acts of sufficient horror unprosecutable as crimes. The incentives this creates are disturbing, but it's also a backdoor way of displacing traditional crime and justice with deviant behavior being treated legally as a medical condition--a trend we see throughout society in many seemingly disparate domains.

Yeah, I'm at least as concerned about how this sort of reasoning will be used to violate the rights of the sane but unpopular as I am about how this will allow murderers to go free. There are a lot fewer constitutional safeguards for institutionalization than for incarceration, with much lower standards for what is essentially the same level of confinement (combined with forced administration of psychoactive substances that may permanently affect your brain chemistry). Medicalization is dangerous. Anything that expands the power of the mental health industry gives me concern.

What do you interpret “beyond a reasonable doubt” to mean? What’s the percentage odds?

I would go with 10:1, if forced to put odds on it.

I just don’t see how preexisting intrusive thoughts and planned murder don’t get people to 10:1 here.

She may have had reasonable doubt by the jurisdiction standards but then basically every murderer has reasonable doubt.

By my male standard every women is a little crazy but that shouldn’t mean you get to kill people.

One time I did mushrooms. I had taken the same brand a time before and got very little effect. This time I did twice that dose and it put me in another reality. I eventually assumed I had died and was in purgatory. Everyone around me I thought was demons. Suppose I got a knife and started stabbing my friends who I thought were demons. Should I go free?

I kind of think for society it’s best I’m executed. We can’t just let people murder even if it’s a mental illness and they didn’t know what they were doing. You still need to have that standard.

The mushroom chocolates I took I think were not mixed well. The first time I took them I had three and looking at trees was a lot of fun. The second time I took them I had 6. I went to an alternate universe. So I expected a stronger experience but not alternate world.

One time I did mushrooms. I had taken the same brand a time before and got very little effect. This time I did twice that dose and it put me in another reality. I eventually assumed I had died and was in purgatory. Everyone around me I thought was demons. Suppose I got a knife and started stabbing my friends who I thought were demons. Should I go free?

look up the Bryn Spejcher marijuana-induced psychosis murder case. it's similar to what you're describing. the killer did in fact go free. she was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but she wasn't given any jail time.

whether or not you should go free in such a scenario is a separate matter, but with how our legal system handles cases like that, it seems like you'd have a fighting chance to avoid jail time.

One time I did mushrooms. I had taken the same brand a time before and got very little effect. This time I did twice that dose and it put me in another reality. I eventually assumed I had dead and was in purgatory. Everyone around me I thought was demons. Suppose I got a knife and started stabbing my friends who I thought were demons. Should I go free?

In case where people deliberately placed themselves in states where they have little capability of telling right from wrong, I have little sympathy. Though by default, one might assume that any homicide committed is reckless manslaughter rather than pre-mediated.

But suppose that instead, someone had slipped the shrooms into your food without your knowledge. In that case, I would support sending whomever drugged you into prison for manslaughter and let you off the hook, unless the DA can conclusively prove that you were thinking "finally an opportunity to go on a rampage without doing time afterwards".

From there, the next step would be to consider some fictional insect which bites you and induces a homicidal rage. If the insect was so rare that nobody took any precautions against it, it would still be the same situation on your part -- you did not make any wrong moral choices, but simply were unlucky.

The practical problem with the insanity defense is that we can never disprove it completely. If some mafia hitman claims that he entered a psychotic state before any of his killings, that is not something which could be ruled out from forensic evidence. So pragmatically, we might shift the burden of proof a bit -- make it at least plausible why you did not know right from wrong instead of having the prosecution prove your internal state of mind.

I purposely took what was suppose to be 3 grams of mushrooms in chocolates. The prior time I had took 1.5 grams and it was like cool visuals. My gut says poor quality control and they weren’t mixed well and I had a bigger dose. So hypothetically for some insanity defense when I took the shrooms I thought I was taking a reasonable and wouldn’t go crazy.

When you take a big dose of shrooms there’s something called an ego death. I guess I did something like that. I did imagine I was died and was in purgatory plus some things about thinking I was like Jesus brother which feels like a big ego to me.

My purgatory was hallucinating and seeing people in my life like my mom or gf. But they always turned out to be demons and I was robbed of having any human love. It got to the point where I would give anything to spend a moment with the person I find most annoying. So now in real life I love people more because being robbed of friendship and humanity is really not fun. I accepted I was in purgatory and would spend thousands of years of god molding me to be good or hopefully it doesn’t take that long.

I was begging for what felt like hours to get out of the alternative reality I had created. Purgatory is in fact quite painful.

Also I did shrooms with Jews. And obviously Jews are demons in my purgatory. They tempting me with unlimited power and wealth if I rejected Christ and joined them.

Whatever shrooms do to your mind I don’t know any cases where you end up killing the people your with. But I did have no sense of reality.

I have no idea if I would recommend for someone to do a big dose of shrooms or a similar thing. I had a semi-religious experience and I think some good mental work. But it was not fun. Purgatory is not fun.

But I’m writing this here because that’s my best understanding of some kind of temporary mental illness where you could like kill your kids but not understand what you are doing.

I apologize in advance, but there are a lot of deranged people in EA who are totally into microdoses of LSD or other mind-hallucineugnics. I'm not one of them, in either sense of the word, for good reason. I have no doubt that what you experienced was real enough to you, and that it was a bad one. But your experience, as it reads, is no different than a schizophrenic rant from someone severely disturbed, and voluntarily inducing oneself into such an experience is perverse. It's a personal choice to mindkill oneself with ayuhuesca or what have you, but I never saw it as a brave or adventurous thing, but a kind of psychic suicide.

I’m not touching them for a while. Ayahuaca has too many reports of negative reactions and outcomes that I don’t have that on my list to do anytime.

Everything I’ve seen on psychedelic mushrooms is they are safe to take and people don’t end up doing bad things while hallucinating. Along with having low addiction rates. Personally though it felt dangerous to me and I could see someone doing something bad while on them. Plus I think controlling your dose is hard.

I am basically mixed on whether people should try them.

I think if the person is suicidal or seriously lacking purpose, it might serve purpose as medicine. But to use it recreationally is on the same tier as underwater cave diving. You're a braver man than I for trying even the more moderate option.

All the data seems to indicate it’s not that danger and safer than every thing else people use recreationally. Except it’s not addicting.

Now they did seem powerful to me. And having a psychotic break for a couple hours feels like it should be dangerous. It’s not in the data. It felt a lot more dangerous than drinking alcohol so that admittedly makes me confused. I would like to have a good explanation for why this is the case.

I think this revelation will end the debate about whether the jury failed to reach the right verdict.

I wish I had your faith. I think the self-interest and entitlement of liberal women will mean they don't budge an inch. Middle class white women continue to be the main beneficiaries of DEI despite other groups being ostensibly ranked above them on the oppression totem -- that is to say they're higher ranked only on paper.

Liberal White Women have always folded to the rest of the Progressive Stack, including Black Men. The only cohorts they're able to put up a fight against is White and/or Asian Men.

Why the difference with Asian Men? Are they counted as Whites?

No, that would be silly. Maybe you can find some Twitter randos claiming as such - there's 8.5 billion or so people on Earth, and seemingly twice that many Twitter accounts, so I wouldn't be shocked if you could - but no, Asian men aren't white. They just aren't included, as a rule, in the Progressive Stack.

Don't make the mistake of thinking the Oppression Olympics are rigously defined, and subject to serious analysis, and for that matter, don't make the mistake of thinking they evolved organically, ground-up. The system decided it was in its interest to "Believe Women," when the target was "White Men*" but not when it came to "Black and Brown Bodies." Women aren't leaders, and won't be the ones making the call on who counts. As Orwell noted in 1984, women are the most ruthless enforcers of the rules, but they don't make them. They're** not going to go hard on this guy unless the system tells them he's fair game, that they won't be accused of "doing a racism" if they do.

*"White Men" being primarily men not in capital-P "Power," primarily (and especially) Red Tribe men, not literally every man of Caucasian descent. **Again, this is in the main; doubtless there'll be some women going off the reservation on Twitter, but not in numbers to matter, and they'll catch hell for doing so).

For some time now, for the purposes of the progressive stack, Asians have become white. Though sometimes not white, or extra white, depending on the context.

Basically similar to Jews.

Do you think white women get a bigger boost than blacks in affirmative action? Look at test scores at elite institutions and who is getting the biggest bump and disabuse yourself of this obviously incorrect leftist talking point. There would be almost 0 black men there without AA and DEI.

It's not that white women score the most diversity points, so much as the demand for racial diversity exceeds supply, so the white women end up actually filling most of the diversity hires/admits. "Woman-led" isn't as good as "bipoc-led," but it's better than letting white and asian guys run the show. A lot of the sinecures designed for black people end up going to white women when there aren't enough black people to hit the quota. And with things like college admissions, women already have a leg-up because of how female-biased primary and secondary enducation is, so even a relatively modest DEI bump can become a madsive advantage. This is especially true because being a woman has zero correlation with generational poverty, and so you have all these applicants with the same resources and social connections as white men, but who also get to take advantage of a bunch of programs originally intended to help the poor and disenfranchised.

Also, there are a lot of resources available to assist "minorities" (often explicitly including women) that give additional preference to racial minorities on paper, but still require jumping through a bunch of complicated bureaucratic hoops that, in reality, serve as a barrier actually underprivileged peoole struggle to surmount. Technically eligible (but extremely non-central examples of the type the programs were intended to help) middle class white women, on the other hand, are famously proficient in paperwork, and take advantage of the programs at very high rates.

This just says to me that black people don't take advantage of the easy opportunities afforded to them, and non-black women do.

And why are privileged women able to shamelessly exploit the system without their conscience stopping them? Where does that predisposition (and societal acceptance of it) come from?

I think the self-interest and entitlement of liberal women will mean they don't budge an inch.

I do agree with this. Blacks who are seen as on the side of the enemy, black conservatives being the most famous case, do not get treated nicely.

Middle class white women continue to be the main beneficiaries of DEI despite other groups being ostensibly ranked above them on the oppression totem

What do you mean by this? What the numbers I’ve seen, affirmative action boosts white women individually less than other groups, like black women. Is it a case where, in aggregate, white women benefit the most or their cultural preferences are the most dominant?

What do you mean by this?

On aggregate, just by sheer numbers, and also I think iirc they attain the highest level roles from it? It's a vague memory of something I read years ago. I didn't file it away for later.

The amount of preference they get is less, but their access to the preferences is greater. They have the same access to wealth and power that the evil white men oppressing everyone have, but also have access to gibs.

It's the same as how all the black people in elite universities are either the children of rich American alumni or rich Africans on student visas, with vanishingly few that you could fairly describe as coming from underprivileged backgrounds. Affirmative action mostly helps people who are already privileged but qualify for the gibs on a technicality.

I was considering a post on the jury subject, but you beat me to it. I was going to focus on the comments some of the jurors have made in interviews:

“Roni Carlson, a retired fifth-grade teacher, was the jury foreperson…said she'll attend the retrial if there is one, to support Clancy.”

“Juror Kellie Farina…said the holdout juror ‘had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.’”

“I started filling out forms, I was so excited.”

I can’t find the exact comment, but one of them said that he would not take into account their wisdom from being nurses in teachers. Other jurors have said they felt intimidated and changed from guilty to not guilty.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/09/10/lindsay-clancy-jurors-reasonable-doubt-mistrial/91675679007/

https://nypost.com/2026/09/08/us-news/lindsay-clancy-jury-was-ready-to-find-her-not-guilty-of-murder-until-one-man-refused-to-agree-jurors-reveal-i-was-so-excited/

I mean. This is crazy, right? Do they know how this makes them sound?

Other jurors have said they felt intimidated and changed from guilty to not guilty.

Based on my recent jury experience, you need to account that ~50% of the jury just wants to GTFO and will happily agree with whatever the biggest plurality of outspoken jurors want.

And sometimes it's ten times worse!

And wretches hang, that jurymen may dine!

Do they know how this makes them sound?

Yes? No?

I think they are doing what they believe will confer the most status on them in the in-group and uttering words that enrage the outgroup or befuddle normies is an added bonus in that case.

But its crazy how this has been a series of recursively nesting scissor statements from the jump.

Likewise, its the apotheosis of the Progressive project: women exercising civic authority to serve on a jury, fully autonomous agents able to exercise their own will over others... completely swayed by the argument that women's emotional and mental instability renders them immune from accountability and punishment, and yet having their goals thwarted by a black guy, where the black guy is actually in favor of 'lynching' the white woman, for reasons thus far known only to him.

And history's Supervillain, the Old White Male Attorney suddenly cast as the feminist icon in the drama. The innocent woman saved by the very type of person who used to be her worst oppressor. A hero.

Except, not so much. Love the timing on this drop.

The Simulation masters have a twisted sense of humor, but its A+ writing. Expectations subverted at every turn.

not so much.

How common are those kind of misconduct complaints? I can imagine it's not that rare for people who lose big cases to try and blame the lawyer and accuse them of being the "real" bad guy.

For a long-practicing criminal law attorneys I'm sure they face many over their career.

However the stage it appears to have moved to, where the initial investigation is found to be at least credible enough to merit possible discipline, is rarer.

Sometimes happens when long-practicing attorneys lose a step or two, at least in their administrative practices, and slip up in a critical way that they wouldn't have before.

I have little insight into the merits of the claim but from the professional-ethical standpoint they're fairly 'serious' in nature.

Similar to med mal. Being wrongly sued for malpractice is something of an initiation ceremony for attorneys. Usually it's an argument over the bill. The client claims you overcharged, you present your timesheets showing you didnt, and you agree to take a haircut to avoid getting the courts involved and raising your insurance premiums.

Here, considering the allegations regard a dispute over fees in the context of a corrupt politician trying to get his conviction thrown out, my iniital impression is that the lawsuit is probably not meritorious. I certainly trust the attorney more than his client, absent further details.

My understanding, admittedly second-hand, is that more than one of the female jurors have admitted on camera to arguing their position based on their own "expert opinion", ie based on evidence that was not actually admitted in the trial proper, and that this is in fact serious misconduct. Can anyone else shed more light on this aspect?

It is most likely not misconduct at all, and certainly not serious misconduct. The jury instructions include, "when deciding whether to believe a witness and how much importance to give a witness's testimony, you must look at all the evidence, drawing on your own common sense and experience of life." If someone is a nurse, and they think that gives them special insight as to which side's psychiatric expert to trust, that's fair game.

This is true but it does not allow you to interpret toxicology reports which some claim they did.

This is true but it does not allow you to interpret toxicology reports which some claim they did.

If the toxicology reports are in evidence, any consideration a juror makes of them is "interpretation". It would only be misconduct if they got the toxicology reports from outside the courtroom.

The misconduct is saying "my interpretation is better than yours because I'm a nurse."

You're allowed to bring your expertise and life experience to the jury room.

You're not allowed to countermand sworn testimony by relying on your "experience" though. And no, "expertise" isn't allowed, just general experiences. Doing so introduces unsworn testimony that the opposition has not had the opportunity to cross-examine.

More comments

Really? If the alleged victim in a sexual assault claimed that the accused used his penis to do something impossible, like he shot bullets out of it, I'm not allowed to convey to the women on the jury that penises do not work that way?

That’s a bit different. It is common knowledge that penises don’t shoot bullets. But toxicology reports and their implications are not common knowledge.

The one juror put herself up as an expert but one that was not able to be cross examined.

That kind of bullying is routine in jury deliberations and doesn't rise to misconduct that would void a verdict. I listed a few cases on the issue before when juries were discussed.

The one that got me, was the male juror who thought wrapping one of the bands around a water bottle was beyond the pale, when the move seems clearly intemded to remind the othet 11 jurors that it was wrapped around the three children's necks.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/16981196/lindsay-clancy-holdout-juror-mimicked-strangling-kids-exericse-band/

I think this revelation will end the debate about whether the jury failed to reach the right verdict.

I live under a rock. How/why? I have no idea what you are trying to say.

There has been a lot of character assassination of the holdout juror.

The assumption from the media and progressives is that the holdout must have been a MAGA and manosphere white dude. The fact that it’s a black man, and he was hectored by white people, means they’ll drop it because it looks bad and doesn’t fit their narrative.

If every contentious jury trial had a obstinant black man on it that refused to obey instructions and just voted on their moral intuitions, the outcomes of these trials would be a lot more right wing. So as long as the trial doesn't directly involve a black defendent, you can guess that the jury will hang. Arguably the prosecution made an error of letting three nurses into the jury pool, but the defense foolishly made the assumption that a black man would be the same as the other white men on the jury.

The progressive media was gearing up for a witch hunt on the holdout, but that isn't going to go anywhere now.

Back in college a class went over how jurors act based on race, sex and age. Prosecutors and defense use these stats to make informed decisions of who they want on a jury. Long story short older black men like to vote to convict and support executing the guilty. At least relatively more than some other demographics. Young white women just the opposite. This is based on my memories of very outdated statistics. Anyways, yes to your point.

I've done jury selection surveys in Washington DC for a trial involving affirmative action that indicate something similar. Surprisingly, it wasnt the black participants who proved the problem. It was the white women of Georgetown. A working class black man understands the importance of job-based merit over optics in a way that a liberal white lady with a fake email job never will.

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