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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.

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.

  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.

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