I’ve hesitated to write about the Lindsay Clancy case, for the whole tragedy is quite literally ‘obscene’, which is to say, too gruesome to be visualized, put on display or even put into words. One can scarcely imagine what the jurors went through, having sift through the gruesome evidence. Even less imaginable is that all but one of them wanted to acquit her (apparently, a faithful Catholic).
False compassion is a dangerous thing. C.S. Lewis – amongst many others – saw that warped ‘mercy’ could motivate the most profound evil, which is why the acronym for the satanic organization in his space trilogy was ‘N.I.C.E’. The word – com–passio – implies that we ‘suffer with’, we identify with the ‘pain’ of another. But whose? Why do so many suffer not with the murdered children, but with the murdering mother?
The defense claims that Mrs. Clancy was psychotic and entered a non-guilty plea on the basis of insanity, apparently, of a temporary and transient sort, for she was undiagnosed before her heinous act.
The problem is similar to that of ‘somnambulation’. Courts still permit the defendant to claim they were sleepwalking, say, when they suffocated their spouse with a pillow. But somnambulation is rarely ever successful, since it’s impossible to prove or disprove.
The same holds for ‘temporary’ psychosis, which, here, is accepted entirely on the word of a psychiatrist, whose science – if one may use the term – is fraught with uncertainty, and, one might argue, an implicit materialist ideology. If we’re just nerve cells firing, no one’s ‘guilty’, for we’re all just damaged biological machines, to be fixed with the right psychotropic concoction.
Even if we accepted the insanity plea, there are two further difficulties with such a claim. There is the ironically in-sane policy in the Massachusetts legal system that one must prove that the accused is not insane, a quasi-impossible task, as are almost all false negatives.
As one source put it in the use of sleepwalking as an excuse or, shall we say, a mitigating factor:
Despite the defense’s success in certain cases, most attorneys are reluctant to use this strategy, as the claim of committing a crime during sleep can be seen as a last-ditch effort that lacks reliable scientific support. Furthermore, courts are hesitant to believe such a defense, as it is difficult to distinguish between a true sleepwalker and an individual who is simply using sleepwalking as an excuse to avoid prosecution. Conflicting expert testimonies on the subject further complicates the matter.
Just so.
Then there is the fine line between what we often call ‘insanity’ and plain old evil. Malice, even demonic possession, can seem like one is ‘out of one’s mind’. In short, because one is.
Determining mens rea – how guilty was the conscience of the perpetrator – may play some part in determining punishment, but not the primary one. How can a human court peer inside the mind or soul? Is not its task simply, or at least primarily, to determine whether the alleged has, or has not, committed an objective crime? Should it not be left to God to judge the heart and the depths of one’s conscience?
The purpose of the punishment meted out by our legal system (or, indeed, any authority) is three-fold, as Pope Saint John Paul II alludes in Evangelium Vitae: To rehabilitate the offender, to defend society and as proportionate retribution for the crime. These are all distinct but not separate. They flow one into the other.
If Lindsay Clancy is let off, none of these three will be fulfilled: The mere fact that she is striving for a non-guilty verdict after pre-meditatively murdering her own children, and is not throwing herself upon the mercy of the court, and of society, begging for some sort of expiation, with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, offers some indication that this crime is not being treated with the gravity and horror it deserves.
Whatever her interior guilt, a ‘not guilty’ verdict would send a very wrong and distorted message, not only to Mrs. Clancy, but to all mothers and the whole of society: Children would be deemed expendable if a mother’s mental health is at stake. Such is already the case for pre-natal infanticide, that is, abortion. Even ‘pro-life’ laws make exceptions for the ‘life and health’ of the mother. The slippery slope from this to post-birth infanticide is very slippery and insidious, as the recent ‘putting down’ of the disabled toddler in the Netherlands bears grim witness and, now, the Clancy case.
Children need defending, for they cannot defend themselves, and we as a society need to know that anyone who puts them to death or grievously harms them in any way – even their own mothers – will suffer some sort of retributive, rehabilitative and proportionate expiation, which is requisite for repentance and ultimate salvation. For without such metanoia – as Christ Himself warns – we will pay that price in eternity.
