The Moral Shift that the Lindsay Clancy Trial Revealed

All opinions expressed in this article are my own, and not those of any consulted experts or interviewees.

Fifteen years ago, I sat in an anchor chair in a TV studio for six to eight hours a day, nearly every day for about six weeks. We were in “wall-to-wall coverage.” There was no time to take a break from any of the gruesome testimony—talk of death and decay, the timeline for body decomposition, allegations of incest and abuse—lest we miss a detail that the public was eager to consume.

And they were eager to hear it all, no matter how disturbing, gory, or unbelievable. Our soaring ratings reflected that public interest.

What Happened Then: The Casey Anthony Trial

The Casey Anthony trial riveted not just the metro Orlando area—where Casey and her family lived, and where the remains of her beautiful, brown-haired, two-year-old daughter were found decomposing in woods near the family home—but also the entire country.

How could someone hurt or kill a precious two-year-old? What had happened to Caylee? Why did her disappearance go unreported for 31 days? And why didn’t anyone seem willing to cop to the truth?

Ultimately, the most serious charges against Casey would not stick. A jury acquitted her of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, and aggravated manslaughter of a child, convicting her only of lying to law enforcement.

This post, though, isn’t about the failures or victories of our legal system, depending on how you view any given trial. It’s rather about the court of public opinion—a far more colorful universe ruled not by the staid mechanics of our legal system, but by vibes, feelings, intuition and emotion. And it captures something just as relevant as the verdict itself: the moral instincts of the moment.

What’s Happening Now: The Lindsay Clancy Trial

Fifteen years ago, in a high-profile trial that involved the death of a young child potentially at the hands of a parent, the public demanded accountability from the woman charged in the case. Today, even with an admission from a mother who says she killed her three young children, the public instead is interested in an excuse, or worse, a conspiracy theory.

Of course, the mother I’m talking about now is Lindsay Clancy, whose recent trial ended in a hung jury after she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her defense argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her three young children to death inside her Massachusetts home.

Let me say something clearly at the outset: Postpartum psychosis is real, tragic, and dangerous. It is a rare psychiatric emergency that can appear suddenly in women, even those without a history of mental illness. Acknowledging its existence, and recognizing its warning signs, is critically important.

Three children were killed, and their mother admitted she killed them. And yet, from the earliest days of this case, a startling amount of public energy has been devoted to absolving her of any culpability, and more strangely, concocting theories that redirect suspicion toward her husband, a man who has alternately been branded a sociopath, a highly intelligent master manipulator, and the true culprit on social media.

What has happened with the public between Casey Anthony and Lindsay Clancy?

The Story We Needed to Believe

In my recent conversation with Orlando-based trial attorney Whitney Boan, she offered a simple explanation for the public’s fixation on Patrick Clancy, and it boils down to human impulse.

People simply cannot comprehend that a mother would brutally kill her own children, so they needed another person to blame, someone even one small step further from a maternal figure. And that leaves only one person: Patrick Clancy.

The impulse to pass the blame is real. As any mother knows, the bond with her children is so visceral—inhabited in body, mind and spirit—that it is incomprehensible that any moment of mental distress, however intense, could shroud that protective impulse, let alone be the killer.

But there is a problem with the theories that centered on Patrick as the killer; the evidence simply did not support it, at least the evidence presented at trial. He was extensively investigated, his movements corroborated through video, phone records and GPS data.

Moreover, it was not Patrick who was on trial. This was Lindsay Clancy’s trial—the one who admitted to the murders. Why was this so hard for the public to believe?

Explanation is Not Exoneration

As Whitney explained in our interview, postpartum psychosis and legal insanity are not interchangeable. One is a medical diagnosis; the other is a legal standard. Ultimately, the question wasn’t simply whether or not Lindsay Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis, but whether her illness left her without the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of her actions when she killed her children.

Whitney also emphasized how rare it is for a defendant to prevail with an insanity defense. As she said in our interview, this is not a new or novel legal theory, nor some newly-created “hormone precedent” that could be established as legal precedent to diminish the rights of women in the future.

Moreover, a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity wouldn’t have meant Lindsay would have walked free. Whitney says it would likely have resulted in an involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility where she would receive intensive treatment, with her mental condition subject to periodic review, before any potential consideration of release.

As you can see, the law is designed to provide for nuance. It can recognize that a person was profoundly ill at the time of a crime, consider whether that illness eliminates criminal responsibility, and still acknowledge the need to protect the public. The court of public opinion should strain toward that same level of nuance.

No, we are not legal experts, but we should still be capable of holding multiple truths simultaneously. We can understand that a woman can quite literally lose her mind—we can relate, even—and still demand a system that holds her to a relative level of accountability.

I fear that the impulse to identify with Lindsay has blurred the line between empathy and responsibility. Worse, it has erased the true victims from the story: her children.

Who Do We Allow to Be Guilty?

This is where the contrast between Casey Anthony and Lindsay Clancy becomes more visible, and about something more than just criminal trials.

Fifteen years ago, the public saw in Casey Anthony a woman they could easily villainize—young and beautiful, careless, single, irresponsible. Her behavior in the days after her daughter’s “disappearance” violated every expectation people had of a grieving mother. The evidence in a courtroom may not have been enough to convict her, but that didn’t change the public’s desire to see her punished.

Lindsay Clancy cuts a more tragic figure. Paralyzed by her attempt at suicide, she sat through her trial in a wheelchair, her dark brows constantly in a concerned furrow, looking up at her attorney with an apparent deep trust. There was—understandably—no fight left in her.

And, perhaps most importantly to the people who would come to defend her so fiercely online, Lindsay was “relatable.”

Who among us hasn’t struggled with early motherhood? Only a small number of women, I’d venture to guess, transitioned through those first months with ease. It was easier to relate to Lindsay because—even though most of us had, or would, never commit such a heinous crime—we understood the herculean effort it takes to simply survive those early days of motherhood.

That recognition created empathy, which slowly cascaded into identification. And for some people, identification became absolution. Lindsay, in their minds, should not be held accountable because they’d been there too, or at least close to it.

This is where moral relativism enters the conversation—that shapeshifting impulse that allows us to judge similar acts through different eyes, depending on who committed them. Moral relativism leads with, I understand her, rather than, these are the facts. It pits our hearts against our brains, causing judgment of her actions to feel like an erasure of our own selves.

The problem is, when moral relativism changes the compass by which we judge culpability, we become reluctant to assign blame. And when we refuse to hold people accountable to the severity of their actions, the very foundation upon which we built our society begins to crumble.

What Moral Relativism Costs Us

There is a cost to judging actions based on the sympathy we feel for the person accused.

When we understand people primarily through their impulses, diagnoses, trauma or identities, we think we are extending compassion. In reality, we are denying them something even more foundational—agency.

An identity or trauma does not divorce someone from the responsibility for their actions. Take Luigi Mangione. When he was accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, his supporters framed it as an act of economic altruism—an attempt to level the playing field between the aggrieved common man and the all-powerful, greedy insurance companies.

It was an “I’ll show them” taken to its most extreme end, an act his admirers interpreted not as murder, but as a strike against the system that the victim represented.

This is what I fear moral relativism costs us—the compass we use to judge the world.

It strips us of the much-needed objectivity required to govern a pluralistic society, one where people hold very different beliefs. If violence is only wrong when committed by people we oppose, then violence isn’t really wrong. It’s simply another tool whose acceptability depends on who wields it.

Over time, that inconsistency shifts the Overton window—the arguments and beliefs deemed acceptable by society at any given time. What was once unequivocally condemned becomes justifiable. We relate identity and motive so closely to culpability that the former edges out the latter. Punishment becomes suspect, accountability negotiable, and we trudge slowly toward chaos.

And no, I’m not being dramatic.

Violence by nature is unpredictable, and does not tie itself to the causes you deem worthy. A shapeshifter, it can strike just as easily at the people and things you find worthy of defending. Each faction claims the same permission—”it was justified.” But who is the ultimate judge of what’s right?

A lack of a shared moral compass doesn’t make us better, kinder people. It makes us all more vulnerable.

Compassion Without Moral Confusion

I do not know what a jury should ultimately decide about Lindsay Clancy. After all, I’m not in the courtroom, nor am I covering it with the same intensity and attention with which I was formerly required to cover other cases.

But here’s what I do know, even from casual observation: This thing in our society that has shifted—what I just attempted to explain with so many words—impacts all of us as a country, even if we are not in the jury box or the courtroom. No one can escape the new rules by which our world is governed. The deflection of fact in favor of feeling will do us no good, that I know.

Fifteen years ago, the public demanded accountability for the death of a young child.

Today, even with an admission from a mother who says that yes, she did kill her three young children, that same public appears to be more interested in finding an excuse—or worse, a conspiracy theory.

I’ll remind you again: Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They died, choking for air, at the hands and under the gaze of their mother. This is not disputed.

The medical system and her family may very well have failed Lindsay Clancy. But in the aftermath of this trauma, we cannot fully abandon discernment, even as we ask for mercy.

We can acknowledge suffering without abandoning facts. We can extend compassion while preserving the moral norms that a free and functioning society requires.

Compassion should make our society more humane, but it should not make judgment impossible.

In fact, if we want compassion to mean anything at all, we must insist on both.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope you’ll join me on Substack for more posts like this one.