The Clancy Defence and the Lunacy of Mens Rea

A mother argues that hallucinations absolve her from responsibility for the deaths of her three children.

There is something profoundly strange about the trial of Lindsay Clancy. Not because the facts are disputed — the defence and prosecution largely agree on what happened, how it happened, when it happened and who was responsible.

Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother, killed her three young children — Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months — in January 2023. Prosecutors say she strangled them with exercise bands after arranging for her husband to leave the family home. She then jumped from a second-floor window in an apparent attempt to kill herself, surviving but becoming paralysed.

Her defence does not claim that somebody else killed the children. It does not claim the deaths were accidents. It does not claim Clancy's body somehow performed the acts without her conscious involvement. Instead, the defence asks us to look somewhere altogether less tangible: inside her mind.

Clancy, they argue, was suffering from "postpartum psychosis". A forensic psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, told the jury that she was experiencing a "command hallucination" and a "delusion of influence" when she killed her children. He believes she was unable to distinguish right from wrong or meaningfully resist what she believed she was being commanded to do.

According to Resnick, Clancy believed she was actually helping her children by sending them to heaven with her. And with this, the entire meaning of infanticide radically changes. This is mens rea in perhaps its purest and most tangible, yet strangest, form.

The Act Is Not Enough

Criminal law has long insisted that an act alone is often insufficient to establish guilt. There must also be a guilty mind — mens rea. This sounds sensible when expressed abstractly. We instinctively recognise a difference between someone accidentally bumping into another person or deliberately pushing them.

But cases such as Clancy's expose the much more difficult proposition buried beneath that intuition. We are not merely distinguishing deliberate actions from accidental ones. We are allowing invisible mental states to determine whether deliberately performed actions constitute crimes at all.

Consider what happened in this particular case. Clancy strangled her three children after sending her husband to the store. Those are physical events. They occurred in the observable world. Yet the trial may ultimately turn not on those events, but on whether, at the precise moment she performed them, Clancy understood them the same way another person would have.

The prosecution argues that she did. It says her behaviour demonstrated calculation and intention. The defence says she did not. It says psychosis had displaced ordinary judgement and that she was effectively obeying a command generated by a sick mind. However, the actions remain identical whichever account is accepted. Only the interpretation inside the actor's consciousness changes. And somehow that may determine whether she is a murderer.

The Hallucination Problem

There is an obvious compassionate response to this case. If somebody is genuinely psychotic, hearing voices and experiencing reality in a profoundly distorted way, then surely that must matter?

Of course it matters. But not in ascribing responsibility.

It matters medically and when considering treatment. It matters enormously to the person suffering from such hallucinations when attempting to understand why something terrible happened. But none of those propositions demonstrates that mental illness should determine whether a person remains responsible for the acts they physically performed. That distinction is important.

Mental illness can explain an action without removing its authorship. A hallucination does not strangle anybody. A delusion does not tighten an exercise band. A human being performs those actions while suffering from a mental disorder.

This may sound harsh, but the alternative rests on an extraordinary philosophical assumption: that thoughts occurring within us can somehow detach us from actions we perform. If a voice inside Clancy's mind told her to kill her children, the question becomes remarkably simple: who ultimately acted? The voice, or Clancy?

The law appears willing, under certain circumstances, to treat the voice almost as though it were an external coercive agent. That is clearly erroneous. The voice was not another person standing beside her. It had no hands. It exerted no physical force. However real or terrifying it may have seemed, it existed within her own mind/consciousness.

This exposes another difficulty with mens rea. Human beings are not in full control of their thoughts. Ideas appear. Emotions arise. Fears emerge. Obsessions intrude. It is clearly possible — and often the case — for people to experience impulses they detest or fantasies they would never act upon. A person suffering from psychosis may experience these phenomena with extraordinary intensity. But precisely because thoughts are not fully chosen, it seems peculiar to make them the foundation of criminal responsibility.

We Do Not Choose Every Thought

The thing we can most directly attribute to a person is what they actually do. I may feel rage and choose not to strike somebody. I may experience an intrusive thought and choose not to follow it. I may believe something irrational and nevertheless remain responsible for how I act in the physical world.

Our actions are the point at which internal experience becomes external reality. Yet mens rea reverses this hierarchy. It often treats internal experience as morally decisive and external action as insufficient. The Clancy case demonstrates the consequence. Three children are dead, and yet, whether their killer is legally a murderer may hinge upon precisely what she believed while killing them.

Imagine the Same Children

Imagine two otherwise identical cases. In the first, a mother strangles her three children because she hates them and wants them dead. In the second, she strangles her three children because a hallucinated voice tells her they must die in order to be saved.

The children experience precisely the same thing. The same hands act. The same pressure is applied. The same lives end. The difference exists entirely within the mother's thoughts. Yet our legal system may describe one woman as a murderer and the other as not criminally responsible. That is an extraordinary distinction.

We have become so accustomed to the language of intent and mental capacity that we rarely stop to consider what is actually being claimed. The claim is that two identical actions producing identical consequences can possess fundamentally different moral meanings because of thoughts that nobody other than the perpetrator could directly experience.

Perhaps those thoughts help explain why the action occurred. But explanation is not the same as exoneration. If it is, then moral subjectivism has well and truly arrived via the back door.

Responsibility Does Not Require Evil

Part of the confusion may arise because we often treat responsibility and moral wickedness as though they were synonymous. They are not.

Saying somebody is responsible for an action does not make somone evil or iredeemable. A severely mentally ill person may deserve profound sympathy; they may have been failed by doctors. They may have experienced suffering that most of us cannot comprehend. All of those things can simultaneously be true. And yet, in Clancy's case, they still killed an innocent person which amounts to murder.

Recognising responsibility does not require denying illness, suffering or poor rationality. Nor does compassion require us to deny authorship. That distinction matters because the more importance we attach to the defendant's internal world, the more the victims themselves seem to disappear.

Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot testify about what Lindsay Clancy believed. They experienced only what she did. For them, there was no distinction between a psychotic strangulation and a rational strangulation. There was simply strangulation.

This, therefore, becomes an argument for grounding justice in reality rather than attempting to measure guilt through metaphysical speculation about the purity, corruption or coherence of somebody's mind.

The Victims Cannot Enter the Defendant's Mind

Mens rea produces a peculiar imbalance in criminal justice. The defendant's internal world becomes central as the victim's physical reality becomes secondary.

And the Lindsay Clancy case therefore presents a difficult but revealing question: if a person deliberately performs an action, and that action kills another human being, how far inside their mind must we travel before we decide the action is no longer truly theirs?

Three children died at the hands of their mother. Whatever was happening inside Lindsay Clancy's mind may explain why and it will probably influence how she will be treated post court case. It may determine whether confinement will take place in a prison or psychiatric institution, or whether she is deemed entirely innocent and set free. It may inspire sympathy, understanding and reform. But it cannot change what happened or dilute Clancy's culpability. And perhaps the great mistake buried deep within the concept of mens rea is believing that it can.

---

Written by George Tchetvertakov