Has the Horror of the Act Itself Become the Defense?

What happens when an act is so horrifying that assigning responsibility to the person who committed it becomes psychologically unbearable?

Luis Gonzalez | August 30, 2026

Cora Clancy.  Dawson Clancy.  Callan Clancy.

A person killed them.

There is no elegant way around that sentence, which is precisely why we ought to begin there.  We can discuss postpartum psychosis, psychiatric medications, doctors, prescriptions, institutional failures, sleep deprivation, delusions, and every other circumstance that might help explain how Lindsay Clancy arrived at the moment when she killed her children.  We should discuss them, but there is a peculiar danger in allowing explanation to become so elaborate that the person who committed the act begins to disappear from the story.

That is the question beneath this case.  What happens when an act is so horrifying that assigning responsibility to the person who committed it becomes psychologically unbearable?  Do we begin searching, almost instinctively, for something else to blame, not because the evidence necessarily leads there, but because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate?

The defense does not have to persuade a jury that the killings did not happen.  Everyone knows they happened, and nobody disputes who physically carried them out.  The more difficult proposition is that the woman who killed her children was, at the relevant moment, so profoundly affected by postpartum psychosis that she lacked the criminal responsibility ordinarily attached to her actions.

That argument presents the jury with a peculiar psychological dilemma.  The defendant is not some remote stranger whose conduct can be contemplated with clinical detachment; she is a mother accused of brutally killing her own children.  The horror of the act itself may therefore........

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