Lindsay Clancy: the arguments that sound like law and aren’t

There are two arguments in this case that sound like opposites and are the same mistake.

The first is the version you hear from the Nancy Grace side of this. She killed three children. That is the whole argument and it’s meant to be the end of the conversation.

The second is what Alan Jackson said on a podcast I listened to this week. Nobody in their right mind would kill their children, so that almost demands a logical inference that she was insane.

Both start from the act and reason backward to her mental state. Both skip the evidence about her mind entirely. The act is identical whether she was psychotic or not, which is exactly why it cannot tell you her true mental state.

The law forbids this for a reason. If the horror of a crime could establish a mental state, the worst crimes would be the easiest to excuse and the easiest to condemn depending only on which direction you already wanted to go.

Jackson knows this. He is a former prosecutor who has tried major cases. He would object if opposing counsel argued it in front of a jury. Nancy Grace knows it too. She was a prosecutor for years, she knows who her audience is and she knows what moves them.

Both of them are playing to what people already want to hear. It works on television because it lands instantly and requires no critical thinking. Jurors are not allowed to reason this way. They are told to decide on the evidence and the act is not evidence of what was in her mind.

There is a second shortcut people take. It is true that the burden is on the Commonwealth and criminal responsibility is treated as an element the state has to disprove beyond a reasonable doubt. Most states make the defendant prove insanity instead. But watch what happens when that correct statement of law becomes something you say to another person in a room.

It turns into a question. Are you sure? Are you certain? Can you really say you know what was in her head?

Nobody can answer yes to that honestly, because nobody knows what is in anyone’s head. So the answer is always some version of no, I cannot be certain. And the moment you say it, the argument appears to be over. You admitted doubt. Doubt means acquit.

Except the instruction says the opposite about that kind of doubt. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond all possible doubt, because everything in the lives of human beings is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. A juror can acknowledge doubt and still convict. That is not lawlessness. That is the sentence in the middle of the instruction doing what it was written to do.

It appears the Clancy trial hit this exact scenario.
The lone juror is being asked has to defend and the people asking never do. It sounds like law, so refusing it feels like refusing the judge.

You can see how this spirals. Far enough along, a jury sends the judge a note naming the juror, reporting where the room stands, and describing that person as not following the law on reasonable doubt. Sullivan made the right call.

Reciting the burden is not an argument about the evidence. Once a conversation is running on are you sure, it has stopped being about anything anyone saw at trial.

Take away the act and take away the burden recitation, and you have a specific question.

Think of it as a hurdle the state has to clear. Beyond a reasonable doubt is the same words in every criminal case in the country, so the height never changes but it is subjective. Reasonable doubt has no number attached to it. There is no blood test for capacity, no breathalyzer for a mental state. What counts as reasonable to one juror is not what counts to another, and the instruction leaves it that way on purpose because mental states do not come with instruments.

So the height is set by something, and what sets it is the evidence the defense puts up.

In the Andrea Yates case, a prosecutor faced an enormous hurdle. Seven years of charted psychosis. An antipsychotic prescribed for it and stopped two weeks before the drownings. Her own doctor’s written warning that another pregnancy would bring the psychosis back. Catatonia that nurses documented. A family rule that she was never alone with her children. Months of visible delusion in jail afterward. That is a very high jump and she was eventually acquitted.

Here is the hurdle in the Lindsay Clancy case…

One report of a command hallucination from the defendant herself. It arrives the moment her husband leaves the house. It lasts about eighteen minutes. Survives a call with her husband. It appears in no clinical record before, across fourteen appointments with her psychiatrist, a nurse practitioner, a therapist, an inpatient stay and a perinatal program. It appears in no record after, including the days at Brigham before she was on an antipsychotic and three years of daily observation since. And it exists in two versions that cannot both be true, told to different people.

That is the whole thing. Everything else in the defense case is either evidence of illness, which nobody disputed, or expert opinion built on that same account.

The burden of proof standard is a serious one. The hurdle the defense built under it was not.