Eleven jurors apparently believed Lindsay Clancy lacked criminal responsibility when she killed her three children. One did not. The mistrial settled nothing in law, but what followed has confirmed Nuntiatoria’s earlier warning: compassion was becoming fandom, while Cora, Dawson and Callan were being pushed towards the margins of their own tragedy.
When Nuntiatoria examined the Lindsay Clancy trial on 4 September, while the jury was still deliberating, we began with three names: Cora, Dawson and Callan. That was deliberate. The legal case was about their mother and whether severe mental illness deprived her of criminal responsibility when she killed them. The wider phenomenon, however, had already become something rather different. Lindsay Clancy was becoming a symbol around whom grievances about maternal mental healthcare, psychiatry, motherhood and institutional failure were gathering. Sympathy was understandable. Much of it was humane. But sympathy was beginning to harden into identification, and identification into allegiance. Our concern was that the three children whose deaths made the trial necessary were slowly becoming supporting characters in a story increasingly centred upon the woman who killed them.¹
We argued then that the trial required distinctions which much contemporary commentary seemed reluctant to make. Explanation is not justification. Mental illness is not necessarily innocence, but neither is the commission of a terrible act proof of full culpability. Compassion does not require exoneration, and punishment is not synonymous with justice. Those were not abstract theological niceties imposed upon an American murder trial. They were almost exactly the distinctions the jury itself was struggling to apply after weeks of psychiatric testimony, medical records, expert disagreement and cross-examination.¹
Within hours of that article appearing, the jury failed.
On Friday, 4 September, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial after more than thirty-eight hours of deliberation spread across seven days. Twelve jurors had heard almost six weeks of evidence, more than eighty witnesses and sharply competing accounts of Lindsay Clancy’s mental condition. They agreed that she had strangled five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan on 24 January 2023. That was not the disputed fact. What divided them was whether, because of mental disease, Clancy lacked the capacity Massachusetts law requires before criminal responsibility can attach.²
The result was no result. Clancy was neither convicted nor acquitted. The court did not find that she suffered postpartum psychosis, nor did it reject that contention. The indictments survive and the Commonwealth may try her again. She remains in psychiatric custody, and a status hearing is scheduled for 29 September. The legal machinery has paused, not concluded.²
What emerged about the jury’s division after the mistrial was nevertheless striking. The panel appears to have stood 11–1, with eleven jurors prepared to find Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and one juror unwilling to join them. That should matter enormously to the prosecution. Eleven citizens who had heard the whole case, rather than selected extracts and commentary, apparently concluded that the Commonwealth had not proved criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt. Any decision to try the case again must begin there.³
It does not follow that the trial had produced an acquittal in everything but name. Eleven is not twelve. Unanimity was required and unanimity was not achieved. That basic fact became surprisingly difficult for some of Clancy’s supporters to tolerate once the jury was discharged.
Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s lead defence attorney, emerged from court plainly furious with the holdout. He said the other jurors had been “robbed”, thanked the jury “minus one”, questioned what had motivated the dissenting juror and remarked that he hoped the man could sleep at night. During deliberations the defence had already sought his removal after the foreperson complained that he was not properly applying Judge Sullivan’s instruction on reasonable doubt. Sullivan investigated the complaint, repeated the relevant instruction and refused to replace him. When a mistrial became imminent, the defence sought emergency appellate intervention. That also failed.⁴
Reddington’s frustration is easily understood. He believed his client had persuaded eleven jurors and had lost the verdict through one man’s refusal to move. But public vilification of that man is another matter. A juror who deliberately refuses to apply the law may indeed be guilty of misconduct. A juror who applies the law conscientiously but understands the evidence differently from eleven colleagues is doing precisely what the unanimity requirement permits him to do. We do not know enough about the private deliberations to say confidently which description is correct. The foreperson’s complaint had to be taken seriously; so did the rights of the dissenting juror.
Reverse the numbers and the problem becomes clearer. Had eleven jurors wanted to convict while one believed the prosecution had failed to prove criminal responsibility, many of those now condemning the holdout would probably have praised his independence. Principles which survive only when they favour our side are not principles at all.
There is a useful Catholic corrective here. Conscience is not a synonym for preference. It must be formed, and it must seek truth. A conscientious judgment can therefore be wrong. Yet the obligation to conform conscience to truth is not the same thing as an obligation to surrender it to a majority. The lone juror may have misunderstood the evidence or the law; perhaps the eleven understood both better. What cannot reasonably be inferred merely from the numbers is that dissent itself was morally corrupt.
The 11–1 split should produce humility on both sides. Those who spent the trial insisting that Clancy was obviously a calculating murderer must now reckon with the fact that eleven jurors apparently declined to hold her criminally responsible. That is no small obstacle to the claim that the psychiatric case was transparently absurd. But Clancy’s supporters must reckon with something too: the twelfth juror existed, his vote counted, and the law did not authorise the other eleven to erase him.
The Commonwealth now has to decide what to do with that reality. A retrial after a hung jury is neither extraordinary nor inherently vindictive, particularly where three children have been killed. The prosecution is entitled to believe that another jury might assess the evidence differently. But prosecutorial discretion is not exhausted by asking what the state is legally permitted to do. Prudence requires a harder question: what would another trial actually achieve?
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz defended the prosecution after the mistrial and returned repeatedly to Cora, Dawson and Callan. Some of Clancy’s supporters shouted him down, accused him of corruption, cried “shame” and called for his removal from office.⁵ It is perfectly legitimate to question Cruz’s judgment. An 11–1 split should cause any sensible prosecutor to reconsider the strengths and weaknesses of the case before asking another family, another jury and another group of witnesses to endure it. But prosecuting an admitted triple killing in which criminal responsibility was genuinely contested is not, by itself, corruption.
Catholic thought does not require suspicion of civil authority simply because authority sometimes punishes. Saint Paul recognises a real function of temporal government in restraining wrongdoing, while the moral tradition distinguishes legitimate public punishment from private vengeance. Authority may act unjustly, and when it does it must be resisted or corrected. But its legitimacy does not disappear whenever its exercise is painful. The prosecutor’s duty is not to satisfy public anger, nor to win because losing would be embarrassing. It is to pursue justice according to truth.⁶
That brings us back to the question around which the entire trial turned: responsibility.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that imputability and responsibility may be diminished or even nullified by psychological factors. This is not a concession to contemporary therapeutic culture. It arises from the most elementary principles of Catholic moral theology. Human culpability presupposes a genuinely human act: knowledge matters, freedom matters, intention matters. An external act can be gravely evil while the subjective culpability of the person performing it is reduced because reason or freedom has been seriously impaired.⁷
The direct killing of innocent children remains objectively gravely evil. Postpartum psychosis cannot turn the strangling of Cora, Dawson and Callan into a morally neutral event. Their right to live was not contingent upon their mother’s mental health. Yet if psychosis so profoundly disordered Lindsay Clancy’s perception of reality that she could no longer appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions or meaningfully govern herself, her personal culpability may have been greatly diminished or absent. The horror of the act and the guilt of the actor are connected. They are not interchangeable.
Popular discussion regularly collapses the two. “She killed three children” becomes proof that she must have possessed full moral responsibility. On the other side, “she was mentally ill” becomes sufficient reason to speak as though responsibility has disappeared. Neither proposition is adequate. Mental illness can leave substantial freedom intact; in extreme cases it can devastate it. The difficult work lies in determining which occurred.
This is also why the phrase “justice for Cora, Dawson and Callan” needs careful handling. Justice does not mean extracting the maximum possible suffering from their mother. If she retained the capacity necessary for responsibility, then accountability is due. If grave mental disease deprived her of that capacity, it would be unjust to pretend otherwise simply because the deaths were appalling. Punishing somebody for guilt she did not possess would not honour the children. It would merely satisfy the demand that somebody must pay.
But the opposite distortion has become more visible as well. Compassion for Lindsay cannot require the children to fade from view. They were not symptoms of her mental breakdown or exhibits in a debate about psychiatric provision. They were three persons whose lives possessed value independently of anything we eventually conclude about the condition of their mother.
For Catholics the reason is more fundamental than sentiment. Cora, Dawson and Callan were made in the image and likeness of God. Their dignity did not begin when a prosecutor displayed their photographs or when supporters of their mother began invoking them defensively. It belonged to them by nature. Nothing in a psychiatric report, criminal verdict or online campaign can increase or diminish it.
The natural relationship between mother and child gives the deaths an added gravity. Childhood is a state of radical dependence. A small child has a particular claim upon the protection of those into whose care he has been born, and the family home should ordinarily be the place where that protection is most secure. There is something especially terrible when the person upon whom such protection depends becomes the physical cause of the child’s death.
Yet the same understanding of family makes serious postpartum psychiatric care more, not less, important. If a mother’s reason is disintegrating, protecting her can be inseparable from protecting her children. A society which speaks earnestly about family life cannot regard specialist perinatal psychiatry as peripheral. Nor should Catholics fall into the crude error of treating psychosis as weak faith, defective character or a condition to be corrected with pious exhortation. The human person is a unity of body and soul. Mental illness is real illness. Grace does not make medicine redundant.
Questions about the care Lindsay Clancy received therefore remain legitimate and serious. Both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy have pursued civil claims concerning her psychiatric treatment. Those proceedings may eventually establish whether professional failures contributed to the disaster. They may also establish that clinicians acted reasonably in exceptionally difficult circumstances. A catastrophic outcome does not prove negligence, just as repeated contact with doctors does not prove that the treatment given was adequate. Evidence must decide that question too.⁸
Had the story ended there, the aftermath of the mistrial would already have raised more than enough difficult questions about justice, psychiatry and culpability. Instead, contemporary culture managed to provide a small episode which distilled the larger problem almost perfectly.
Amanda Hirsch, host of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, posted sponsored material connected with the prediction-market platform Polymarket after the trial ended. Following criticism, she removed it and apologised. She acknowledged that using the Clancy case in conjunction with a commercial partnership had been insensitive and said, in effect, that she had become so absorbed by the case that she had lost perspective.⁹
The apology deserves to be accepted. Repentance becomes meaningless if we demand apologies and then deny anyone the possibility of being forgiven after giving one. But Hirsch’s explanation deserves attention for another reason. Becoming consumed by the case and losing perspective describes rather well what has happened far beyond one podcast.
Three children were strangled. Their father returned home to discover what had happened. Their mother attempted suicide and survived with catastrophic injuries. A criminal trial spent weeks examining whether she was psychotic. Jurors then carried that evidence through almost forty hours of deliberations and emerged unable to agree. Support services were made available to them because of the psychological burden of what they had heard. Yet this chain of suffering could still be absorbed into the commercial grammar of online content and prediction markets.¹⁰
Our earlier editorial warned that compassion was becoming fandom. The mistrial has exposed what follows. Fandom generates teams. Teams require antagonists. The dissenter becomes the villain, the prosecutor becomes the persecutor, the courtroom becomes a stage, and each development supplies another round of material to consume. Once attention itself has a monetary value, tragedy does not merely become entertainment; it acquires commercial utility.
That is where a Catholic criticism of the spectacle must go beyond saying that a particular advertisement was tasteless. Human beings may never be treated merely as instruments for somebody else’s amusement or profit. Cora, Dawson and Callan were not content. Lindsay’s psychiatric collapse is not content. Patrick’s grief is not content. A juror’s troubled conscience is not content. Their lives may properly become subjects of public discussion because criminal justice is a public matter, but there remains a moral difference between attending to human suffering and consuming it.
Traditional Catholic moral theology also supplies a word which has largely lost its proper force: scandal. Scandal is not mere notoriety. It concerns behaviour which becomes an occasion of moral harm to others, distorting judgment or encouraging wrongdoing. Those with public influence bear a particular responsibility because their words and conduct can teach others what to admire, despise, excuse or trivialise.¹¹
There is a real danger of scandal when compassion is presented as though mercy requires denial of objective evil. There is scandal when disagreement by a juror becomes permission for hatred. There is scandal when anyone obstructing a preferred legal outcome is cast as morally suspect. There is scandal too if an exceptional case of maternal psychosis is treated as representative of women suffering postpartum illness generally. Mothers experiencing intrusive thoughts need to know that such thoughts do not make them inevitable killers; frightening them into silence would be a disastrous consequence of a movement ostensibly created to support them.
The spectacle ultimately reveals a cultural difficulty deeper than the peculiarities of this case. We have become uncomfortable allowing more than one morally significant truth to remain true at the same time. Lindsay may have loved her children and killed them while gravely mentally ill. Her acts may remain objectively evil while her subjective responsibility was catastrophically reduced. Her doctors may have tried honestly to help and still missed something decisive. Eleven jurors may have interpreted the evidence correctly while a twelfth sincerely understood it otherwise. Timothy Cruz may believe that justice requires prosecution and still conclude that another trial would no longer serve the common good.
None of this fits particularly well into the categories rewarded by social media. The medium prefers a heroine and a villain. It prefers certainty to prudence, outrage to hesitation, affiliation to discrimination. Lindsay must therefore become monster or martyr; the prosecutor, courageous or corrupt; the holdout, principled or malicious. Once everyone has chosen a side, evidence is easily reinterpreted as material with which to defend it.
Catholic moral realism is less exciting. It begins with the uncomfortable fact that reality does not owe us simplicity. Mental illness may diminish freedom without destroying human dignity. Authority can be legitimate and still make mistakes. Conscience deserves respect and can nevertheless err. Forgiveness is obligatory without rendering public justice unnecessary. An objectively evil action can have been performed by a person whose degree of guilt God alone knows perfectly.
Patrick Clancy stands at the centre of these collisions in a way that spectators do not. He lost all three children, returned home to the scene of their deaths, watched Lindsay survive terribly injured, publicly asked others to forgive her, testified about his family before a national audience and may now be required to endure another trial. His lawyer has described that prospect as extraordinarily painful.¹² His wishes cannot by themselves settle a matter of public justice, but neither should the burden placed upon him be treated as an incidental cost of procedure.
His forgiveness is also worth understanding without sentimentalising it. Christian forgiveness is not an acquittal. Patrick’s refusal to hate Lindsay does not determine whether she was criminally responsible. Forgiveness concerns what the injured person does with the offence suffered: he relinquishes vengeance. He does not declare that no offence occurred. Indeed, there is nothing especially Christian about “forgiving” something one has first explained away.
Mercy and justice are not rivals. Mercy without truth degenerates into sentimentality; justice without charity degenerates into vengeance. The Cross leaves Christians no room for either simplification. A culpable person should not be falsely pronounced innocent, but neither should a person deprived of meaningful freedom through grave psychosis be treated as fully responsible merely because public anger needs somewhere to land.
That is the dilemma now facing the District Attorney. Another trial is available in law. Whether it is desirable is a matter of prudence. The apparent 11–1 split is powerful evidence of the prosecution’s difficulty. A retrial would place substantial burdens upon Patrick, medical witnesses, another jury and Clancy herself, and might complicate the separate examination of her psychiatric care. Yet three children were killed and the criminal process has not produced a final judgment about the responsibility of the person who killed them.
The answer cannot simply be “try her until someone convicts”, any more than it can be “eleven jurors wanted acquittal, therefore the matter is finished”. Cruz and his colleagues must decide whether another prosecution has a reasonable prospect of resolving what the first could not, and whether doing so serves justice rather than merely prolonging the spectacle.
The mistrial ought to have encouraged precisely that kind of humility. Twelve people heard evidence far more completely than almost anyone commenting online. Eleven apparently reached one conclusion, one another, and nearly forty hours of argument did not close the gap. There could hardly be a clearer warning against the certainty of spectators.
Yet within hours the solitary juror was being denounced, supporters were shouting down the prosecutor, political commentary had entered the case, and the tragedy was being incorporated into sponsored prediction-market material. The sequence reads almost as an illustration of the warning contained in our first article.¹
There is another response available to Catholics, and it has received remarkably little attention amid all the commentary: prayer. Catholics should pray for Cora, Dawson and Callan and commend them to Almighty God. We should pray for Patrick, whose suffering no transcript or documentary reconstruction can communicate adequately. We should pray for Lindsay because, whatever responsibility ultimately attaches to her, the Christian does not cease to recognise an immortal soul in someone associated with terrible acts. We should pray for all twelve jurors, including the dissenter rather than joining those eager to despise him. We should pray for the judge, prosecutors, defence lawyers and doctors that truth and prudence prevail over vanity, pressure and professional self-interest.
Prayer is not an alternative to justice. It reminds us where human justice ends. Massachusetts must make the decisions proper to Massachusetts. Perhaps another jury will eventually determine Lindsay Clancy’s criminal responsibility. Perhaps prosecutors will conclude that another trial can add little to what has already been established. Those judgments matter and ought to be made conscientiously.
Perfect judgment of Lindsay’s knowledge, freedom and culpability does not belong to a podcast audience, a prosecutor, a defence lawyer, eleven jurors, the twelfth juror or Nuntiatoria. It belongs to God.
That recognition does not leave us unable to judge anything. We know that three innocent children were killed. We know the deliberate killing of innocent life is objectively gravely evil. We know grave psychological illness can diminish or even remove subjective culpability. We know mental disease requires treatment rather than stigma. We know punishment must be ordered to justice rather than revenge. We know conscience should not become an object of public hatred merely because it dissents. And we know that another person’s suffering should never become merely a commodity.
There is therefore no Christian “Team Lindsay” and no Christian “Team prosecution”. The Christian does not purchase mercy for one person by forgetting justice owed to another, nor defend innocent children by refusing to consider whether their mother’s mind had become gravely disordered. Catholic charity asks something more demanding because it insists upon truth about everyone involved.
That is why this follow-up must finish where our first article began. Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy were not rhetorical ammunition for prosecutors, awkward complications for those campaigning for their mother, statistics in a debate about postpartum psychiatry or material for an entertainment economy. They were three particular children, created in the image of God, entrusted to a family and possessed of lives whose value did not depend upon how compellingly anyone could tell their story.
The mistrial means Massachusetts has still not decided how the criminal law should judge the woman who killed them. The spectacle which followed has revealed something else: how readily the rest of us can lose sight of the persons at the centre of a tragedy once the tragedy becomes a cause, a contest and a commodity.
That is why their names must still come first: Cora, Dawson and Callan.
¹ Nuntiatoria, “Cora, Dawson and Callan: The Moral Disorder Behind the Lindsay Clancy Spectacle”, 4 September 2026.
² Reuters, “Lindsay Clancy trial over killing her children ends in mistrial”, 4 September 2026; Associated Press, “A mistrial is declared in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy. Here’s what could happen next”, 4 September 2026.
³ People, “Lindsay Clancy Was ‘Robbed’ by Holdout Juror, Attorney Kevin Reddington Says After Mistrial”, 4 September 2026; The Guardian, “Judge declares mistrial in Lindsay Clancy case after jury deadlocked again”, 4 September 2026.
⁴ PBS NewsHour, “Lindsay Clancy’s lead defense attorney speaks after mistrial declared in murder case”, 4 September 2026; The Guardian, “Judge declares mistrial in Lindsay Clancy case after jury deadlocked again”, 4 September 2026.
⁵ ABC News, “Lindsay Clancy supporters vow to return in ‘bigger numbers’ after mistrial”, 4 September 2026; CBS Boston, coverage of Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz’s post-mistrial remarks, 4 September 2026.
⁶ Romans 13:1–4; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.64; Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2265–2266.
⁷ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1735, 1750–1756, 1857–1860, 2268.
⁸ Associated Press, “A mistrial is declared in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy. Here’s what could happen next”, 4 September 2026.
⁹ People, “‘Not Skinny But Not Fat’ Podcaster Responds to Backlash for ‘Grossly Inappropriate’ Betting Ad About Lindsay Clancy Trial”, 6 September 2026.
¹⁰ Reuters, “Lindsay Clancy trial highlights growing efforts to aid jurors after traumatic cases”, 4 September 2026.
¹¹ Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2284–2287.
¹² Reporting on Patrick Clancy’s response to the possibility of retrial, 4 September 2026.
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