A Massachusetts jury looked at Lindsay Clancy for the better part of a week, three separate times, and could not agree. Eleven of the twelve had reportedly settled on a verdict. One juror hadn’t, a holdout who, in the judge’s own words, had “acknowledged doubt but refuses to apply it to the verdict.” That single person is why we now have no verdict at all. Just a mistrial, a judge with no choice but to end it, and three children who are still gone: Cora, five. Dawson, three. Callan, eight months old.

The horrific fate of those children has been lost in all of this. They are the true victims, and those beautiful kids did not deserve any of this.

I’ve spent the last several weeks reporting this case for The New York Sun — tracking testimony, calling psychiatrists, reading transcripts until the words stopped making sense. In that time I’ve watched the internet split itself into two furious camps, one insisting Lindsay Clancy is a monster who doesn’t deserve an ounce of sympathy, the other insisting she’s a victim of a system that poisoned her and then abandoned her.

I want to say something that apparently isn’t allowed anymore, on either side of that argument: multiple things can be true at once.

It is true that Lindsay Clancy horribly killed her children. She does not dispute this. She strangled them with exercise bands in her own home, then tried to end her own life. That is not in question, was never in question, and nothing I write here is an attempt to soften it or explain it away. She murdered her own children.

It is also true that prosecutors have laid out a version of events that is genuinely hard to grapple with, that this wasn’t a woman lost to psychiatric collapse but someone who allegedly asked her husband to run errands so she could have time being alone with the kids, and who researched how long he’d be gone. If that’s accurate, it argues for calculation, not chaos.

And it is also true, by every clinical account I’ve gathered, that something catastrophic may have been happening inside her mind in the days before.

white red and blue candy cane — Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Dr. Jennifer Payne, who studies this at the University of Virginia, describes postpartum psychosis as a kind of “delirium or confusion” that “can wax and wane,” meaning a woman evaluated during a lucid stretch can look composed. At the same time, she is, underneath, dangerously unwell. Ms. Clancy was reportedly prescribed as many as twelve medications in the months before the killings, from multiple providers who, by every account, weren’t coordinating.

All of these things can be true simultaneously, and a jury’s inability to reconcile them isn’t a failure of twelve ordinary people. It’s a reflection of how unprepared our entire system — legal, medical, cultural — is to hold this much complexity about mothers, mental illness, and violence in the same breath.

But here’s what still isn’t being said clearly enough: three children do not get to weigh in on the debate. Cora will never start kindergarten. Dawson will never turn four. Callan never made it to his first birthday. They are, in all of this, the quietest voices in the room, and I think that says something ugly about the rest of us. We have made this a referendum on one woman’s mental state, and three actual children have been reduced to a footnote in an argument about culpability.

Ms. Clancy deserves to face the full weight of the law for what she did. But that alone isn’t enough. If we don’t also push to keep this from happening again, we’ve failed everyone this case is supposed to be about.

Beyond postpartum psychosis specifically, we are not talking nearly enough, in this country, about mental illness generally — the broader, chronically underfunded, poorly coordinated mess of American mental health care, where a mother can be in visible crisis in front of a multitude of professionals, and none of them are required to speak to one another. No case manager stitches those providers together, no single person whose job it is to see the whole picture.

I keep returning to this: punching a fist in the air and refusing to look at what potentially contributed to this tragedy protects no one. It doesn’t protect Cora, Dawson, or Callan, who are already gone. It fails every mother spiraling in silence right now, and every child not yet born who will inherit whatever gaps we refuse to close today.

The system can do better. I don’t want another child to die because it didn’t. This is bigger than the Clancy case.

We owe those kids more than a hashtag war over whether their mother deserves our sympathy. We owe them a system that might have caught this before three small coffins became the cost of finding out it didn’t.

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