The facts of Lindsay Clancy’s case are almost unbearable to hold in your mind. In January 2023, she strangled her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands. Her defense did not deny this. They argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a severe psychiatric condition that disconnects a person from reality. In the four months before the killings, Clancy had been prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications across more than 30 prescriptions.
A jury of 12 people — nine women, three men — sat through six weeks of testimony. After nearly a week of deliberation, 11 of them voted to acquit on grounds of insanity. One refused. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial.
Enter the Republican Party, which has apparently decided that the appropriate response to a deadlocked jury in a postpartum psychosis case is to torch the entire concept of due process.
Ron DeSantis called it a “miscarriage of justice” and labeled the proceedings a “kangaroo court.” Rep. Michael Rulli of Ohio praised the lone holdout as a “hero” who had “the courage to hold a serial killer accountable.” Sen. Mike Lee mused on social media that the holdout juror would “need security,” as though 11 jurors who followed the evidence to an insanity verdict were a mob. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina suggested Clancy only has public support because she is white, then held up a baby’s onesie as a prop.
And then Trump, during an Oval Office gaggle, offered his characteristic blend of vagueness and menace. “She did a horrible, horrible thing,” he said. “There’ll be a price. It’s going to be a mental institution or jail or something.”
“Or something.” The President of the United States, weighing in on a case he clearly has not followed beyond headlines, musing about punishment for a woman whose own husband is now suing her medical providers for wrongful death and malpractice. Patrick Clancy’s lawsuit names Dr. Jennifer Tufts, Rebecca Jollotta, Aster Mental Health, and South Shore Health System. He is suing because the system that was supposed to help his wife failed her so catastrophically that his children are dead.
That is the structural story here. Not a “kangaroo court.” Not a culture war flashpoint. A woman was prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in four months. Thirteen. The medical infrastructure surrounding postpartum mental health in this country is threadbare, underfunded, and chronically dismissive of women’s pain. Postpartum psychosis is rare but well-documented, and it is a medical emergency. When the people closest to Clancy — her mother-in-law Susan told jurors she was “very nurturing, very loving,” a “wonderful mother” — could see her unraveling, the response from providers was a cascade of prescriptions without adequate oversight.
Eleven jurors heard that evidence and reached a verdict that the prosecution could not overcome. That is not a broken system. That is the system working exactly as designed: a jury of citizens weighing testimony and reaching a conclusion. The people calling it a “kangaroo court” are the ones who did not sit in that courtroom, did not hear the medical testimony, and did not deliberate.
What GOP leaders are actually attacking is the legitimacy of an insanity defense itself, and by extension, the legitimacy of postpartum mental illness as a medical reality. They want punishment, not understanding. They want a spectacle, not a reckoning with a healthcare system that hands a struggling mother 13 prescriptions and calls it care.
Clancy is due back in court September 29. The real accountability — the kind that names who holds power and who is harmed — starts with the providers, the institutions, and a national failure to treat postpartum mental health as the crisis it is. Everything else is political theater performed over three children’s graves.