by Gavin Ashenden, New English Catholic
Victimhood, vengeance and the refusal to suffer
I’ve been hesitant for a while to write about the Lindsey Clancy trial outcome.
Reading an article about witchcraft posted by a friend of Rod Dreher, Tara Thieke, has provided the stimulus to comment because I think that, in terms of our attempt to read human encounters through a Catholic lens, the issues put before us are not so much by the trial as by the reaction to the trial. They are profound, confusing, challenging and perhaps indicative of a serious danger to our social cohesion, relations between the sexes, and a serious shift in spirituality and culture.
What happened in the Clancy case
Not everyone has the facts, so let me rehearse those first for the sake of clarity.
Lindsey Clancy was a 36-year-old labour and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, and killed her three children, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, in January 2023, and then attempted to take her own life.
The trial turned on whether her mental state left her unable to tell right from wrong or to conform her conduct to the law.
The defence case was that severe postpartum psychosis, compounded by a long list of psychiatric drugs, had undermined her capacity to tell right from wrong.
On the 4th of September (2026), a jury of nine women and three men reported they could not agree because one single juror, a man, held out against a finding of lack of criminal responsibility.
It was the reaction to this event that has been so unusual that it requires some commentary.