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ISSUE 061 · DEEP DIVE · MYTHS & MISINFORMATION

Lindsay Clancy delivered other women's babies for a living. She was a labour-and-delivery nurse in Massachusetts, married, mother of three: Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months.

In the months after Callan's birth her mental health collapsed. On New Year's Day 2023 she admitted herself to McLean Hospital, one of the most respected psychiatric facilities in the country. She was discharged five days later with an outpatient plan. She was taking a long list of psychiatric medications. Nineteen days after that discharge, in January 2023, all three children were killed, and Clancy attempted to take her own life.

What matters for this piece is what happened in the courtroom, not the details of that day. And in the courtroom, one thing was not seriously in dispute: that Clancy was mentally ill. The prosecution and the defence fought not over whether she was sick, but over what her sickness meant for her responsibility — the prosecution arguing the killings were planned and deliberate, the defence arguing she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis and had not received the care she needed.

An American jury in a case like this is handed a binary. Either the defendant is guilty of murder — fully responsible, first-degree, a life sentence — or she is not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning not criminally responsible at all, and committed to a psychiatric institution. There is no setting in between.

Clancy's 2026 trial did not end in either. After lengthy deliberation the jury deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial. Prosecutors may retry the case.

It is tempting to read a hung jury as confusion. It was closer to the opposite. The jurors were asked to sort a gravely ill mother into one of two boxes — cold-blooded murderer or blameless innocent — when the honest answer for many people sits somewhere neither box allows. The deadlock wasn't a failure to understand the case. It was the predictable result of a question with no acceptable answer.

Here is what almost no American following the case knows. Roughly two dozen countries have a third box, and have had one for a century.

Britain built it first, with the Infanticide Act of 1922, amended in 1938. The law treats a mother who kills her child while the “balance of her mind” is disturbed by giving birth as guilty of infanticide — an offence akin to manslaughter, not murder. In practice, such verdicts almost never mean prison; they mean an order for psychiatric treatment. Canada wrote the same principle into its Criminal Code in 1948; Australia, Ireland and more than twenty other nations followed. The United States has none of it. The only related American law, in Illinois, applies solely at sentencing, after a mother has already been found guilty. Massachusetts — where Clancy is being tried — has considered such a statute and not passed one.

An honest caveat, because it matters: infanticide laws are written for children under one year old. Of Clancy's three children, only the baby would classically fit; the older two would not. But the deeper point survives the caveat. Those same countries also have a broader partial defence — diminished responsibility — that reduces murder to manslaughter for a defendant whose mind was disturbed, whatever the victim's age. America's insanity defence has no such middle setting. As one legal review of infanticide and American justice put it plainly, the long sentences the US hands mentally ill mothers trace back to “our archaic insanity defence.” The rest of the common-law world built a graded response to exactly this kind of tragedy. America kept the switch that only flips two ways.

Why is the binary so unforgiving? Because underneath it sits a belief most people hold and few examine: that mental illness and violence belong together — that letting “not responsible” in is a danger to everyone else.

The data say otherwise, and they are not close. Less than five per cent of violence in the United States is attributable to serious mental illness. People with severe mental illness are more than ten times as likely to be the victims of violence as the perpetrators. And mental illness on its own — without substance abuse, poverty or a violent environment — tracks the general population; the factors that actually drive violence are the same for the ill and the well. In the words of one review, mental illness is “a weak predictor of violent behaviour.” The fear that makes the all-or-nothing verdict feel necessary is, for the most part, mistaken.

And now the part that cuts the other way, because leaving it out would be dishonest. Acute postpartum psychosis is one of the genuine exceptions to that reassuring rule.

It is rare — roughly one birth in a thousand — and it is a psychiatric emergency: rapid-onset delusions, hallucinations, paranoia and severe insomnia, with a real, if small, elevated risk of harm to the child and to the mother during the acute episode. So here, unusually, the link between illness and danger is not a myth. Which produces the cruellest irony in the whole story. The one condition where the risk is genuine is the one the American system is worst at catching — Clancy was hospitalised and sent home in five days — and the sensational coverage that follows a case like hers tars the thousands of women who develop postpartum psychosis and never harm anyone, teaching them to hide the very symptoms that most need saying out loud. Compounding it, the standard diagnostic manual still doesn't list postpartum psychosis as its own diagnosis, which makes it harder to testify to in the courtrooms deciding these cases.

There is a last, uncomfortable turn. Which killers are granted the “sick, not evil” explanation is not decided by the illness.

Research on media coverage of mass violence finds that white perpetrators are markedly more likely to have their acts attributed to mental illness — an individualising, sympathetic frame — while perpetrators who are Black are more often cast as simply criminal, and those who are Muslim as terrorists. A criminologist who studies race and gender in crime coverage has observed the same pattern around Clancy: white women who kill tend to be explained by circumstances beyond their control, including mental health, while women of colour are more often portrayed as bad people or bad mothers. Clancy — white, married, professional, a nurse — fits the sympathetic profile almost exactly.

The pattern isn't airtight; at least one analysis of cable-news coverage found mental health raised more often when the killer was not white. But the selectivity is well documented, and it leaves an uneasy conclusion. The compassion so many people feel for Lindsay Clancy is real, and it is defensible. It is also not distributed evenly — and a mother with a different name, income or skin colour might not have received it.

Strip it back and the villain of this story is not a person. A jury deadlocked not because it couldn't see that Clancy was ill, but because the law gave it nowhere to put a mother who was ill and yet not the monster the word “murderer” implies. Every comparable country built that room a century ago and America never did. The tragedy belongs to Clancy and to a family that lost three children and, in a real sense, their mother too. The failure belongs to a legal architecture that forces an impossible choice, a public myth that makes the choice feel safe, and a mental-health system that discharged a woman in crisis after five days and was somehow surprised by what came next.

The Boston Globe (2026), “Lindsay Clancy trial: US is an outlier in prosecuting infanticide” — the two-dozen-country figure, the England and Wales statute, and Illinois as the sole US state with a related (sentencing-only) law.

Friedman, S. H. et al., “Infanticide and American Criminal Justice” (PubMed, 2018) and “Postpartum Psychosis, Infanticide, and Insanity” (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 2012) — the infanticide-law comparison, the “archaic insanity defence,” and the DSM's omission of postpartum psychosis.

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and Disability Rights California — under 5% of US violence attributable to mental illness; people with severe mental illness over ten times more likely to be victims.

Van Dorn, R. et al. and the MacArthur Violence Risk Study — mental illness alone, absent substance use and social factors, does not raise violence rates above the general population.

Duxbury, S. et al. (2018) and Frontiers in Psychology (2022) — white perpetrators more often framed as mentally ill; racial disparities in media explanations of violence.

The 19th / CT Mirror (2026), quoting criminologist Danielle Slakoff — race and gender patterns in sympathetic coverage; Ms. Magazine, PBS NewsHour and Psychiatric Times (2026) — the postpartum mental-health care gap, the McLean admission and discharge, and clinicians' warnings on conflating postpartum psychosis with dangerousness.

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