Lindsay Clancy’s Jury Is Not Unanimous--My View

Substack

I do not like jumping on the latest headline and rendering my “opinion” from afar. This is precisely what contributes to the enormous and largely illiterate chaos that is well upon us.

Yes, I do have “opinions.” Who doesn’t? Here are some of my mine, some of which are actually based on some expertise and lived experience.

We have lost the plot as a dear friend puts it--did I only dream that we once thought we were well on our way to a woman’s rights revolution? Yet, today, young women, teenage girls are following the celebrity fashions of appearing half-naked in public, listening to so-called music which features lots of “ho” lyrics--and what’s , worse, boasting about their botox injections and plastic surgeries? Claiming it as a feminist right since a woman has the right to do what she wants--it’s her body.

Ah, and there we find ourselves hoisted by our own petard. Thus, many of us, including women, favor legalized surrogacy/surrogate wombs as well as legalized prostitution/sex work. Worse: Too many of us, including women, believe that donning hijab or niqab (a face mask) is a genuine act of resistance to racism. Worse: too many women, including faux-feminists, believe that gender and transgender rights trump women’s sex based rights. With malice towards none--I can only cry Woe!

And then there are the pink-clad groups of women who are out demonstrating in support of male killers--for example, for Mangione. A bit weird yes? Not really. Women have married convicted serial killers of women who are in jail. And, unbelievably, women are out there on behalf of Linday Clancy. This is more interesting, even daring, rather unusual.

I have kept completely quiet about the Lindsay Clancy case. I have never interviewed her nor have I seen any of the forensic testimony or the voir dire of the jury. Unlike others, I have little right to share my views. Know that I do not justify murdering children, on the contrary, but I do think that the psychiatrists who wrongfully and overly medicated Clancy as well as the hospital that released here far too soon should all be held accountable. I also know that post partum psychosis is real and terrible. I have nothing but compassion for Clancy who is now paralyzed in a wheelchair. Her husband has already remarried--one cannot blame him for that and yet, women, not men, often stand by mentally ill and disabled spouses--children too. Just sayin.’

However, society as a whole has not found any real solution to mental illness. Have we? Our treatment for bipolar disorders, depression, character disorders, and for schizophrenia do not always work and for many different reasons. We used to misdiagnose mostly women and institutionalize them in hell holes where they were wrongfully and overly medicated and lost forever. We used to jail men who were not only mentally ill but violent as well. Today, we allow those who hallucinate and who attack random strangers on our increasingly “mean” streets to continue on; if they are ever arrested and tried, they are far too often found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Is insanity a good enough reason to let someone off? Why? And--if not, what are our alternatives?

I hope that my readers know that women are always sentenced more heavily than men for the same crime--and for much lesser crimes. I have written about this many times before.

Just in: The jury has told the judge that they cannot return a unanimous verdict. The judge has sent them back to deliberate further. What do you think will happen? A mistrial? Juror holdouts finally folding because they want to return to their families and their work?