Watch the video for the latest update from Dr. Lieberman on the Lindsay Clancy case, or read the transcript below.
Lindsay Clancy's trial has entered the final stage, and the jury is now deliberating before rendering a verdict. Now, there's no question that she did kill her children. The question is whether she should be held personally responsible for it and punished as a consequence.
The key factors throughout history that mitigate such a horrible crime in violation of the law are knowledge and control—meaning whether a person had knowledge of what they were doing—that it was illegal and they had the ability to distinguish right from wrong—and also whether whatever was motivating them to commit this act, to take these behaviors on, was able to be controlled or not, or whether this was an irresistible thing.
For example, if a person is driving a car and they suddenly have a seizure—and they've never had any prior history of epilepsy or seizure disorder, it just spontaneously happens—but they then happen to have one, and they crash into another car and kill the driver, should they be held responsible? The law would say no, because the fact that they had a seizure made their behavior involuntary—they didn't have control over the car, and that was the cause of the accident and the death of the other person.
In Lindsay's case, her psychotic state rendered her, one, incapable of exercising the judgment that a person who was sane would have: that murder of children is heinous and a violation of the law. And secondly, the command hallucinations, the voices she was hearing, were not resistible. The beliefs she had were incorrigible. She believed the reality was that the devil was going to possess her children, and the voice she heard telling her to save them by killing them was something she felt she had to adhere to—and afterwards it told her also to take her own life.
So certainly what happened is terrible and is to be condemned. However, Lindsay Clancy was not the perpetrator. She was the victim. She was the victim of the illness, and she was the victim of our mental health care system, which was not able to do enough to diagnose what she was suffering from and to treat it effectively.
And thus here we are today, and Lindsay Clancy’s fate will be decided soon. And whether she’s to be remanded to a state mental institution for the foreseeable future or she's found guilty and is sent to prison—in either case, it's not a great outcome. But the point that should be made is that she's not responsible for what she did and shouldn't be punished as a criminal who did the horrible thing of a mother killing her own children. She did it under the influence of an illness that could have been identified and treated—and this could have been prevented.
