The case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman who is on trial for the death of her three young children, is captivating public opinion and discourse in surprising ways. Clancy has claimed legal insanity in the murders of her children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, with the defense asserting that she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis. Outside the courtroom, the media and social media buzz reveal a deeper, troubling reality about dominant social biases. But legal accountability should be based on proof, not opinions steeped in gender, race or class.
Our cultural narrative of motherhood is of the loving nurturing “perfect mother” who always puts her children above all else. In my work as a reproductive psychiatrist, I treat mental illness in pregnancy and the postpartum in moms who struggle with this narrative’s lofty expectations. As a forensic psychiatrist, in evaluating mothers after tragedies, I use my reproductive background but must step back to consider whether or not they have a mental health diagnosis and the individual motives why a mother may kill her child.
Like men, women — regardless of their race and class — are capable of a full spectrum of decision-making and fatal violence.
In the recent cases of Ruth Miller and Lauren Dickason, two mothers charged with killing their children, after thorough evaluations, I testified that each of these mothers was seriously mentally unwell at the time of killing their children. But it is far from the truth to think that all mothers who kill their children are mentally ill. Cases that I evaluate where mental illness was not present, not causal or where the criteria for legal insanity are not met usually end in plea bargains without much media fanfare.
Like men, women — regardless of their race and class — are capable of a full spectrum of decision-making and fatal violence. In fact, mothers and fathers kill their children at similar rates.
Yet public discourse often separates people into “bad” and “mad” (or mentally ill) columns. In so doing, we do a disservice to equality and to the children killed.
When a father kills his children, it is frequently attributed to men being violent, whereas certain mothers are often presumed to have been mentally unwell. After all, the narrative goes, mothers don’t kill their children — at least not conventionally attractive, usually white, mothers. That means certain women who kill their children are treated one way, while others receive a different type of attention and different justice.
For example, when Clancy cried out in court in the midst of testimony critical to the prosecution’s case about autopsy, the judge granted two recesses, and people soothed her. Similarly, her attorney has rubbed her back or held her hand in court. Other defendants showing the same behavior can face either contempt of court charges or removal from the courtroom. Further, the judge even stated — to other courtroom participants — that there should be no inappropriate or disruptive comments, and that anyone doing so would be escorted out and barred from the proceedings. (Imagine, for instance, a male defendant, getting his hand held or back rubbed, soothing him after his outburst in his triple murder trial.)
This belief is so strongly held that elegantly simple research demonstrates the gender and racial bias. When asked to read vignettes about a fictional child murder in which the facts are the same but the gender of the parent-perpetrator is switched, lawyers were more likely to blame mental illness when the parent-perpetrator was a mother and to blame jealousy and retaliation in fathers. In another vignette study among college students, Black fathers who used a gun to kill had the most severe judgement. These automatic thoughts and prejudices demonstrate the risk of people with real mental illness not getting the help they need, inside or outside the courtroom.
In 2022, in a contrasting Plymouth case, Latarsha Sanders was found guilty of first-degree murder after just four hours of deliberation. Sanders was diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Sanders was a Black mother functioning as a single parent at the time she killed her two sons, Marlon and La’son. She did not have over $1 million dollars donated to a GoFundMe in the wake of killing her children, as Clancy did. The trial judge ruled that Sanders’s medical records could not be used as evidence. Last week, amid the Clancy case in the same Plymouth courthouse, the Massachusetts Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Sanders was entitled to a new trial.
Sanders was a Black mother functioning as a single parent at the time she killed her two sons, Marlon and La’son. She did not have over $1 million dollars donated to a GoFundMe in the wake of killing her children, as Clancy did.
In a lot of ways the difference in public attention to the Sanders versus Clancy case is akin to another social phenomenon: missing white woman bias. Recall that while the world focused on the tragically missing Gabby Petito, hundreds of missing Indigenous women were not considered newsworthy.
From the start, amid GoFundMe donations, media coverage has heavily favored Clancy. From the news media to podcasts and the world of social media, the narrative overwhelmingly is sympathetic. Many seek to blame psychiatry. Internet sleuths have even suggested that the blame lays with her then-husband and his new wife.
Whether or not the jury ultimately finds Clancy legally insane, justice demands that we separate the individual case from our gendered, racial and classist expectations of parenthood. Objective courtroom evidence, rather than demographics, should dictate legal accountability. Anything less denies women agency in both directions: a presumption of mental illness for the mother who looks the part, and a presumption of malice for the mother who doesn’t.
The post I’m a forensic and reproductive psychiatrist. Here’s what we are missing in the Lindsay Clancy case. appeared first on MS NOW.
