We sell T-shirts, mugs, pillows, stickers, and a growing assortment of things nobody technically needs but might desperately want.
We are not psychiatrists. We are not lawyers. We are definitely not forensic experts.
But we do have opinions.
And the Lindsay Clancy case has brought together several subjects we care deeply about: mental health, stigma, personal responsibility, the justice system, and the increasingly bizarre tendency of the internet to turn real-life tragedy into a team sport.
First, something needs to be said clearly:
Mental illness is real.
Depression is real. Psychosis is real. Postpartum mental illness is real. Psychiatric crises are real. People experiencing them deserve treatment, compassion, dignity, and access to competent care.
The stigma surrounding mental illness is also very real.
People still hide symptoms because they are afraid of being judged. Families still don't always understand what they're seeing. People who seek psychiatric treatment can still be treated as weak, unstable, dangerous, or somehow morally defective simply because their brain is sick.
We reject that.
But we also reject the idea that acknowledging mental illness requires us to abandon the concept of accountability.
Those two beliefs can exist in the same brain at the same time.
Three Children Died
That fact has sometimes seemed almost secondary in the enormous online debate surrounding this case.
On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her three children: 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan.
That is not speculation. It is not a prosecution theory. Clancy has acknowledged killing them.
The dispute at trial was whether she was criminally responsible when she did it.
Her defense argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and lacked criminal responsibility. Prosecutors argued that despite her mental illness, she retained sufficient capacity to understand the wrongfulness of what she was doing or control her conduct.
That distinction matters.
Mental illness and legal insanity are not synonyms.
A person can be genuinely mentally ill and still be legally responsible for a crime. The legal question is much narrower than simply asking, "Was this person mentally healthy?"
After a lengthy trial and roughly a week of deliberations, the jury could not unanimously answer that question. Eleven jurors reportedly favored finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. One did not.
The result was a mistrial.
And then the internet did what the internet does.
It went looking for somebody else to put on trial.
Enter: Juror Number Twelve
Several jurors have publicly criticized the lone holdout, including allegations that he acknowledged having reasonable doubt but still would not agree to the insanity verdict. Those accounts deserve to be reported accurately, but they remain accounts from other jurors. The holdout has not publicly given his version of what happened inside that jury room.
Now details about the man's personal life, including reports involving domestic violence allegations and a restraining order, have been dragged into public view.
And this is where the conversation becomes fascinating.
Because suddenly, some of the same broader discourse that has spent weeks insisting we must understand behavior through the lens of mental health, trauma, circumstances, medications, hormones, psychiatric conditions, and unseen internal struggles seems considerably less interested in extending nuance to someone it dislikes.
For Lindsay, we are told to look beneath the behavior.
For the holdout juror, some people seem perfectly comfortable defining the entire man by allegations about his behavior.
That's quite a switch.
And yes, we have noticed that some politically left-leaning commentary around high-profile cases frequently emphasizes trauma, mental health, rehabilitation, and the danger of reducing human beings to their worst actions. Those are often worthwhile principles.
But principles aren't principles if they disappear the moment they're inconvenient.
If mental illness deserves consideration, it deserves consideration when the person experiencing it is sympathetic and when he isn't.
If someone's personal struggles don't automatically erase his humanity, that principle shouldn't depend on whether he voted the way you wanted him to vote.
And if past allegations make someone's reasoning inherently suspect, we are wandering into some awfully uncomfortable territory when the defendant herself has admitted killing three people.
You can't demand infinite nuance for one person and zero nuance for another simply because one helps your argument.
We Think Murder Is Almost Always Evidence That Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong
We want to be careful here because this is our opinion about human behavior, not a psychiatric claim.
We tend to believe that virtually every murder involves something profoundly abnormal happening in the mind of the person committing it.
Maybe it is a diagnosed mental illness.
Maybe it is an undiagnosed disorder.
Maybe it is rage, obsession, desperation, intoxication, jealousy, distorted thinking, extreme emotional dysregulation, or a temporary psychological collapse.
Because psychologically healthy people functioning normally don't generally wake up and decide to kill somebody.
But here's the important part:
That cannot automatically become a get-out-of-jail-free card.
If "something was mentally wrong with me when I killed someone" were enough by itself to eliminate criminal responsibility, the concept of murder would become almost meaningless.
That's precisely why the law sets a much more demanding standard for an insanity defense.
Mental illness can explain behavior without necessarily excusing behavior.
Sometimes it does both.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Determining which is which is exactly why we have courts.
Compassion and Consequences Can Coexist
This seems to be the part we've collectively forgotten.
We can believe Lindsay Clancy was desperately mentally ill.
We can believe she deserved better psychiatric treatment.
We can believe postpartum psychiatric disorders deserve dramatically more awareness.
We can believe women should be able to say, "Something is terribly wrong with my mind," without fearing shame or judgment.
We can believe Patrick Clancy endured something almost incomprehensible.
We can mourn Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
And we can still believe that killing three children requires the justice system to determine whether the person who killed them was legally responsible.
None of those positions contradicts another.
Compassion does not require pretending an act didn't happen.
Accountability does not require denying mental illness.
And acknowledging mental illness does not automatically answer a legal question about criminal responsibility.
And Then There Are the Conspiracy Theories
Oh, internet.
Apparently a triple-homicide trial involving extensive medical records, psychiatric testimony, phone records, surveillance evidence, eyewitness testimony, journals, and a defendant who admits she killed the children simply wasn't complicated enough.
So some corners of social media decided Patrick must have done it.
Or arranged it.
Or drugged Lindsay.
Or pushed her from the window.
Or somehow orchestrated the entire thing because he eventually moved on with his life.
Why?
Shoes.
Clothing.
Body language.
A new relationship.
The timing of his remarriage.
Probably Mercury being in retrograde. Give it another week.
There is no evidence presented at trial establishing that Patrick Clancy killed his children. Reporting on the conspiracy theories has specifically noted that surveillance footage and phone records corroborated that he was away from the house when the children were killed. Even Lindsay Clancy's own defense attorney has publicly pushed back against accusations directed at Patrick.
At some point, "asking questions" becomes refusing to accept answers because the answers aren't exciting enough.
These were three real children.
Their father is a real human being.
This isn't Only Murders in the Building.
Not every tragedy has a secret villain waiting for TikTok detectives to discover him in Episode 8.
Sometimes the truth is simply horrible.
The Holdout Juror Was Allowed to Hold Out
Here's another apparently controversial opinion:
A unanimous jury means unanimous.
Eleven people believing something does not obligate the twelfth person to agree with them.
Maybe the holdout was wrong.
Maybe the other eleven were wrong.
Maybe his reasoning was terrible.
Maybe their reasoning was terrible.
Maybe information eventually comes out that changes how we view what happened during deliberations.
But the entire purpose of requiring unanimity is defeated if we decide that the twelfth juror's job is simply to surrender when the vote reaches 11-1.
The allegations about his conduct during deliberations are legitimate subjects for legal scrutiny. The judge was informed of concerns before declaring the mistrial, and the defense unsuccessfully sought additional intervention regarding the juror's conduct.
That's a matter for the courts.
Digging through a juror's personal history after you dislike his vote and publicly destroying him is something else entirely.
And threatening jurors is beyond the pale. Reports now say jurors who have spoken publicly have received death threats.
Nobody wins when disagreement with a verdict, or lack of one, becomes permission to destroy the people involved.
Mental Health Advocacy Has to Mean Something
This is ultimately why we're writing about this case.
Mental health awareness cannot mean:
"Mental illness matters when I like the person."
It cannot mean:
"Trauma explains behavior when the explanation supports the outcome I want."
And it cannot mean:
"Don't stigmatize people with mental illness...unless they're on the other side."
That's not advocacy.
That's selective empathy.
Real mental health advocacy is much harder.
It means acknowledging that mental illness can happen to good people.
It can happen to bad people.
It can make someone sympathetic.
It can make someone extremely difficult to sympathize with.
It can contribute to terrible behavior.
And sometimes a mentally ill person can also commit a crime for which the law holds that person responsible.
Those truths can coexist.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan Deserve to Remain at the Center of This
The saddest thing about watching this case become an internet obsession is how easily the three smallest people involved disappear from the conversation.
Cora.
Dawson.
Callan.
They weren't hashtags.
They weren't evidence exhibits.
They weren't characters in somebody's favorite true-crime saga.
They were children.
Whatever eventually happens legally, we hope the enormous attention generated by their deaths produces something worthwhile: better recognition of severe postpartum psychiatric symptoms, better access to mental healthcare, less stigma surrounding people who ask for help, and a justice system capable of balancing compassion with accountability.
We don't know what the final legal resolution of Lindsay Clancy's case will be.
Her attorneys have asked the judge to find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility without another trial, while prosecutors had not yet announced whether they would seek a retrial as of this writing. A court conference is scheduled for September 29.
We'll leave that decision to people with law degrees, psychiatric credentials, access to all the evidence, and considerably more authority than the comment section on Facebook.
We support mental health awareness.
We support treatment.
We support people asking for help without shame.
We support compassion.
We also support accountability.
We don't believe those things are enemies.
But what do we know?
We just sell T-shirts and stuff.
The opinions expressed here are those of the Epileptic AL Staff. This commentary discusses mental illness, suicide, and the deaths of children. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
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