I was gathered with friends, mostly from Brookline, Maskachusetts, to celebrate the marriage of a widow to a widower. In keeping with the spirit of this joyous occasion, I surveyed everyone on how they would have voted if they’d been on the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case.
All of the women except one young hater (conservative) would have voted to acquit (“not guilty by reason of insanity”, but the insanity was temporary and, therefore, the government would have no reason to detain her further). A Joe Biden Democrat in his mid-60s married to a Mamdani/AOC Democrat also voted to acquit (i.e., liberal male is the functional equivalent of “female”). A Brookline resident whose politics are driven by hatred of and contempt for Republicans and Trump also voted to acquit (“she’s already been punished enough”).
The remaining men all voted to convict Lindsay Clancy of at least some degree of murder. “Someone like that needs to be removed from society,” said a young man. “There has to be a consequence. Jeffrey Dahmer was psychotic, but he was still convicted,” said the boy’s father.
Half of the group were MDs and all had harsh words for the psychiatrists and psychologists who pumped Lindsay Clancy full of various medications (that said, nothing she was on had a known side effect of psychotic violence and it was unclear what she was actually taking from among the pills that she’d been prescribed).
(Based on my skimming of press coverage of the trial, I personally would have voted to convict her of the lowest degree of murder available. Her attempt to kill herself after the murders was certainly evidence of irrationality if not insanity and a first-degree murder is supposed to be rationally planned, I think. Maybe I would have voted differently if I’d heard all of the evidence and been instructed by the judge in the law.)
Based on this survey, I don’t think the Commonwealth will be able to convict Lindsay Clancy unless prosecutors can contrive a means of excluding female Democrats from the jury or, perhaps, reduce the maximum charge to something minor.
Loosely related, a sad-funny X exchange:
Separately, the gathering of these Brookliners was actually in Silicon Valley. To make everyone from Massachusetts feel at home, the locals were kind enough to engage in outdoor masking (Menlo Park; under-nose Faucism):
(Quite a few indoor maskers, of course, as well, e.g., in retail establishments. There was, unfortunately, a serious dearth of social justice signage. People in Silicon Valley, apparently, care primarily about themselves and their money, unlike the virtuous folks in San Francisco and the East Bay.)
The outdoor marker also wears a hoody. Is it already cold in the Sillicon Valley? Or is he on his way to hold up a store? By the looks the only hold ups he does is those of shareholders.
I was in shorts and a T-shirt, but maybe it was trending down towards 70 for the evening? (6 pm is the timestamp on the photo)
Litigator friends have told me that the only thing the state needed to prove is that she was aware the act of strangling the children would put her in legal jeopardy. So insanity defense, even in Maskachusetts, seems to be for the type of person so loopy that they kill someone, the police show up, and they have no idea why the police are even there.