Monday, September 7, 2026 · Independent editorial

Medicalizing evil will not raise three dead children

Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, is accused of strangling them with exercise bands in January 2023. A Massachusetts jury could not agree. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial, 11 to 1, after nearly a week. Eleven jurors voted to acquit. One would not. The panel was nine women and three men. She is due back September 29 for a status hearing. Nobody on this page is going to invent the verdict the court did not enter.

What Gill actually said

On Friday, Will Cain asked Rep. Brandon Gill whether the defense was right to call her brave. Gill’s answer was plain. “She is anything but brave.” He said he has an enormous amount of sympathy for the three children and not an ounce for Lindsay Clancy. “You don’t get license to murder your children or anybody else just because you have mental health problems.”

Then he said the sentence that should have come from a pulpit before it came from a cable hit. “We have gotten in a habit of medicalizing evil.” What happened, he said, is that a woman murdered three children. Full stop. He thinks justice means the death penalty, or at least that she is locked up for the rest of her life, whether she was hearing voices or not.

Fox reports the defense did not deny the strangling. They argued not guilty by reason of insanity and postpartum psychosis. Mental illness is real. So is murder. Using a diagnosis to dissolve guilt until there is nothing left to judge is the habit Gill named. A church that cannot say the word, when a mother has killed her children, is not being gentle. It is being quiet.

Politicians are not the church

President Trump called it a horrible tragedy and said she did a horrible thing. He said there will be a price, a mental institution or jail or something. Gov. Ron DeSantis called the mistrial a miscarriage of justice and a kangaroo court. Rep. Nancy Mace said the case is not about the excuses. It is about justice for three children. Sen. Mike Lee said the holdout juror is going to need security. Fox noted that Republican lawmakers spoke and Democratic lawmakers, including from Massachusetts, did not.

They can be right about the facts and still not be a congregation. The church already had “you shall not murder.” If the only place Americans hear that, this week, is a GOP post, then the pulpits have handed their vocabulary to a party. A party is a bad church.

A hung jury is a legal fact. It is not a sacrament. Eleven people voted one way. One person would not medicalize what happened. We are not going to guess what the September 29 hearing does with that.

The same morning, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein ordered flags at half-staff for Gloria Steinem and called her a powerhouse journalist and an advocate for freedom and equality. Breitbart noted her pro-abortion work and the phrase “reproductive freedom.” That is a different argument. This page is three children who will not grow up.

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