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The Lindsay Clancy Trial: When the Algorithm Decides Who You Should Believe

by Author Bill Farley

 

FULL VIDEO: https://youtu.be/ZZv36zUxJkg

 

The algorithm already knows what you will believe.

Before getting into the Lindsay Clancy case, I want to make something clear. This is not an argument that postpartum psychosis is not real. It is not an argument against mental health treatment. And it is not a determination of Lindsay Clancy's guilt. That decision belongs to the jury.

What I want to examine is something bigger than one courtroom. One of the central arguments in my book, The Fracture: How Political Division Is Tearing America Apart, is simple. The internet does not just inform people. It sorts them, it clumps them, and it feeds tribal instincts that were already there and then calls the result "news."

Nothing in recent memory illustrates that better than the public reaction to Lindsay Clancy.

If your understanding of this case comes primarily from TikTok, you may not be studying a case. You may be consuming a narrative. The content you see is selected because it keeps you watching, not necessarily because it gives you the complete picture. After enough of those videos, an opinion starts to feel as natural as breathing air. It feels like fact, even when the underlying material is partial, out of context, or even wrong.

The job of the feed is not to make you wiser. It is to keep you clicking. So it learns you, often better than you know yourself. Then it gives you more of what already works on you. I am sure you have probably had a thought about a product that you never verbalized, and suddenly that product appears in an advertisement. That is the algorithm doing its job. The algorithm feeds you agreement, outrage, and a false sense of belonging. After hundreds of clips, you are not necessarily evaluating evidence anymore. You are reinforcing a tribal belief.

That is a problem in any story. It is an even bigger problem when the story sits on top of another tribe: sex, feminism, who gets excused, and who gets condemned. Search Lindsay Clancy on TikTok and look at who is doing the advocating. The pattern is obvious. That does not prove every woman is wrong. It proves the feed is not a courtroom. It is a club.

I am for equal rights. Race, sex, age, or whatever category you want to insert here. Equality means the same standard every time for everyone. It means applying the same standard of criminal responsibility regardless of who is standing in the defendant's chair. If mental illness genuinely destroys a person's ability to understand the wrongfulness of their actions, that standard should apply to them. But if the evidence shows that a person understood what they were doing and understood that it was wrong, sympathy cannot substitute for evidence.

The facts of the case are not mysterious. Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in the family home. She used exercise bands to do it. Her husband had been sent out on errands. She then cut herself and jumped from a second story window. She survived, but she is paralyzed.

The children did not.

She does not dispute that she killed them. The fight is over criminal responsibility. The defense says postpartum psychosis and related illness are to blame. The prosecution says she planned it, understood it, and should be held accountable. The jury's job is the evidence, not the comments section.

Mental illness can explain how a person reaches a breaking point. But whether it legally excuses criminal conduct is a question for the evidence and the law, not for sympathy and not for social media. Empathy for suffering is not the same thing as an excuse. It is okay to be empathetic for her. She is a human, after all. Explanation for a person's actions is not grounds for immunity. And it is not a promise that the same person will never be dangerous again.

That is why this case should be decided in a courtroom rather than on TikTok.

I do not think a lot of the people cheering on this defense are thinking about the rule they are asking the culture to accept. The Lindsay Clancy case has become much bigger than a courtroom.

To some people, she represents the failures of maternal mental health care. To others, she represents a mother who murdered her children and should be punished. And somewhere in the middle is a complicated legal question about criminal responsibility. But the internet does not reward complicated questions. It rewards certainty. It rewards outrage. Above all else, it rewards people who pick a side and defend it.

Once you have identified your tribe, evidence that supports your position feels obvious. Evidence that challenges it feels like an attack. That is exactly how tribalism works. And that is exactly why courts exist. A courtroom is supposed to operate differently from a social media feed. The jury is not supposed to ask, "Which side am I on?" They are supposed to ask, "What does the evidence actually prove?"

None of this is new. In 1954, Constance Fisher drowned her three children in Maine. She was treated as a patient, institutionalized, later declared improved, and then released. She and her husband went on to have more children. In 1966, she did the exact same thing to those children. Six children ultimately died. And whatever the intentions of the people involved, history gives us a terrifying warning. A previous finding of mental illness does not automatically tell us whether someone is safe to return to society.

The question after you treat a child killer as a temporary medical episode is this: What happens when you let them out, and who pays if it happens again?

People are already writing Lindsay Clancy letters and sympathy cards saying prison is a cruel punishment. Cruel is three small bodies. Cruel is doing it once and being handed a path that treats the next set of children as an acceptable risk. Cruel is pretending history did not already run this experiment and lose a total of six kids.

While we should be extremely careful about calling unrelated crimes "copycats," another case has recently brought the same question back into the public conversation. In Mandan, North Dakota, 22 year old Kailey Erhart is accused of attacking her three young children with a knife.

Two children died and a third survived.

Her case is still in its early stages, and no mental health defense has been formally presented in court. The point is not to declare these cases identical. The point is to recognize that whenever a parent is accused of killing their children, questions about mental illness, criminal responsibility, public safety, and the protection of children inevitably follow.

There is another danger here, and it cuts in the opposite direction. If we start treating women as uniquely incapable of responsibility because of pregnancy, hormones, motherhood, or mental illness, we risk reviving arguments women have spent generations defeating.

Women fought for the right to vote because their emotions were not a legitimate reason to deny them political agency. Women fought for equal employment because biology was not a legitimate reason to deny them opportunity. Women fought for equal treatment under the law because being a woman was not supposed to mean being treated as less capable of making rational decisions.

So be careful.

Protecting women does not mean declaring women incapable of responsibility. Compassion should not become condescension. Equality is a two way street. Special pleading is not.

I would say that it is probably wise to protect the institutions and rights built by generations of women before you, not tear all of it down because you feel sorry for one individual woman. That is why the standard has to be consistent. Not because Lindsay Clancy is a woman. Not because she is a mother. Not because she suffered. Not because people sympathize with her. And not because people hate her. The question has to be what the evidence shows and what the law requires.

All of this sits on a larger question: What is a child's life worth when the culture is already numb?

When parts of society treat the youngest lives as optional, disposable, or politically inconvenient, it should not shock anyone that three children killed in a basement fail to produce the reaction they should. If the baseline is that some children's lives do not count, then a basement in Duxbury becomes just another content cycle.

I am not collapsing every issue into one slogan. I am saying moral numbness is contagious. Algorithms accelerate it. Tribes reward it. And the children pay the price.

And this brings me back to the three people who are easiest to forget in all of this:

Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

The internet has turned Lindsay Clancy into a symbol. To some people, she represents the failures of maternal mental health care. To others, she represents a mother who murdered her children and should be punished. But Cora, Dawson, and Callan are not symbols. They are not evidence for somebody's political argument. They are not a hashtag. They were three children. And somewhere along the way, the internet has made the argument about everybody except them.

There is something else worth remembering. Patrick Clancy, the father of these children, has publicly said that he believes Lindsay was seriously ill and that he forgives her. You do not have to agree with him. But if the father who lost all three of his children can separate compassion for Lindsay from what happened to his children, perhaps the rest of us should be capable of doing the same.

Mental illness can be real. Postpartum psychosis is real. It is rare and serious. None of that turns three strangled children into an abstraction. Have empathy for this woman, absolutely. Excusing her should not be an option and a free pass to do it again should never be considered.

And if the verdict is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, that does not mean the tragedy disappears. What it means is that the legal system has reached a different conclusion about responsibility and what should happen next. That distinction matters.

It is possible to acknowledge someone's suffering without ignoring the suffering of their victims. It is possible to believe mental illness deserves treatment without believing that every act committed during a mental health crisis should automatically be excused. And it is possible to have compassion without abandoning accountability.

Watch the case. Read the record, not the For You page. Notice who the algorithm is grouping you with, and ask whether that group is helping you see the children or helping you look away.

And here is the irony.

While millions of people online have already decided who Lindsay Clancy is, twelve people sitting inside a courtroom have spent days trying to decide something much harder:

What does the evidence actually prove? The internet wants certainty. A courtroom is built for doubt. That distinction is important. The internet rewards us for being first. The courtroom demands that we slow down. The internet rewards certainty. The courtroom requires evidence. And perhaps that is the lesson we should take from the Lindsay Clancy case.

Before we decide who deserves our sympathy, who deserves our anger, or what a particular case means about society, we should ask ourselves whether we are actually looking at the evidence or simply seeing what the algorithm decided we should see.

Because when the tribal battle becomes more important than the people involved, the people who are easiest to forget are often the ones who can no longer speak for themselves.

Cora.

Dawson.

Callan.

Three children.

Not a symbol.

Not a hashtag.

Not an argument.

Three human lives.

If this is the kind of argument you want more of, my book, The Fracture: How Political Division Is Tearing America Apart, goes deeper into how platforms can train tribalistic behavior, reinforce echo chambers, and deepen the divisions that are already tearing at our society.

 

📖 Want to go deeper? Read The Fracture: How Political Division is Tearing America Apart — available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV9Z4SD4
Website: http://authorbillfarley.com
 

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