According to a well-worn adage, “a good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge.”

I don’t know a lot of judges, but I know a lot of judges in the sense that basic deductive reasoning goes a long way in strategizing litigation. In other words, the judge is a human being with a background that can be googled, and he only has so many options in terms of what to decide for your client.

That being said, I would add that the proverbial “good lawyer” has a sense of pertinence before he “knows the law.” And one of the things that a good lawyer must do in any jury trial is convince the jurors that his sense of which facts are pertinent really is what’s pertinent in the case.

In a democracy, a lot is riding on the overall reasoning ability of the jury pool. For that reason, perhaps the most dreadful outcome of the Lindsay Clancy trial is that it seems to have cemented into public consciousness—and public discourse—a thoroughgoing conflation of mental illness with criminal insanity.

Mental illness and criminal insanity are not the same. A huge proportion of the population has a mental illness of some kind. Nearly anyone who commits a homicide has something psychologically wrong with them, but a valid insanity defense means that at the critical moment, the defendant had absolutely no ability to distinguish right from wrong. So, when an insanity defense is raised in a criminal case, whether the defendant had a mental illness is not exactly the question.

What Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, was successful at getting 11 jurors to do was conflate these two issues. Here is juror Paula Devlin, in her own words post-trial:

WCVB-TV: Do you think this case should just go away, be dismissed?

Devlin: No. Our verdict that the eleven of us had decided on was not guilty by reason of a mental illness. And we really feel that Lindsay needs to get the help she needs to give some justice to the children. That [their] mother loved [them], and didn’t know what she was doing when she did that, and to get justice for them the medical community needs to acknowledge that this exists.

You may think that Paula Devlin is a vacuous nonentity. But it’s worth reading the tea leaves, because people like her sit on juries. What was pertinent in the Clancy case, from Paula Devlin’s perspective? Well, we might start by taking a look at how she defines “justice.” According to Devlin, justice would be for the killer to get psychiatric care. In subsequent interviews, Devlin and some of the other jurors have stated that, in deliberations, they saw the case as being about the bigger societal picture of women’s mental health.

Genuflection to systemic explanations in a murder trial is a bad sign, in my opinion. And of course, there’s no such thing as “not guilty by reason of a mental illness.” From what I can tell, the evidence in the Clancy case strongly suggests premeditation. Then again, I didn’t attend the Clancy trial and I didn’t see everything the jurors saw. Here is Devlin again, in her own words:

CBS News: Was there any specific evidence that swayed you?

Devlin: I think Dr. Resnik, his testimony about altruistic filicide was really impactful, because all throughout the trial we had all the witnesses, there had been nothing but good said about Lindsay and how amazing of a mother she was and how much she loved her children. We saw that in every picture that was taken of the house on the night that this happened. Everywhere you looked there was just love. There was a big sign [inside the house] that said ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ And you know, there wasn’t anything that said she wasn’t that. And then to hear somebody talking about a real reason why all of a sudden this could happen, that was really impactful.

These remarks are more enlightening. Two experts said Clancy was psychotic, and three said she wasn’t. There was considerable variation among them about what caused the killings. Expert testimony is often kind of a wash—what you’re left with after a battle of the experts is Occam’s razor, and the roulette wheel of jurors’ intangible prejudices. Here, we got the opposite of Occam’s razor. Faced with an extraordinary set of facts, Paula Devlin and ten of her fellow jurors were looking for an extraordinary explanation.

That’s just how conspiracy theories work, isn’t it? Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, but evidence is less compelling than the right narrative. Faced with a filicide by a prim suburban nurse, the right narrative for the acquittal jurors was that prim suburban nurses don’t just murder their children.

Here is juror Kellie Farina, to NBC-10 Boston:

The prosecution had no witness to question her credibility. [Reddington] brought all these people in, people that lived with her: family, her in-laws, even Patrick [Clancy] was very compassionate.

So in the absence of testimony that Clancy was a bad mother prior to killing her kids, the least disturbing explanation won the day for eleven of the 12 jurors.

Indeed, other jurors have made similar statements in the media, i.e., that the prosecution’s failure to put on negative character evidence was a problem for them. This has been widely criticized on social media, to the effect that character evidence was irrelevant or would’ve been inadmissible.

Those criticisms are misplaced: because Reddington introduced evidence of Clancy’s good character as a mother, the Commonwealth was permitted to introduce rebuttal evidence of her bad character as a mother. Rather, the problem here, as I see it, is the inability of the average American to grapple with the problem of evil.

This isn’t just a problem that afflicts mall walkers, or the median voter. For example, in law school, my criminal procedure class was taught by a very smart, very liberal professor. Her background was in criminal defense and civil rights. One time, during an after-class discussion with a group of students around the lectern, she said that, from her perspective as a former criminal defense practitioner, she believed people are fundamentally good, and that people only commit crime because they were abused as children.

Of course, this is a logical fallacy called begging the question. If people are good, and only misbehave because they’re abused, then how are we to explain the abuse?

This failure to accept a tragic view of life is where all conspiracy theory comes from. Indeed, it’s at the heart of most religions and all ideologies, which are fundamentally conspiracy theories. In Christianity and Islam, the source of evil is Satan. In left-wing ideologies, it’s the bourgeoisie and big business. In libertarianism, it’s government. In right-wing ideologies, it’s the intelligentsia.

For mall walkers and median voters and law professors alike, increasingly, the stand-in for Satan is the impenetrable mystery of mental illness, something inherently evasive of measurement, which the Clancy acquittal jurors enabled Kevin Reddington to invoke to comfort themselves in the face of extraordinary evil.

In Nietzsche’s philosophy, life can only be affirmed by embracing its tragic essence:

Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence—and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.

In other words, only through the acceptance of tragedy can we affirm life and try to make it better.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow is the aspect of the personality that does not correspond with the ego ideal, which we repress and project. Projection is a defense mechanism where we attribute our own unacceptable traits and impulses to others, in order to absolve ourselves of introspection.

American public discourse is increasingly shot-through with nihilism and conspiracy theory—admiration for foreign dictatorships, retreat into traditionalist larping and olde tyme religion, apologetics for crime and terrorism, the celebration of assassinations, and the resort to antisemitism as a grand theory. All of this is projection, a failure of maturity designed to absolve ourselves of introspection and acceptance of tragedy. According to all of these ideologies, evil is fundamentally unreal, a foreign imposition rather than an inherent part of life to be contended with realistically. Don’t believe your lying eyes—instead look for the man behind the curtain.

I don’t know whether Lindsay Clancy was psychotic when she killed her children. But it very much appears as though psychosis was a foregone conclusion for the acquittal jurors, because they refused to entertain the possibility of radical evil.

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This blog post is commentary and is not legal advice for your individual situation. All text content © Aaron Cress 2025-2026.