The Lindsay Clancy case horror: When empathy becomes child sacrifice

The ancient pagan world was full of human sacrifice. The most horrifying instance was child sacrifice. We got an inkling of this in this summer’s smash-hit The Odyssey, with the brief depiction of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter for favorable winds.One of the most important changes that occurred from the pagan to the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian world was the outlawing of child sacrifice. The Judeo-Christian teaching that every individual is created in the image of God meant that one’s children are not one’s property — they are not items to do with as one pleases. The teaching that all individuals are created in the image of God meant that children are equally infinitely valuable as their parents, and therefore parents have no right to sacrifice them to appease the gods, or God, no matter how spiritually or psychologically pressed the parent may feel.This was the central teaching of the Binding of Isaac story in the Book of Genesis. Although Abraham initially heard God tell him to offer up his son, God eventually told Abraham to stay his hand and not sacrifice his child. What may have been acceptable in pagan times would no longer be permitted. With the disgusting outpouring of sympathy for a child murderer that we have seen in the Lindsay Clancy case, it appears as if 4,000 years of moral and ethical progress are disappearing. We are devolving back into a frightening, pre-Judeo-Christian, horrific pagan world in which people freely rationalize away the murder of children. That is the cultural and political import of what happened in Plymouth, Massachusetts, last week. Lindsay Clancy in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Superior Court. (AP photo) On Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy, then a labor-and-delivery nurse on maternity leave, strangled her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — with exercise resistance bands in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callan died three days later.Clancy does not dispute that she killed them. Her lawyers argued that she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder. After a six-week trial and nearly 40 hours of deliberations over seven days, a jury of nine women and three men deadlocked. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. Eleven jurors appeared ready to find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. One juror would not.That one juror was a man. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington said so and then denounced him. “It was 11-1 for an acquittal,” Reddington told reporters, “and one individual who recognized that there was reasonable doubt and refused to apply the law.” The other jurors, he said, “know that they were robbed by one man for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.” Then: “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”Of course he can sleep well. The question is how the jurors who voted to acquit can sleep well, and how anyone who feels empathy for a child murderer can sleep at night.Suicidal Empathy redux Readers of this magazine will recognize an unfortunate pattern here. In my recent feature on Dr. Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, I described Saad’s diagnosis of a virtue gone wrong. “Suicidal empathy,” as Saad has shown in his book and in his subsequent posts and podcast appearances, are instances of empathy that “hyperfire” toward the wrong targets and produce civilizational self-harm. Saad’s closing line in the book bears repeating here: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct. It truly is that simple.”The Clancy spectacle is that diagnosis made flesh. Hundreds of supporters gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court, rallying in pink attire and demonstrating solidarity with a woman who killed three children. Online, the slogan “Same, Lindsay” spread among mothers filming themselves with their own living infants. GoFundMe campaigns for Clancy’s parents raised enormous sums. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted a video of the courthouse rally and wrote: “This is what it looks like when toxic empathy ripens into late-state suicidal empathy. @GadSaad has identified an epidemic that can no longer be ignored.” Police escort District Attorney for Plymouth County Timothy Cruz, center, after the judge declared a mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial on Sept. 4, 2026, in Plymouth, Massaschusetts. (Charles Krupa/AP) The empathy was not equally distributed. It flowed overwhelmingly toward the killer. The three children became almost an afterthought — props in a morality play about failed maternal mental health care. That is the same hierarchy Saad has identified in other domains: within the warped worldview of those who’ve been afflicted by the mental pathogen of suicidal empathy, some lives are more equal than others. The vulnerable who fit the approved script receive infinite compassion. The vulnerable who do not — here, three small children whose last minutes were spent with bands tightening around their necks — receive silence, or worse, a lecture about systems and sleep deprivation.After a mistrial was declared, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz tried to restore the proper order of concern.“We’re here at this courthouse today because those children are not,” he said. “Our priority has always been to fight for Cora, for Dawson, and for Callan. … Children were murdered, and it’s our job to seek justice. … The facts are Lindsay Clancy killed her three children and the evidence suggested to us that she was in control of her actions when she committed those homicides.” He called it “the cruel and calculated killing of three innocents.”Supporters heckled him. He refused to stand there and listen.What strangling three children actually requires The defense asked the jury to treat the killings as the product of a mind so broken it could not appreciate wrongfulness or conform conduct to the law. The physical facts of the crime make that claim extraordinarily difficult to swallow.Ligature strangulation is not a single impulsive blow. Medical examiners testified that unconsciousness can occur in 10 to 30 seconds under complete oxygen deprivation, but brain death takes far longer — roughly six to eight minutes without oxygen flow. Continuous pressure must be maintained. One forensic pathologist testified that after rapid unconsciousness from a tight ligature, death still requires five to 10 minutes of ongoing constriction. Dawson, the 3-year-old, showed more hemorrhaging than his sister, consistent with struggling or a change in pressure on the neck. Callan, 8 months old, had deep strangulation marks around the entire circumference of his neck.To do this once is already a prolonged, tactile act. To do it three times — moving from child to child, wrapping bands, holding them until the struggling stops — requires minutes of sustained, deliberate action, not split-second moments of psychotic spasms. Clancy reportedly said she told the children “go to God” while she did it. That is not the language of a person who has vanished from the scene of her own body. It is the language of someone who knows she is sending them somewhere.Defense attorney Kevin Reddington holds up a picture of the Clancy family before the murders during closing arguments in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court on Aug. 27, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP) Prosecutors presented a timeline that looks like planning rather than a sudden break. On the afternoon of Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy searched for a children’s laxative, looked up a restaurant the family did not typically use, and used mapping tools to see how long the trip would take. At 4:53 p.m., she texted her husband, Patrick: “Any chance you want to do take out from ThreeV. I didn’t cook anything. It’s been a long day.” He agreed. She replied, “Okie dokie, check the menu when you can.” She added a CVS stop. He left around 5:15 p.m. and was gone less than an hour. She placed the order, spoke with the restaurant, and later took a brief phone call from him while he was at the pharmacy. When he returned, the house was quiet. He found her outside, injured. The children were in the basement with bands still around their necks.While still intubated in the hospital, she wrote on a whiteboard: “Do I need an attorney?” Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague told jurors that showed “clarity, focus and mental acumen to focus on protecting her own rights and interests.”None of this proves she was not severely ill. Postpartum psychosis is real, rare, and terrifying. Clancy had sought care, taken a cascade of medications, and left a trail of diary entries about anxiety, insomnia, and despair. A civilized legal system can weigh mental illness without pretending that three children were not murdered. What it cannot do, without abandoning the moral inheritance of the Binding of Isaac and 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian ethics, is to treat the murderer as the primary victim. It’s as if, after going on yet another Halloween killing spree, people started rallying in support of Michael Myers. 11 Angry Men Reddington’s fury at the holdout juror is revealing. The other eleven, in his telling, were “so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful.” The one man who would not join them had an “agenda.” In other words: The majority’s empathy was virtue; the minority’s refusal was vice.That inversion is the political story. A jury is not a support group. Its job is not to decide which narrative about motherhood feels most validating. Massachusetts law required unanimity on whether Clancy lacked criminal responsibility. Eleven people were prepared to say that a woman who spent upwards of ten minutes strangling her three children, after sending her husband on a timed errand, should walk free of criminal guilt. One man said no.Aimee Breault of Acushnet, Massachusetts, livestreams a demonstration in support of Lindsay Clancy outside Plymouth Superior Court, where Clancy is on trial in connection with the deaths of her three children, on Aug. 20, 2026. (Josh Reynolds/AP) We do not know his name. We do not know his reasoning in the jury room. We know only that he would not dissolve the distinction between illness and innocence when the act itself was so prolonged, so sequential, and so final. In a culture that has begun to treat child-killing as a complicated mental-health event rather than an atrocity, that refusal is a form of civic courage.Saad has argued that the West’s empathy instinct has been hijacked so that it fires toward the perpetrator class — illegal immigrants over citizens, criminals over victims, the ideologically fashionable over the actually vulnerable. The Clancy chorus is the domestic criminal justice version of the same misfire. The “Same, Lindsay” mothers are not wrong that the medical system often fails people. They are wrong that this failure licenses, or even morally softens, the murder of Cora, Dawson, and Callan. (The same goes for the suicidally empathetic supporters of Luigi Mangione. Yes, the healthcare system is screwed up — who among us hasn’t been so frustrated by an insurance bill that we’ve wanted to rip our hair out or throw a remote across the room? But this frustration and the mess that is the health insurance industry do not justify the cold-blooded murder of a health insurance executive!)Empathy that cannot hold two truths at once — that a mother may have been suffering and that this same mother murdered three children who had a right to live — is not compassion. It is a disturbing regression to a time in which adults prioritized their own psychological concerns over the lives of their children.The choice Pagan logic was transactional. Sacrifice the child, gain the wind, save the fleet, please the goddess. The Judeo-Christian revolution was the insistence that the human being (and especially not the child) is not a means to an end; the human being is intrinsically valuable. The Agamemnon scene in The Odyssey reminded us, in a single brutal flashback, what the older world looked like. The Clancy trial reminds us how quickly a post-modern society can talk itself back toward that older, more horrifying world, provided that the language is clinical enough (“psychosis,” “system failure,” “she needed help”) and the photos of the victims are kept off the rally signs.GAD SAAD, THE DOCTOR WHO DIAGNOSED THE WESTCruz has not yet said whether he will retry the case. A status hearing is set for Sept. 29. Clancy remains at Tewksbury State Hospital, charged with three counts of first-degree murder. The legal system still has more to play out and more to say about this sordid, horrid affair. But the moral and cultural question will not wait for a second verdict.A society that cannot look at three murdered children and say, first and last, that this must not be done, and that the person who did it is responsible for doing it, has begun to unlearn the lesson that separated us from the Moloch worshippers (the pagans whose form of idolatry was so unimaginably hellish—passing children through a fiery pyre — that the Judaic word for Hell, “Gehinnom,” is taken from the location of one of the primary Moloch-worship centers of ancient Judea). Empathy for the parent who murders is such a warped, evil form of empathy that the word “empathy” does not even deserve to be used at all in reference to the perpetrator of this ghastly crime. The one man on that jury understood at least that much: that some acts are so wrong that the survival of a moral order depends on refusing to explain them away. The rest of us would do well to stand with him, and with Cora, Dawson, and Callan, rather than with the mob that found it easier to love the killer.Daniel Ross Goodman (@DanRossGoodman) is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and teaches theology and religious studies at St. John’s University. His next book, Dante’s Guide to Life: How The Divine Comedy Can Change Our Fortunes, Our World, and Ourselves, will be published this fall by Angelico Press.