Lindsay Clancy trial: Postpartum is real, but child killing demands accountability, veteran prosecutor says

Three kids are dead. Cora, Callan, and Dawson Clancy will never grow up, and somewhere in the last several months the public conversation quietly shifted from that fact to a debate about their mother's mental state. Jonathan Hatami is right to say the quiet part out loud: sympathy has a way of crowding out accountability, especially when the accused doesn't look like who we picture when we picture a killer.

Postpartum depression and psychosis are real conditions, and nobody serious disputes that they can be devastating. But there's a difference between using mental illness to explain what happened and using it to explain away what happened. Courts exist precisely to sort through that difference, carefully, with evidence, not with a public relations campaign that starts building sympathy before a jury ever hears the case. When true crime podcasts and social media threads start referring to a woman accused of strangling and drowning her three children as a victim of the system, something has gotten out of balance.

None of this means Clancy shouldn't get a real defense, a fair trial, or a full accounting of her mental health at the time. She should, and the legal process is built to weigh exactly that. What it shouldn't mean is that the children become an afterthought in their own deaths, reduced to a footnote in a story about their mother's suffering. Hatami's job is to speak for them, and it says something uncomfortable about our culture that he feels he has to remind people they existed at all.

Compassion for a struggling mother and justice for three murdered children aren't mutually exclusive, but they require holding both at once. Lately it feels like we're only doing the former.