Lindsay Clancy's three child victims forgotten amid crowds of support: mother of six

Three kids are dead, and outside the courthouse people are showing up with signs of support for the woman charged with killing them. That's the part of this story that should stop everyone cold. Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy aren't abstractions. They were five, three, and eight months old. They had names, birthdays, favorite toys, and now they have nothing, because the crowds gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court aren't there for them.

We understand postpartum depression is real and serious, and nobody's arguing Lindsay Clancy's mental state is irrelevant to what happened. But there's a difference between examining context and staging what amounts to a rally for the accused while her three children are barely mentioned. Bethany Mandel is right to flag it. When the public conversation around a triple child homicide becomes primarily about sympathy for the person charged with committing it, something in our moral instincts has gotten scrambled.

This isn't really about one case. It's about a broader cultural habit of reflexively centering the perpetrator's inner life while the victims fade into the background, especially when the victims are children too young to have advocates of their own. Kids don't organize support crowds. They don't get hashtags outside courthouses. Somebody has to speak for them, and right now it sounds like almost nobody is.

If we can't hold space for basic outrage on behalf of three murdered children without immediately pivoting to the accused's suffering, we've lost something important about how we weigh justice against sympathy. Compassion for a defendant's struggles shouldn't require erasing the people she's accused of killing.