Texas Republican: 'I don't have an ounce of sympathy for Lindsay Clancy'

Brandon Gill said the quiet part loud, and a lot of people are going to nod along with him even if they'd never say it on camera. Three children are dead. A jury couldn't reach a verdict on whether their mother was too sick to be held responsible for killing them. And a sitting congressman went on Fox and said, essentially, I don't care what the diagnosis was. That's not a policy position. That's a gut reaction, and it's one plenty of Americans share whether or not it holds up under cross-examination.

But there's a reason we have insanity defenses and juries instead of just letting the loudest voice on cable news decide guilt. The Clancy case is genuinely awful precisely because it isn't simple. Severe postpartum psychosis is real, documented, and has ended in tragedy before in ways courts have treated very differently than ordinary murder. A mistrial means twelve people looked at the same evidence and couldn't agree, which usually means the case is harder than the sound bite version.

None of that requires anyone to feel warm feelings toward Lindsay Clancy. Sympathy for a defendant and belief in due process aren't the same thing, and conflating them is how you end up with politicians grandstanding on the worst day of a case's life. Gill is entitled to his revulsion. Most of us share it. But a congressman's job isn't to pre-judge a mistrial for a cable hit, it's to let the system that's supposed to sort out mental illness from malice actually finish its work.