It has been a while...

Apparently it takes a nationally watched murder trial, two deadlock notes, a disputed holdout juror, and seven days of deliberations to drag me back to the keyboard.

Not exactly the triumphant return I had planned.

As of this writing (9/4/26), the jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is entering its seventh day without a unanimous verdict. Deliberations began August 27 in Plymouth Superior Court after nearly six weeks of testimony before Judge William Sullivan. The panel — nine women and three men — has already told the court twice that it cannot agree. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has publicly described the split as 11–1 and asked the judge to remove a juror he says “spurned the instructions” on reasonable doubt. The judge declined Thursday. An inquiry of that juror was expected Friday morning. A mistrial is possible. A verdict is also possible. Neither has arrived.

That is the news.

Here is what is not in dispute:

On January 24, 2023, in a house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Cora Clancy, five years old; Dawson Clancy, three years old; and Callan Clancy, eight months old, were strangled with exercise bands. Lindsay Clancy does not deny causing their deaths. Afterward she cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She survived. She is now paralyzed from the waist down and has been held at Tewksbury Hospital. The children did not survive. Callan died days later. The strangulation counts were later dropped as redundant with the murder charges. The trial is about the three murders.

The legal question before the jury is not whether the children are dead. It is whether Clancy was criminally responsible when she killed them. Massachusetts law allows a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility if a mental disease or defect left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or unable to conform it to the law. The defense says postpartum psychosis — and a disastrous course of psychiatric treatment — did exactly that. Prosecutors say she planned it: she sent her husband, Patrick, out for takeout and medication, then used the window of time. A first-degree murder conviction carries life without parole. A finding of no criminal responsibility would not send her home. It would ordinarily mean commitment to a state psychiatric facility, subject to review. Those are the stakes in the room. And before someone adjusts their glasses, clears their throat, opens Outlook, and begins composing an email titled Actually, Inkari… Yes.

I know!

The jury is not sitting in a room debating whether murdering children is morally acceptable. They are answering a specific and difficult legal question about criminal responsibility under Massachusetts law. Thank you, imaginary commenter.

You may lower your hand now. Because I am talking about something larger than twelve jurors in Plymouth. I am talking about us. I am talking about a culture so terrified of making a moral judgment that every clear sentence now requires seventeen disclaimers, three diagnoses, six specialists, a flowchart, a podcast miniseries, and a laminated permission slip before anyone is allowed to say:

Killing children is wrong.

There.

I typed it.

The ceiling did not collapse.

The internet probably survived.

You will too.

Remember their names Cora was five.

Dawson was three.

Callan was eight months old. Remember those names. Because if we are going to spend weeks talking about Lindsay Clancy’s mind, Lindsay Clancy’s medications, Lindsay Clancy’s treatment, Lindsay Clancy’s suffering, Lindsay Clancy’s diagnosis, Lindsay Clancy’s legal responsibility, Lindsay Clancy’s doctors, and Lindsay Clancy’s psychiatric history, perhaps somewhere in all that sophisticated discussion we could remember one inconvenient detail: There were three other human beings in that house. Three children.

Three victims.

Three little people who depended entirely on the adults around them to keep them safe. And they are dead.

We collect explanations like coupons Somewhere along the way, our culture developed a peculiar allergy to moral clarity. We love explanations.

We collect them like coupons. Trauma.

Mental illness.

Childhood.

Medication.

Hormones.

Stress.

Environment.

Systems.

Diagnosis. Every one of those things can matter.

Some of them matter enormously here. Nobody needs to pretend Lindsay Clancy was mentally well. Her struggles are not a last-minute courtroom invention. The prosecution and defense disagree over her condition and what it did to her criminal responsibility. Serious concerns about her mental health and psychiatric treatment are part of the established history of this case. Mental illness is real. Postpartum psychosis is real. People can become profoundly disconnected from reality. Psychiatric care can fail. Doctors can make mistakes. Medication can be complicated. Families can miss warning signs. Systems built to catch people before catastrophe can fail spectacularly. I am not interested in pretending otherwise. But can we please remember that Lindsay was not the only person hurting? Imagine that.

Apparently this is the revolutionary contribution Inkari has returned from hiatus to provide. Yes.

Lindsay was hurting mentally.

We know.

We have discussed it.

Experts have testified about it.

Lawyers have argued about it.

News programs have dissected it.

Millions of strangers have debated it. Her suffering has received articles, interviews, court days, expert analysis, and endless commentary. Now here is my apparently outrageous question: Has anybody stopped long enough to think about how the children were hurting? Cora.

Dawson.

Callan. The conversation keeps orbiting the suffering of the adult who killed them while the children she killed are slowly pushed toward the edge of their own story. They become “the three children.”

“The victims.”

“The Clancy children.”

A sentence halfway down an article before we return to psychiatric medications. No. They had names.

They had bodies.

They could experience pain.

They depended on their mother.

They were completely vulnerable to the adults responsible for protecting them.

They were the ones physically harmed.

They were the ones whose lives ended.

They were the ones who never got to sit in a courtroom and explain what happened to them. And somehow we have become so sophisticated in our compassion that we are in danger of compassioning the victims straight out of their own murder case.

The question underneath the case Does mental illness suddenly erase a person’s responsibility not to kill another human being? If your answer is simply yes, with no qualification and no further thought required, then I need you to understand the size of the thing you just said. Mental illness can affect judgment.

It can distort perception.

It can interfere with someone’s ability to distinguish reality from delusion.

Severe psychiatric illness can affect legal culpability. And yes — there are circumstances under American law where a person can commit a horrific act and nevertheless be found not criminally responsible because of their mental state. That legal concept exists for a reason. Fine.

Take it seriously. But stop turning that legal question into a moral magic trick where three children disappear beneath the tablecloth. Their lives mattered.

Their suffering mattered.

What happened to them mattered.

They were hurting too. Except they don’t get psychiatrists.

They don’t get attorneys.

They don’t get expert witnesses.

They don’t get sympathetic profiles explaining the complexities surrounding that night.

They don’t get years afterward to process what happened.

They don’t get another morning. So perhaps, for five minutes, we could let them occupy the center of the conversation. Because somewhere between understanding why someone did something and deciding what that means, America appears to have driven the family minivan directly through the guardrail. Explanation became exoneration.

Context became absolution.

Compassion became an excuse to mumble when we should speak plainly.

And nuance, once a useful tool for understanding complicated things, has been promoted to Supreme Moral Emperor of Everything. Say that an action was evil and someone immediately assumes you believe mental illness is fictional.

Acknowledge mental illness and somebody else assumes you have declared the action morally neutral.

Express compassion for the perpetrator and you are accused of forgetting the victims.

Demand justice for the victims and someone concludes you have no compassion for the mentally ill. Apparently the human brain is now capable of holding precisely one thought at a time. Very advanced species we have become.

Two things can be true Lindsay Clancy may have been profoundly mentally ill.

And killing Cora, Dawson, and Callan was wrong. The healthcare system may have failed her.

And three children were still killed. Her psychiatric condition matters when determining criminal responsibility.

And their deaths do not become less horrific because her mind may have been severely disordered. We can investigate failures in her treatment. We should.

We can ask whether her doctors recognized what was happening. We should.

We can study postpartum mental illness more seriously. We absolutely should.

We can build better systems for mothers in psychiatric emergency. Please, for the love of all things sane, we should. And while doing every one of those things, we can maintain the apparently endangered belief that parents possess a responsibility not to kill their children. These thoughts do not cancel each other out.

They are not mortal enemies.

They can sit at the same table. Compassion matters.

Justice matters.

Mental health matters.

Personal responsibility matters.

Context matters.

Right and wrong still exist.

Humans are complicated.

Morality does not therefore evaporate. That distinction matters because mental illness is not imaginary.

But neither is morality. And I am deeply uncomfortable with a culture increasingly convinced that acknowledging one requires dismantling the other. Because where exactly does that road end? If every explanation eventually becomes an excuse, accountability becomes impossible. There will always be a reason. Always. Trauma somewhere. A wound. A fear. An ideology. A diagnosis. A childhood. A chemical. An influence. A circumstance. A desire. A pressure. A biological process. Human beings do not commit wrongdoing inside sterile laboratory vacuums.

Every sinner has a biography.

That has never meant sin does not exist.

Scripture already knew this tension Christianity, inconveniently for modern sensibilities, has understood this for a long time. Scripture does not present humanity as a collection of cartoon villains twirling mustaches in dark alleyways. It presents people as broken. Wounded. Deceived. Tempted. Afraid. Angry. Sick. Selfish. Sometimes oppressed. Sometimes oppressing someone else. Sometimes victimized. Sometimes victimizing others. Frequently several of those things before breakfast. And yet Scripture never concludes: Well, everyone is complicated, so I suppose good and evil are canceled. Quite the opposite. “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;

Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;

Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”

— Isaiah 5:20, NASB 1995 Grace means something because sin is real.

Mercy means something because judgment is real.

Forgiveness means something because there is actually something requiring forgiveness. You cannot preserve biblical compassion by deleting biblical accountability.

That is not mercy.

That is moral anesthesia. And America seems increasingly determined to sedate its conscience. Paul did not treat the moral law as a niche religious hobby. He said even those without the written Law still show it at work in them: “For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them.”

— Romans 2:14–15, NASB 1995 That is why the simplest sentence in this whole affair still rings. Not because a jury said it. Because conscience does. We are perfectly comfortable proclaiming MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS when mental illness is marketable. When it looks like anxiety beneath a weighted blanket. When it is depression expressed through a tasteful pastel infographic. When it is someone bravely admitting they are struggling while gentle piano music plays underneath. Good.

Have those conversations.

Please.

I mean that. Mental-health awareness matters. People should be able to ask for help without shame. But severe mental illness is not always photogenic. Sometimes it is terrifying. Sometimes someone loses contact with reality. Sometimes someone becomes dangerous to themselves. Sometimes someone becomes dangerous to other people. Sometimes people are harmed. Sometimes people die. If our compassion for mental illness evaporates the moment illness becomes frightening, then we never actually cared about severe mental illness.

We cared about branding. Listen carefully, because the opposite error is sitting directly across the aisle. Acknowledging severe mental illness does not require pretending actions lose all moral significance. We should be capable of saying:

“This person may have been extraordinarily sick.”

And:

“This should never have happened.”

Without our heads exploding. We should be able to investigate psychiatric failures without turning Cora, Dawson, and Callan into collateral damage in a policy argument.

We should be able to discuss postpartum psychosis seriously without allowing three children to become supporting characters in the story of the person who killed them.

We should be able to recognize diminished criminal responsibility where the law determines it exists without rewriting the underlying act into something harmless. That is not contradiction.

That is adulthood. Justice without mercy becomes brutality.

Mercy without truth becomes sentimentality.

Compassion without moral clarity eventually becomes cowardice.

Moral clarity without compassion becomes cruelty. We need all of them.

At the same time. Annoying, isn’t it?

Humans keep insisting on being complicated. Micah already refused the false choice: “He has told you, O man, what is good;

And what does the LORD require of you

But to do justice, to love kindness,

And to walk humbly with your God?”

— Micah 6:8, NASB 1995 Justice.

Kindness.

Humility.

Not one of those words devouring the other two.

One thing here is not complicated Three children should still be alive. Cora.

Five years old. Dawson.

Three years old. Callan.

Eight months old. Perhaps before we spend another day arguing over which ideological tribe gets custody of this tragedy, we could remember them. Not as evidence.

Not as Exhibit Whatever.

Not as symbols in a debate about maternal mental health.

Not as ammunition for whichever side of the internet woke up angry this morning. Children.

A little girl.

A little boy.

A baby.

Whatever comes from that courtroom, I hope we possess enough moral backbone to resist turning it into something it isn’t. A guilty verdict would not prove mental illness is fake.

A verdict finding her not criminally responsible would not make killing children morally acceptable.

A mistrial would not transform disagreement about a legal standard into disagreement about whether three children’s deaths were horrific. The jury has a difficult question.

They should answer it carefully.

That is their responsibility. The rest of us have another. Do not become so intoxicated with explanation that you forget explanation has limits. Understanding an action does not automatically sanctify it.

Diagnosing something does not baptize it.

Finding the wound does not resurrect the people injured by it.

Having compassion for someone’s broken mind does not require gouging out your moral compass and throwing it into the nearest river.

And caring deeply about mental illness does not require looking at three dead children and suddenly becoming frightened of the word wrong. “Deliver those who are being taken away to death,

And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.

If you say, ‘See, we did not know this,’

Does He not consider it who weighs the hearts?

And does He not know it who keeps your soul?

And will He not render to man according to his work?”

— Proverbs 24:11–12, NASB 1995 The children cannot be held back now.

That is the horror.

What remains is whether we will pretend we did not know what we were looking at.

Seven days and counting.

Take the law seriously.

Take psychiatric illness seriously.

Take postpartum psychosis seriously.

Investigate the doctors.

Investigate the medications.

Investigate the system.

Ask whether warning signs were missed.

Ask whether better intervention could have prevented this.

Ask every uncomfortable question available. Please ask them. Maybe answering those questions saves the next mother.

Maybe it saves the next child. But for the love of everything holy, stop acting as though complexity requires moral paralysis. Some actions can be understood and still condemned.

Someone can deserve compassion while the thing they did deserves judgment.

Someone’s suffering can matter without mattering more than the suffering of the people they harmed.

Mercy and justice can occupy the same room.

Mental illness and moral responsibility can exist in the same conversation. And sometimes the bravest sentence left in a culture drowning beneath qualifications is the simplest one: What happened was wrong. Lindsay was hurting.

Yes. So were they.

And they do not get to tell us about it. Three children should be alive.

No diagnosis changes that.

No verdict changes that.

No amount of nuance changes that. So before you remember the defendant’s diagnosis —

before you remember the lawyers —

before you remember the experts —

before you remember the arguments —

before you remember the holdout juror, the deadlock notes, the Friday inquiry, the possible mistrial — Remember their names. Cora.

Dawson.

Callan. Everything else comes after.

Yep, the classic one was: — inkari 🧵⚡

Sector Δ7

Data Recovered — Romans 1:20

Note on the record: As of Friday morning, September 4, 2026, there is still no verdict. The 11–1 figure is the defense’s characterization, not a court finding. A finding of no criminal responsibility would not equal walking free. The children’s names and ages follow the established public record of the case. Scripture quoted from the New American Standard Bible, 1995.