IS LOVE THE VILLAIN? - by Trixie Wrights

What if we're seeking the wrong answer? What if love is the villain? Can loving someone make us believe we know what's best for them? And when does that stop being a defence? What happens when love becomes so twisted that a parent believes death is better than life for their children? That is why I think the Lindsay Clancy case goes beyond simply asking whether she was mentally ill or whether she should be punished. I think severe postpartum psychosis, depression, bipolar disorder, or any other mental illness should not automatically determine criminal responsibility. Mental capacity should. Was she mentally capable of understanding that her actions were wrong and of conforming her conduct to the law at the time of the killings? Deliberate action and planning alone do not necessarily prove that someone was mentally competent. A person can act intentionally while their perception of reality is severely twisted. The evidence of her mental state at that moment matters. But there is another question I think we often overlook. What about the children? Children are individual human beings, separate from their parents. Parents make decisions for their children every day. Sometimes those decisions are as simple as what to eat. Parents should exercise authority over their children's lives, but that authority has limits. Being a parent gives you responsibility for a child's life, not ownership of it. Consider this: I'm a parent in charge of deciding where my child gets to live, but should I also be in control of whether they live? Should my decision always override theirs even if I love them? I don't think it should. Lindsay's children were children, yes. But being someone's children did not make them any less living, breathing human beings with lives and rights of their own. Their mother's love did not make their lives hers to dispose of. Perhaps Lindsay genuinely believed she was protecting them. Perhaps, in her mind, death was safer or better than the future she imagined for them. But good intentions do not automatically produce good actions. A person can sincerely believe they are protecting someone while being dangerously wrong about what protection requires. This is where mental illness matters—but it cannot become the entire story. If her mental illness genuinely prevented her from understanding the wrongfulness of her actions, then that should matter when determining criminal responsibility. But an explanation is not the same as a justification. The children still died. And that brings me to what I believe justice should mean. I don't believe justice necessarily has to mean prison. If someone was genuinely incapable of understanding the wrongfulness of their actions because of severe mental illness, rehabilitation, psychiatric treatment and appropriate confinement may be more just than conventional punishment. But rehabilitation should not mean erasure, and treatment should not erase accountability. Accountability, to me, means treatment, confinement when necessary, understanding what happened, and confronting the consequences. If Lindsay recovers, she may eventually have to confront the reality that her children are gone and that she played a role in what happened, regardless of whether the law ultimately finds her criminally responsible. That confrontation does not undo what happened. And perhaps that is part of accountability: not simply being punished for an action, but being capable of understanding its consequences and having to live with the truth of them. But if, after recovery, she still cannot understand why what she did was wrong, what would that tell us about her mental state? And what would it tell us about the nature of the crime? The question should not simply be whether Lindsay Clancy had a diagnosis or whether she was guilty. In my opinion, it should be whether her mental illness actually deprived her of the capacity necessary for criminal responsibility when she killed her children. And regardless of that legal determination, her children were not hers to dispose of. They were separate human beings whose lives had value independent of their mother's intentions. Justice does not require us to ignore mental illness. Neither does love nor a parent's sense of ownership give them the right to decide whether their children live. Compassion for mental illness must not require us to erase the victims.

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