Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader.
In January 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children – Cora, five; Dawson, three; Callan, eight months – then threw herself from a window and was left paralysed. She does not deny the killings. The trial that followed was not about whether. It was about whether she could be blamed.
Her lawyers said postpartum psychosis: a male voice ordering her to kill the children and herself; a psychotic break; a mental-health system that failed a woman who had sought help. Prosecutors said depression, not psychosis; still an agent; still answerable for three dead children. In September 2026 the jury was hung. A mistrial. On the defence’s account of the foreperson’s notes, the split was not six and six. It was 11 to one – 11 ready to find her not criminally responsible and one holdout who would not join an acquittal. The judge refused to remove that juror. The case remains unresolved. Clancy stays in a psychiatric hospital. The children stay dead.
The commentary class treated this as a referendum on maternal mental health. Fair enough that postpartum psychosis is real and dangerous. But watch the argument closely and you will see something Alasdair MacIntyre described nearly half a century ago in After Virtue: a culture that keeps the forms of moral reasoning – courts, experts, closing speeches, words like responsibility and justice and care – after it has lost a shared account of what those words are for.
Both sides speak English. They are not playing the same game. One tradition’s telos is therapeutic. The human good is to heal the suffering agent; the killings are a medical catastrophe; the proper response is treatment, not condemnation. Another tradition’s telos is juridical, and older than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the human good includes answering for the taking of innocent life; the primary victims are the three small humans whose futures were ended; compassion for illness does not erase judgment. Same vocabulary. Different ends. Endless heat.
MacIntyre called the late-modern condition emotivist: moral utterance often amounts to I strongly approve or disapprove – do so as well, dressed up as argument. Listen to the Clancy feeds. How can you not have compassion for her? How can you not see three murdered children? The passion is genuine. What is missing is agreement on what a mother is for, what agency is, and what justice owes the dead. Experts are summoned as if a scan could settle a metaphysical dispute about blame. Science can inform capacity. It cannot tell you whether the point of a trial is therapy or judgment.
The 11-to-one split matters. Emotivist deadlock is not only a culture split down the middle. It can also be a culture that has almost wholly absorbed one script – illness excuses; care not blame – with a single juror still running another: that the Commonwealth had not erased responsibility beyond reasonable doubt, or that three children still demand a name for what was done. Nearly unanimous feeling is not the same as a settled moral framework. Formal unanimity rules then freeze the result into a mistrial, and everyone goes back to shouting.
MacIntyre does not diagnose Clancy’s mind. He does not deny psychosis. He points at us. We retain the ceremony of moral decision while the traditions that once made ‘responsible’ mean one thing have fractured into rival goods. Until we can say what a human being is, what a parent is for, and what justice is for, cases like this will keep producing compassion and condemnation as competing preferences – each side convinced it is reason.
Put the children’s names back in the centre. Any tradition worth keeping has to do that before it decides what to do with their mother. Cora. Dawson. Callan. The rest of the argument is secondary until that much is shared.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
