Lindsay Clancy Trial, Freedom, and Accountability

A Departure From My Usual Subject

I usually write about freedom: what a government can do to a human being once it decides that person is no longer a full moral agent. The Lindsay Clancy trial and accountability are a departure from that subject, but they test the same question. That question is the spine of my novel Alejandro’s Journey: From Cuba’s Communism to America’s Freedom. Alejandro does not flee hunger alone. He flees a system that claimed the right to name him—counterrevolutionary, unfit, unwell, no longer a man who owned his own soul. My father was stood against a wall on October 22, 1960, and shot. His last words were “Viva Cuba Libre.” I was seven. I have spent a lifetime, and then a book, trying to explain what that kind of power does to a family. I have also written that communism has already failed everywhere it has been tried. The habit I fear is not only the old ideology. It is the old method: let the state decide who still owns his own acts.

This post is a departure. It is about the Lindsay Clancy trial and personal responsibility in Massachusetts. I am writing it because I do not want a horror in a Duxbury basement to teach our courts a habit I wrote Alejandro escaping: that experts and officials may dissolve a person’s agency when the truth is inconvenient, or confine a person indefinitely when “care” is easier than a verdict.

What Happened in Duxbury

On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and eight-month-old Callan—with exercise bands. She then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She lived, paralyzed from the waist down. Those children were not a chapter about policy. They were little lives. In the Cuba I come from, and in the Cuba Alejandro flees, the dead are often turned into scenery for someone else’s speech. I will not do that here.

The Lindsay Clancy Trial and Accountability

There is no dispute that she killed them. The trial was never about who did it. It was about whether Massachusetts law should still treat her as a person who answers for what she did. The defense said postpartum psychosis—and possibly bipolar illness—produced command hallucinations and an irresistible compulsion. They described a mother collapsing, asking for help, and failed by doctors and by those closest to her. The prosecution said the afternoon looked chosen: she sent her husband out, measured how long he would be gone, and acted with purpose. A calm face is not proof of a free mind.

Postpartum psychosis is real and rare. It is a psychiatric emergency. It is not a revolutionary decree. It does not, by itself, erase a killing. That is the line the jury was asked to draw. As of this writing they could not draw it. After days of deadlock the judge moved toward a mistrial while the defense ran to a higher court. A hung jury is not only a legal snag. It is a free country arguing over the question Alejandro’s Cuba settled from the top down: Does this human being still own her acts?

In the world I put on the page, the Revolution answers that question for you. It decides who is sane, who is sick, who is guilty, and who merely needs re-education. Psychiatry is not always medicine. Sometimes it is a second police. America is supposed to do the opposite. It is supposed to assume the adult in the dock is a moral agent until the evidence proves otherwise—and then it is supposed to say so in open court, with a sentence the public can see. That is the country Alejandro thought he was entering. If we get sloppy, it is not the country he was promised.

Why Both Verdicts Threaten a Free Country

That is why both easy verdicts worry me.

A guilty verdict that pretends we never break

A guilty verdict sold as proof that we are never broken is a lie. Human beings crack. Illness is not a myth invented by the weak. Medication can wreck a mind. If the law pretends every killer is a fully rational citizen, it becomes a sermon, not a judgment. Alejandro’s faith—and mine—has never required that lie. We are fallen. We are still accountable.

A stamp that teaches the state to un-person a life

A finding of no criminal responsibility is the more Cuban danger if we handle it carelessly. It can become a stamp. Lawyers will study the stamp. Future defendants will rehearse the voice, the journal, the stacked pills. Precedent is not compassion. It is a tool. Once the state accepts that a panel of experts can erase responsibility after three children are dead, the same machinery can face the other way: lock first, treat forever, skip the hard work of proving a crime. That is how a hospital becomes a quieter prison. Alejandro knew that building. He did not cross the water so we could invent a polite American version of it.

So I reject both slogans.

Prison or a Locked Hospital—Not the Street

I abhor the murder of children. Pity for the act has no place in a courtroom. Mercy for a broken mind is not the same as pretending Cora, Dawson, and Callan were taken by weather. In a free country, accountability still means a locked door. Lindsay Clancy should never walk free among ordinary people. Prison or a secure psychiatric hospital—those are the two remaining rooms. “She suffered” does not open either one. Suffering did not cancel my father. It does not cancel those three children.

Labels Travel From Havana to a Massachusetts File

There was failure around her. The prescriptions piled up. The diagnosis lagged. The people nearest her watched a decline they could not stop. That is not an excuse. It is sloppiness. Regimes and bureaucracies both discover illness after the bodies. A republic should demand better sight beforehand, not a new doctrine afterward.

I am not torn about the children. I am torn about the label the court finally inks on the file, because labels travel. In Havana they traveled from a clinic to a cell. In Alejandro’s Journey they travel from a whisper to a file to a life that is no longer yours—lessons from Alejandro’s Journey in a shifting world that still apply when the stamp is medical instead of political. Here they can travel from a sympathetic headline to a future official who wants to excuse a killer—or hold a citizen—without standing in front of a jury and saying the plain words: this person did this thing.

Whoever writes the last line of this case—this judge, an appellate justice, or a second jury—should remember what is at stake besides one paralyzed defendant. Three children are gone. The minimum decent outcome is that the woman who killed them never lives as if those lives were a chapter she can close. The minimum free outcome is that we do not let this horror teach the state a new way to un-person a human being.

That is why the man who wrote Alejandro is writing about a house in Duxbury. The novel was never only about leaving an island. It was about arriving in a country that still believes a man or a woman belongs to their own acts—even when the mind is sick, even when the experts are certain, even when it would be easier to look away.

The firing squad was one way to end a person. A rubber stamp that says “not responsible,” or “hold her for her own good,” used carelessly, is another. I did not write Alejandro out of Cuba so I could watch the second method grow fashionable in the country that took us in.

From Alejandro’s Journey

Juan Ramirez’s last words before the rifles:

“Viva Cuba Libre.”

What he leaves his son:

“Truth is our weapon, mijo. Hold it tight, even when the world tries to take it.”

What the boy answers, years later, when America tries to name him smaller than he is:

“Their words cannot chain me; my will set me free.”

The regime could take the man. It could take the house. It could write whatever name it wanted on a file. It could not take the hour he stood in—before God, and before the dead. The Clancy case is a test of whether this country still believes the same thing. For more of that soul-versus-regime thread, see what Alejandro’s Journey teaches in Cuba’s darkest hours.

Further Reading

If this question of what a family owes the living and the dead stays with you, The Watchmakers’ Thread is the quieter companion: a faith-and-family story about the long work of keeping a moral line intact when science, grief, and institutions all claim the last word. The trial asks what the state may stamp on a life. That book asks what a family is still required to carry after the stamp dries.