A Different Game

The Lindsay Clancy trial, which has captured our attention for weeks, is now over, with a rather unsatisfying ending. Why didn’t our justice system work? But actually, it did!

It largely depends on how we view trials. They are not unlike football, baseball, and basketball games. Am I trivializing?

To start with, they happen in a court, and they typically involve two teams, and most of the time, there is a winner and a loser. Participants play by a very complicated set of rules.

Let’s use football for our example. The prosecution and defense attorneys are combined head coaches and quarterbacks who design and launch the plays. The trial judge is the referee. The objective of each team is to score points with the jury.

The rest of us are in the stands. Most of us expect to see a favorite team win. But as with all competitions, the plays called and executed by each team may not work as expected, contributing to unpredictability.

And then, there is the jury. In a criminal trial, there is one overarching rule of this game: jurors must reach a unanimous verdict to convict or acquit. This is a very high standard, and it is supposed to be. It’s not up to the trial judge to jawbone a juror who doesn’t agree with the majority. In the Lindsay Clancy case, the judge found that the lone holdout juror was following the law, so there was no alternative but to declare a mistrial.  It was almost like an unfavorable ref call we sometimes see at the end of a game.

Unlike in sports, the outcome of a court trial can set precedents - legal, moral, and even educational. It’s agreed by many now that post-partum depression is a real thing. True, not all mothers will kill their children, otherwise, quite a few of us wouldn’t be here.

I am not saying that such crimes should not be prosecuted, but I personally hope the prosecutor in this case just leaves it alone and does not seek a retrial. As for punishment, Ms. Clancy is paralyzed following her suicide attempt and would seem to have a rather bleak life ahead of her. That should be enough.

Were there pre-trial mistakes made? Was she overmedicated? Should the children have been separated from her for safety reasons?

It’s easy to fix blame, but this game is over and blaming is unproductive and not our business. What IS our business is learning something about human behavior. Life itself, for some of us, can be a rough game indeed.