Every lawyer who passed the bar (and some who didn’t) have an opinion on the Lindsay Clancy trial.

I have an opinion, too, and it’s about as expert as the others, which is to say simply part of the social media scrum.

Not being a criminal defense attorney by trade, but having gotten a B in criminal law at Villanova, I am informed on some of the legal niceties. As an aside, if Lindsay were an immigrant who’d overstayed her visa, I could wrap up this controversy in a minute.

But I digress.

The point is we don’t need lawyers to tell us what is going on. That’s because none of this is about the law.

If it were, a woman who systematically and methodically murdered her three babies would have been convicted of at least second degree murder one week into testimony.

This is about the most dangerous of all tribunals: the court of public opinion.

And that has very little to do with legal guilt or innocence, and everything to do with morality, which makes the legal profession tremble, because morality and legality are often on a collision course.

The opinion here is from a woman who tangentially happens to be a lawyer.

I have to channel my pre-law-school self, that young woman who, in September of 1984, walked into room 29A at Villanova and thought she had a clear grasp on justice. She did.

She would have looked at a woman who planned the murder of a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and an 8-month-old as Medea, guilty as hell of the most barbaric of societal crimes, and would have called for the death penalty.

But after three years of massaging my conscience with concepts like “mens rea” and “mental incapacity,” after failing a law school exam because she could not grasp the idea that you could intend the “act” but not understand that it was wrong, she … me …realized that not every person who kills babies is going to be held liable. That person now thinks like a lawyer.

Still, there is enough of 1984 Christine left that I can look at Lindsay Clancy and still wish we had the electric chair. More importantly, I am horrified, beyond disgusted, with the women supporting her.

I say women, even though I know there are some men who are on her side as well.

But men don’t have the power to give and nurture life, despite what Josh Shapiro might think with his “pregnant persons” terminology. Women are the ones who feel the tiny taps of life in their wombs, speak to the creature just months from curling in their arms, know they are two, not one. Women like the ladies wearing pink and supporting a mother who murdered three babies.

Their support is based on several things.

Some feel that they could be in the same sad predicament as Clancy, wracked with postpartum hormones and mental illness.

Some, like me, have never been pregnant but have lost just enough of their moral compass to believe that what Clancy did was a tragedy foretold because she didn’t get the help she needed.

These are the ones who say she begged for help. To them I say, she needed to walk out of that house and away from those children and then seek help if she was that desperate.

Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has become the new sex symbol for desperate mommies, in much the way Jose Baez, who successfully defended Casey Anthony was the savior for bar hopping single mommies who drowned their kids in the swimming pool.

They see him as not only defending Clancy, but also telling them they are not alone. Her sees them, and their angst.

The Christine who got her law degree admires his technique. 1984 Christine believes he is an apologist for matricide, and she is not alone.

The madness that allegedly took hold of Lindsay Clancy is in question, but the brutal insanity of her supporters is not. They hate her husband because they see in him every man who did them wrong.

They hate his new wife and the happiness he has found because they see in this a personal rejection of, perhaps, themselves in other circumstances. It doesn’t take a therapist to see that.

So regardless of the final verdict, one thing is certain: a society that can excuse the murder of three young children by their mother because she was “ill” is a society that, itself, is afflicted by a terminal illness.

Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers