Imagine that the essential facts of the Lindsay Clancy case remain the same, but that we move the accused backwards and sideways through history. A mother kills her three young children. There is little serious dispute that she physically committed the acts. The great question is whether she possessed the mental capacity at the time to be held criminally responsible for them. Put her in ancient Rome, pagan Scandinavia, medieval Europe, colonial Massachusetts, modern China, modern Iran or Taliban Afghanistan, and the bodies remain the same while almost everything surrounding their deaths changes.
The comparison becomes even more interesting once we leave the modern Western assumption that the only alternatives are sanity and mental illness. Across much of human history, and within some cultures today, there has been a third possibility: the person committed the physical act, but another supernatural agency was ultimately responsible. Demons, spirits, witches and sorcerers once occupied explanatory territory now largely occupied in Western courts by psychiatry. This introduces an extraordinary philosophical question into the Clancy case. When a person appears to have lost control of her own mind, who, or what, is actually acting?
Every legal culture requires some conception of the person who can properly be blamed. The modern Massachusetts trial expresses that problem through psychiatric evidence, postpartum psychosis, reasonable doubt and lack of criminal responsibility. Other societies possessed very different vocabularies, but several confronted essentially the same philosophical difficulty. A human body can cause an event without necessarily establishing that a rational human agent deliberately chose it. The history of insanity, possession and criminal responsibility is therefore part of the much larger history of what human beings have meant by guilt.
Begin in ancient Rome. We should resist imagining Roman criminal law as nothing more than execution, crucifixion and arbitrary imperial brutality. Roman law developed a sophisticated conception of legal capacity and recognised that the furiosus, a person deprived of reason through madness, could not simply be treated as an ordinary rational actor. The Romans obviously possessed nothing resembling modern psychiatric diagnosis, neuropsychology or a specialist literature on postpartum psychosis, but they understood the elementary distinction upon which the Clancy defence depends: sometimes the person whose body performs an act is not rationally responsible for performing it.
A Roman version of the Clancy case would therefore probably have revolved around a much cruder question than the one occupying the Massachusetts court. Was this woman manifestly mad when she killed her children, or was she a rational woman who deliberately murdered them? Her behaviour before and after the killings, the testimony of relatives, servants and neighbours, and evidence of obvious derangement would matter enormously. If accepted as genuinely furiosa, punishment in the ordinary retributive sense could be inappropriate because madness itself deprived the act of the rational agency required for guilt. Custody, family control or some other form of restraint could follow instead. If she were regarded as sane, however, the consequences of intentionally killing three children could be ferocious, although Roman punishment varied considerably according to period and social status.
Now carry the case northwards into pagan Viking Scandinavia. Here the reconstruction becomes less certain because much of the written Scandinavian law available to us comes from the Christian period, making it dangerous to project later legal codes neatly backwards into the Viking Age. Nevertheless, the social world in which homicide was understood was profoundly different from ours. Killing was not simply an offence committed by an isolated individual against an abstract state. It disturbed relationships between families and kin groups and could generate compensation, outlawry, vengeance and feud.
The Clancy killings would be peculiarly horrifying within such a system because the killer and victims belonged to the same intimate kinship unit. The very people who ordinarily might demand compensation or vengeance would be connected to both offender and victims. Norse culture also inhabited a supernatural universe containing gods, spirits, magic and seiðr. Strange behaviour did not necessarily have to be understood as either ordinary rationality or what we would call mental illness. Supernatural explanations could enter the causal picture.
A manifestly deranged woman might therefore be understood as mad, spiritually afflicted or affected by forces that a modern court would exclude from consideration altogether. Nobody would convene a six-week battle between psychiatrists over diagnostic criteria. The questions would be immediate and social: had she lost her mind, what danger did she represent, what supernatural forces if any were involved, what obligations remained to the dead children and their kin, and what must now be done with her? The modern distinction between individual criminal responsibility and psychiatric incapacity would be embedded within a much broader world of kinship, honour and supernatural causation.
Move next into medieval Christian Europe and the comparison becomes more surprising. Medieval law is easily caricatured as a system that would simply burn or hang anyone behaving strangely after announcing that the Devil was responsible. Medieval people certainly inhabited a theological universe profoundly different from ours, and explanations of abnormal behaviour could include sin, demonic influence, possession, humoral imbalance and madness. Yet medieval European legal thought also developed increasingly sophisticated distinctions between acts performed voluntarily and those committed by people lacking reason.
The idea of being non compos mentis, not master of one's mind, eventually became fundamental to Anglo-American law. Medieval legal thought increasingly recognised that serious criminal guilt required more than the physical production of a forbidden result. Reason and will mattered. A person deprived of rational understanding could therefore stand in a fundamentally different position from someone who knowingly chose evil.
Here, however, the supernatural dimension introduces an extraordinary complication. Suppose our medieval Lindsay Clancy reported hearing voices commanding her to kill her children. Suppose she became convinced that the children were threatened by some terrible force and that killing them would somehow save them. A modern psychiatrist might treat these statements as powerful evidence of psychosis. A medieval priest could regard some of the same statements as evidence of demonic interference.
That did not necessarily make Clancy more culpable. Christian thought distinguished, however inconsistently in practice, between involuntary demonic possession and voluntary cooperation with evil. If a demon had overwhelmed an unwilling victim, she could herself be regarded as afflicted and in need of exorcism, restraint and spiritual care. If she were believed to have voluntarily entered into a diabolical relationship, however, the supernatural explanation could increase rather than diminish culpability. The demon would cease to be an excuse and become part of the accusation.
The same behaviour could therefore produce radically different outcomes. "She was not herself" might mean madness, possession or voluntary alliance with evil. One interpretation potentially reduced responsibility; another might magnify it. This is an important corrective to the simplistic idea that pre-modern Europeans attributed every abnormal act to witchcraft and executed the sufferer. Their conceptual universe contained multiple categories of madness, possession, temptation, sin and witchcraft, even though the boundaries between them could be unstable and sometimes disastrous.
Move forward into colonial America, particularly seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and the comparison becomes almost eerie because geographically we have arrived close to the location of the modern trial while culturally entering another world. English common-law conceptions of insanity crossed the Atlantic, so colonial courts were capable of distinguishing madness from ordinary criminal intent. But Puritan Massachusetts placed criminal conduct within an explicitly Christian moral order in which law, sin, providence, family and communal discipline were intimately connected.
A colonial Lindsay Clancy would therefore have been examined not merely as a malfunctioning biological organism but as a moral and spiritual being. Neighbours and family might testify that after childbirth she became profoundly disturbed, behaved irrationally, heard voices, expressed bizarre beliefs or appeared to have lost command of herself. Those observations could support a conclusion that she had lost her reason. Yet some of precisely the same evidence could invite questions about Satan, possession, temptation or witchcraft.
This produces a remarkable comparison with the modern trial. Massachusetts in 1692 and Massachusetts in 2026 might observe similar behaviour while placing it within completely different ontologies. The modern psychiatrist hears "a voice commanded me" and investigates auditory hallucinations, delusions and psychosis. The Puritan minister hearing the same statement could investigate spiritual agency. Both are attempting to explain an apparent fracture between the person's ordinary identity and the horrifying acts subsequently performed.
The distinction between possession and witchcraft would again matter enormously. If Clancy were considered the unwilling victim of a supernatural force, the moral analysis could separate her from the evil attributed to that force. If she were thought to have willingly embraced diabolical power, the same supernatural framework could transform her into something worse than an ordinary murderer. A psychiatric defence and a witchcraft accusation can therefore begin with surprisingly similar observations while ending at opposite conclusions.
This possibility was by no means confined to Europe. Across many traditional societies, illness and abnormal behaviour have been interpreted through spiritual or supernatural causation. That remains true in parts of the world today, although it is essential not to speak of "African belief" as though an entire continent possessed a single culture. Modern African states have formal legal systems, enormous religious diversity and large populations that understand mental illness in biomedical terms. Nevertheless, anthropologists and contemporary human-rights organisations continue to document communities in which witchcraft, sorcery and spirit possession remain socially important explanations of misfortune, illness and unusual behaviour.
Put the Clancy case into such an environment and something extraordinary can happen: two different trials can effectively occur simultaneously. The state court asks whether Clancy intentionally murdered her children and whether mental illness deprived her of criminal responsibility. Her family or community may ask an entirely different causal question. Was she possessed? Had somebody bewitched her? Was a malevolent spirit responsible? Or did the deaths demonstrate that Clancy herself possessed dangerous occult powers?
Each answer relocates responsibility. If Clancy was possessed, she may be considered another victim of the event. If somebody bewitched her, suspicion can migrate towards the alleged sorcerer. If Clancy herself is believed to be a witch, however, her abnormal behaviour may be interpreted not as exculpatory madness but as evidence of supernatural wickedness. Tragically, such accusations can themselves produce violence against people believed to be responsible for deaths or other misfortunes.
Papua New Guinea provides an especially striking contemporary example because sorcery beliefs have continued to interact with serious violence despite the operation of a modern state legal system. Papua New Guinea repealed its Sorcery Act in 2013, and an accusation of supernatural wrongdoing obviously does not lawfully entitle anyone to torture or kill an alleged sorcerer. Nevertheless, sorcery-accusation-related violence remains a documented problem in some communities.
A Papua New Guinean Clancy scenario could consequently produce competing causal models. A psychiatrist might diagnose postpartum psychosis. Relatives might agree that Clancy had ceased behaving like herself but attribute the transformation to sorcery. Someone might conclude that another person caused her condition supernaturally. Others might regard the killings as evidence that Clancy herself possessed occult powers. The physical facts remain constant while the identity of the supposed responsible agent changes dramatically.
Now transport the case to modern China and much of the apparent historical distance suddenly disappears. Chinese criminal law expressly recognises that mental illness can eliminate criminal responsibility. Where mental disorder renders a person unable to recognise the nature or wrongfulness of an act or unable to control the act, Chinese law provides a route to non-responsibility, while compulsory medical treatment may follow. Partial impairment can instead mitigate punishment without eliminating liability.
The Chinese Clancy case would therefore contain a question remarkably similar to the Massachusetts one: what was the defendant's mental capacity at the precise time she killed her children? Yet the institutional mechanism for answering it would look very different. China would not place the ultimate question before twelve lay citizens watching competing defence and prosecution psychiatrists fight an adversarial battle over postpartum psychosis. Forensic psychiatric evaluation and judicial determination would occupy a much more central role. The underlying philosophical distinction nevertheless survives the journey. Did Lindsay Clancy merely perform the physical acts, or did she possess sufficient rational and volitional capacity for those acts to constitute murder?
Modern Iran makes the comparison still more interesting because Islamic criminal law is sometimes represented in Western discussion as if intentional killing mechanically produces retaliation. Iranian law actually contains an explicit insanity doctrine. Criminal responsibility requires mental capacity, and a mental disorder sufficiently severe to deprive a defendant of intention or discernment can remove criminal responsibility. A person considered dangerous may instead be subjected to confinement or treatment.
The stakes would nevertheless become exceptionally high if an Iranian court rejected the insanity claim. Intentional homicide can enter the qisas system of retaliatory justice, within which the victims' heirs acquire a role very different from that occupied by a victim's family in Massachusetts. Thus, the mental-state question becomes a gateway between radically different legal destinations. If severe disorder destroyed Clancy's intention or discernment, criminal responsibility could disappear. If the court concluded that she deliberately and rationally killed her children, she could confront an extremely severe punishment structure.
Finally place Lindsay Clancy in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and uncertainty increases dramatically. Afghanistan under the Taliban does not possess the transparent and comparatively predictable judicial structure of Massachusetts, and contemporary proceedings have been heavily criticised for weak procedural safeguards, limited access to lawyers and substantial judicial discretion. The Taliban have restored their interpretation of Sharia and have carried out qisas punishments for intentional murder, including public executions.
Yet even here the conceptual problem of insanity does not simply vanish. Classical Islamic jurisprudence recognises that rational capacity matters to culpability. The question would be whether Taliban judges accepted that Clancy was genuinely insane at the relevant moment and what evidence they considered sufficient to establish that condition. What would be far less certain is whether postpartum psychosis would receive anything remotely resembling the elaborate psychiatric examination it has received in Massachusetts. A modern Western courtroom can spend weeks distinguishing depression, anxiety, psychosis, intrusive thoughts, delusions and criminal intention. Under Taliban justice, the inquiry could be far less transparent and the consequences of being classified as a sane intentional murderer potentially fatal.
Our journey therefore produces an unexpected result. The historical story is not simply one in which primitive societies punished the mad until enlightened modern societies discovered mental illness. Recognition that a radically disturbed mind can undermine responsibility is extremely old and appears across civilisations that otherwise disagree about almost everything. What changes is the machinery through which societies distinguish madness from wickedness and, more fundamentally, their theories about what madness actually is.
For modern secular psychiatry, the causal chain remains inside the natural world. There is Lindsay Clancy, her brain and mind, childbirth, psychiatric illness, medications, circumstances and behaviour. Earlier European societies and some contemporary traditional cultures permit additional agents into the causal model: Satan, demons, ancestral spirits, witches or sorcerers. Once those entities are admitted as real causes, responsibility can migrate away from the person whose hands physically performed the act.
Consider the apparently simple statement, "A voice commanded me to kill them. I couldn't resist it. It wasn't me." The forensic psychiatrist investigates hallucination, delusion, psychosis and impaired capacity. The medieval priest investigates possession. A traditional healer may investigate spirits or sorcery. The criminal lawyer asks whether the defendant possessed the mental capacity necessary for responsibility. They can observe the same phenomenon and disagree completely about what exists behind it.
This gives us three rather than two basic models of the Clancy case. In the first, a rational Lindsay Clancy intentionally killed her children and is therefore responsible. In the second, Lindsay physically killed them but severe mental disorder destroyed the agency necessary for criminal responsibility. In the third, Lindsay's body performed the acts while another supernatural agency displaced or overwhelmed her own. A fourth and darker possibility appears when supernatural involvement is regarded as voluntary: she cooperated with evil and is therefore more culpable rather than less.
The second and third models are metaphysically worlds apart, yet structurally they contain a remarkable similarity. Both separate the physical organism performing the act from the morally responsible agent. The psychiatrist says disease so disrupted the mind that the ordinary capacities underlying responsibility disappeared. The possession believer says another agency overwhelmed or displaced the person who normally controlled the body. One explanation is naturalistic and the other supernatural, but both challenge the apparently obvious inference that because these hands killed, the owner of these hands must necessarily be morally responsible.
Modern Massachusetts has added an enormous scientific and legal apparatus to this ancient problem. Psychiatrists reconstruct Clancy's mental state from medical records, medications, statements, behaviour and diagnostic categories. Lawyers cross-examine experts about postpartum psychosis and criminal responsibility. A judge defines the legal standard and twelve citizens are expected to perform an extraordinarily difficult philosophical operation: separate physical causation from responsible agency and decide whether the Commonwealth has proved criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.
That may be why the jury has found this case so extraordinarily difficult. Nobody seriously needs twelve people to determine whether Lindsay Clancy physically caused the deaths of her children. The real dispute concerns something that cannot be photographed, weighed or recovered from the crime scene: the state of the agent behind those hands. The jury must reconstruct a vanished mind and decide whether the woman who physically performed those acts possessed sufficient rational agency to be morally and legally identified with them.
Seen across two thousand years and radically different cultures, the Clancy case therefore becomes much larger than a Massachusetts murder trial. It poses one of the oldest problems in law, religion and moral philosophy. What exactly are we punishing when we punish a human being? If punishment is justified simply because someone's body caused a prohibited result, mental state should hardly matter. If punishment instead expresses blame directed towards a responsible person, then the capacity for reason, intention and choice becomes indispensable.
A falling stone can kill a child but cannot murder one because there is no responsible agent inside the stone. A human being normally possesses precisely what the stone lacks: consciousness, intention, understanding and some capacity to choose. The insanity problem begins when the human organism remains physically capable of acting while the mental capacities upon which responsibility depends have become radically disordered. The possession problem goes one extraordinary step further and asks whether the apparent human agent has been displaced by another agent altogether.
That is why a seventeenth-century priest and a twenty-first-century forensic psychiatrist could conceivably reach the same conclusion about Lindsay Clancy while agreeing about almost nothing else. Both might say that the woman who killed the children was not fully responsible for what her body did. One could attribute the destruction of agency to an invading spiritual intelligence; the other to severe postpartum psychosis. Their universes are radically different, but the question confronting them is recognisably the same. Who, or what, was acting through those hands?
That is ultimately what the Lindsay Clancy jury has been asked to decide in the secular language of modern law. Three children are dead, their mother killed them, and nothing about a verdict can alter either fact. The almost unbearable question is whether, at the decisive moment, there remained behind those acts a legally responsible Lindsay Clancy capable of choosing them.
Ancient Rome would have understood a version of that question. Medieval Europe understood it. Islamic jurisprudence understands it. Modern Chinese law understands it. Traditional societies that interpret extraordinary behaviour through possession or sorcery approach it through a completely different metaphysics. Two thousand years of changing law, religion, medicine and politics have transformed almost everything surrounding the question without making the question itself disappear.
Perhaps that is why twelve modern jurors, equipped with weeks of evidence and centuries of accumulated legal and psychiatric knowledge, can still sit in a room and be unable to agree. Science can provide diagnoses, lawyers can provide competing interpretations and judges can provide legal definitions, but none can directly observe the thing upon which the verdict finally depends: how much agency remained inside another human mind at one terrible moment in time.