After assisting with multiple jury trials, I can see why the prosecutors who litigate criminal cases involving minors would want female jurors. A woman’s natural “mama bear” instinct to protect her children would cause any attorney to assume women, especially mothers, would want justice for any child who was harmed. But after watching the reactions to the Lindsay Clancy trial, and the interviews of the female jurors on the case, I can’t help but wonder: What happened?

A staggeringly large handful of both liberal and conservative women seem to be losing their moral convictions over this case. When it comes to the Epstein files, everyone wants them released so the perpetrators can be charged for their crimes of harming children, right? Yet when the defendant is a woman and not a man, all of a sudden these onlookers aren’t worried about the crime committed and the victims who suffered. Instead, they are worried about the defendant — worried that she didn’t have enough help (which she did), that she did not have resources (which she did), and that her husband wasn’t helping her (which he was).

One of the female jurors who was interviewed made a shocking statement when discussing the male holdout juror. She said, “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” My question to her would be: Why are you so willing and able to move past this fact? Why do these children, who were most likely looking their mother in the eye while she strangled them to death, not deserve justice? As a society, when did we become so numb to evil that this fact alone does not make us sick and demand justice for the victims?

This form of “empathy” is misplaced and misguided. People often show empathy toward those who feel similar to us, such as the case of all of the moms posting, “Same, Lindsay,” on social media. Yet, this form of empathy can drastically destroy our moral judgment. These women likely feel like they can relate to Lindsay because they are new moms who are exhausted due to lack of sleep and possibly dealing with postpartum depression themselves. However, I hope and pray these new moms see what they are portraying to society through these posts. It’s not empathy; it is troublesome behavior that causes me to worry for the safety and well-being of their children.

For the sake of views and clicks, female influencers alleged that the husband was having an affair and jumped to conclusions that he committed the crime so he could run off into the sunset with his lover. Yet, what these women are forgetting is that this crime was uncontested, which means in the three years since the killings of her three children, Lindsay never denied having committed the act and even her own attorney never argued that she didn’t commit the crime.

In fact, Lindsay’s own attorney discussed conspiracy theories about Lindsay’s husband in an interview with Fox News, stating, “I’ve never said he did. I never would say he did. I don’t think the evidence shows that he did. I know what the evidence shows as far as postpartum. That’s the defense in this case.”

Like attorney Kevin Reddington just said, the whole trial that we witnessed was to argue the second element of the crime, the mental state, which women across all walks of life jumped on immediately, tying this crime to Lindsay’s hormones.

Now imagine the scenario where the roles are reversed. Picture men flooding social media and confessing that their testosterone once pushed them to the brink of hitting their wives or beating their children. Imagine a jury finding a man “not guilty by reason of insanity” during a rape trial because his hormones were to blame. I would hope that most of us would find that outrageous, yet that is where this kind of empathy leads when it is applied consistently across the board. Excusing violence as a product of hormones does not stay confined to one case or one group of people. Instead it spreads, eroding our personal accountability, erasing our moral judgment, and eventually resulting in detrimental downstream effects on our country and legal system.

If we are going to make the argument that female hormones cause women to be mentally insane, maybe we shouldn’t be given any responsibility. I mean, what if the next presidential election falls on a certain day of the month? We should probably have our husbands as a gut check to ensure we aren’t acting out, right? During a certain time of month, women probably shouldn’t have custody over their children because of hormones, right?

Of course, I am not arguing for this. My argument would be that we, as a society, need to get off social media, stop listening to influencers stating their opinions as facts on topics they are completely uneducated on, and, as my pastor said recently, pray that the callouses that have covered our conscience be removed so we can return to recognizing harm, evil, and injustice for what they really are: sin.

An awful and gruesome crime was committed, and we should not be numbing ourselves to this fact for the sake of conspiracy theories and TikTok clicks.

***

Heidi Hall is an occasional legal analyst on Evening Wire and has a JD and MBA from Belmont University.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Menu

The Lindsay Clancy Trial Revealed A Dangerous Blind Spot Among Mothers