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During his wide-ranging 60 Minutes interview, Patrick Clancy of course discussed his ex-wife’s mistrial.

He spoke of his youngest dying in his arms, about his hopes for the future, and shared that he and his wife are expecting.

Patrick also spoke about both compassion and consequences for Lindsay.

He argued that the two can, and should, coexist.

Patrick Clancy calls for accountability and compassion to go hand-in-hand

Speaking to the once-prized 60 Minutes on Sunday, September 20, Patrick Clancy emphasized that compassion and accountability can coexist.

The deaths of the three young Clancy children were horrific.

But, despite what unhinged wingnuts trying to turn this into a culture war flashpoint would say, this was not the product of criminal intention, but of mental illness.

In this complex case, we all have to ask ourselves: what does true justice look like, and is the state equipped to give it?

Patrick has wrestled with that a lot, and had some thoughts to share.

During his interview, Patrick shared the belief that society can find a compassionate way to respond to tragedies like the one that destroyed his family.

He emphasized that “that doesn’t mean ‘no accountability.’”

Compassion, Patrick explained, involves recognizing both the suffering and stigma that surround mental illness.

At the same time, he expressed the importance of finding ways to prevent more families from suffering from tragedies like this one.

Patrick didn’t suggest that he has all of the answers. He doesn’t. It’s likely that no one person does.

Patrick Clancy views the deaths of his children with more moral clarity than a lot of very loud folks online seem to

We mentioned that some political malefactors and manosphere types have been using the tragedy of the Lindsay Clancy case as a “culture war” touchstone.

Some deeply weird men have used social media to claim that they used the case as a litmus test to evaluate their girlfriends.

(The alleged “male loneliness epidemic” seems to be, if anything, a self-inflicted situation.)

These individuals might say that an acquittal or even a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity (the latter of which, every reasonable juror had settled upon) would open the floodgates for other moms to kill their kids, claim mental illness, and … what, profit?

But that’s not how this works. There is no deterrent for mental illness, no way to scare someone out of postpartum psychosis.

Postpartum depression is common enough that there are old-timey, folksy names for it, such as the baby blues. Postpartum psychosis is less common, and significantly more dangerous.

Many people have shared their experiences with psychosis and psychotic episodes. For some, it meant taking off their clothes and going outside, under the delusion that this would prevent the world from ending. For others, it meant believing that all of the food in their home was poison, resulting in them throwing away hundreds of dollars in perfectly fine groceries.

As Patrick says, his ex-wife’s mental illness does not mean that she cannot be accountable for her physical actions, but both the courts and society should understand that she was not thinking rationally. She did not decide to do this.

Andrea Yates was, before Lindsay Clancy, perhaps the most famous case of postpartum psychosis resulting in the deaths of all of the sufferer’s children in living memory.

She is still in an institution. Even if Lindsay were to “go free,” she would never be free — and would always be haunted by this life-ruining moment.

For now, it’s unclear if prosecutors will even bother with another trial. It was a mistake to start with, and it backfired.

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