The judge in the Lindsay Clancy case declared a mistrial on Friday.

The jury deadlocked, and the vote was eleven to one for an acquittal.

Eleven people sat through that entire trial and were prepared to say that Lindsay Clancy bears no criminal responsibility for the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan. But one man would not go along with the insanity.

My hat's off to that guy. He walked out of that courthouse with the only moral integrity I saw in the whole building. But he was ridiculed and criticized for it.

You know the case. The argument was that she didn't know what she was doing — that postpartum psychosis left her unable to tell right from wrong, and that voices in her head told her to kill her three children. They were five, three, and eight months old.

A medical expert testified that each of those deaths would have taken up to four minutes. Four minutes. Three times, inches away. Physically strangling them with exercise bands.

The defense never disputed that she killed the children. They disputed whether she was criminally responsible for it.

The question is whether a postpartum mental health episode can take away a person's ability to know right from wrong. I don't believe it can. In fact, I think it's ridiculous to even suggest it. There is no voice in any person's head that makes her strangle her own children.

That is a choice of the will.

Reasonable doubt is a real standard, and it protects every one of us. I served on a jury back in 2018 — a two-and-a-half week trial, ten hours of deliberation, reaching a verdict around one in the morning, if memory serves me correctly.

I was the last holdout.

I know that may surprise some folks. But it's true. I wanted to know if the prosecution's case truly proved the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And ultimately I concluded that it did.

The prosecution builds its case brick by brick. If that wall eclipses reasonable doubt, the job of a juror is to vote guilty. If it does not, the job of a juror is to say not guilty, no matter anything else.

We can't reach verdicts based on a feeling, an assumption, or even the idea that he probably did it. It has to be beyond a reasonable doubt.

I can sympathize with a jury that struggles to reach a verdict. But I cannot sympathize at all with what happened next.

Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, walked out onto the courthouse steps, stood behind a podium full of microphones, and thanked all the jurors — except one.

He took the time to single out the lone juror who wouldn't go along and told the country the man refused to apply the law. The jury forewoman had already reported the same thing to the judge.

My jury experience was something different. After we reached our verdict, both the prosecution and the defense came to thank us for our time, and for working through an incredibly difficult case that involved the death of an innocent little five-year-old boy.

It was terrible for all parties. The defense and the prosecution alike showed respect for everyone on that jury for what we decided.

At the conclusion of the Clancy trial, the jury was asked by the defense to conclude that a mother holds no criminal responsibility for strangling her own children, one at a time. And somehow, in the defense attorney's deranged way of thinking, the villain of that story is the one man who wouldn't buy that argument.

This is an upside-down world, my friends. And these people vote.

This insanity is spreading, too. An Illinois mother who prosecutors say had "recently become very invested" in the Clancy trial has now been charged with murdering her own two-year-old son.

The court filing says she was discussing the case in a group text with friends until around 12:30 in the afternoon — three and a half hours before the scene at her home was found. Prosecutors say she killed the boy because he was the "devil" and the "antichrist."

Understand what has been done to us, the American people. Generations of us have been taught by leftist lunatics that we are collectively responsible for everyone else, and that somehow none of us is personally responsible for what we ourselves choose to do.

You're told you carry the weight of what people did generations before you were born. You're told you don't carry the weight of what you choose to do on a Tuesday afternoon.

None of it makes any sense.

Plymouth County has a hearing on September 29 to sort out whether Lindsay Clancy gets retried. Reddington's advice to the district attorney, delivered from those same steps, was that he'd lose.

Perhaps he would. It was a long trial, it's expensive, and the whole country already has an opinion.

But there is evil among us, my friends. There is even evil in the hearts of some mothers.

I had a wonderful mom and my wife has been a wonderful mother to our three children. I've watched a lot of great women be tremendous mothers.

None of that means there aren't people capable of committing these atrocious crimes.

And if you're determined to believe she wasn't responsible, fine. But at least believe it with some sadness for the deaths of her children. Not with the celebratory tone, as though she somehow won the World Series.

I've seen far too many people cheering Lindsay Clancy on like she's some type of hero. She absolutely is not.

Woe to those who call evil good.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

NPR — The mistrial itself, including the eleven-to-one split for an acquittal and what the judge told the jury before he let them go.

ABC News — What happens now: the September 29 hearing, the district attorney's decision on a retrial, and where she's being held in the meantime.

Not the Bee — The write-up that put the Illinois case in front of me. It reads like satire and it isn't.

NBC News — The underlying report on the murder charge in Frankfort, Illinois, and what the court documents say about that group text.

Fox News — The Virginia mother, in her own words, on the walk down the path and the seven years on the registry.

Reason — The part the news coverage skips: Virginia passed a childhood independence law in 2023, unanimously, and the prosecution charged around it.

Eleven of the twelve said she isn't responsible. I've told you where I land. Now I want to know where The Inner Circle lands.

We've spent a lot of time discussing the Lindsay Clancy case. Now let's spend some time comparing it to another case — one in a court in James City County, Virginia, involving a mother named Karyann Parkinson.

She let her five-year-old son, Sam, walk about half a mile down a familiar path inside their own gated community to collect goose feathers. The path happens to run past the pond.

A security guard found him and walked him home. Police and Child Protective Services then got involved.

Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor — a first-degree misdemeanor. She got a six-month jail sentence, but that sentence has been suspended.

And she was placed on Virginia's child abuse and neglect registry for seven years.

Sam is six years old. He'll be twelve before his mother comes off that list. She can't volunteer in the classroom until he reaches at least the sixth grade.

"I didn't send him to play at the pond," she told Fox News. "I sent him down the path that happens to go past the pond to collect goose feathers."

Virginia passed a reasonable childhood independence law back in 2023. It passed unanimously, and it defines neglect as putting a child in serious, obvious danger.

Instead of applying that law, prosecutors reached for a delinquency charge. And they got their conviction. Now she's appealing.

You can have questions about a five-year-old near a pond by himself. That's fair. A lot of people would have questions.

But he never got in the water. He walked the path he had walked a hundred times, in the only neighborhood he can remember living in, behind a gate, with security guards patrolling it. Some of you reading this roamed around outside as kid — you may have started younger than 5. Who knows?

But it’s 2026 — and his mother ended up with a misdemeanor conviction, a six-month suspended jail sentence, and seven years on a registry.

Meanwhile a woman whose own defense conceded she strangled three children isn't on any registry anywhere. If she has children again someday, nothing on paper stops her from being the homeroom mom.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Some of the same folks putting on pink and “demanding justice” for Lindsay Clancy would drop the hammer in a second on Karyann Parkinson without even blinking.

That isn't justice. That's a country that's lost its ability to exercise sound judgment.

This one is about the Illinois mother now charged with murdering her own two-year-old son. Prosecutors say she had recently become very invested in the Lindsay Clancy trial, and that she was texting friends about it three and a half hours before the scene at her home was found.

The pink-clad army may have just found another hero as Not the Bee says in the article I’m quoting. Take a look, and read the comments while you're there. They never disappoint!

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