Political Pistachio

By Douglas V. Gibbs

The trial of Lindsay Clancy caught the attention of Americans because of how horrific the crimes were.  A mother, after sending her husband off on an errand, killed her three young children (ages 3, 5, and 8), one by one, by strangling them.  Then, she tried to commit suicide by jumping out a second story window of her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.  But, she survived the fall, sustaining injuries that left her permanently paralyzed from the waist down.  Prior to her decision to kill her children and attempt suicide, Lindsay Clancy knew she was mentally messed up.  She saw psychiatrists.  She called a suicide hotline.  She even went to an emergency room, but was turned away.  She was taking a prescribed cocktail of medications that didn’t seem to help, and the list of medications, according to her lawyers, put her into a mental condition that made is to that she didn’t know what she was doing.

Anyone who kills their own children, one by one with the living ones watching as the first is being killed, is definitely out of their mind, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she was so out of her mind that she was completely incapable of stopping and saying to herself, “Hey, this is wrong.”

The prosecution believed she premeditated the whole thing, and was aware enough regarding what she was doing.  The defense argued she heard a voice that told her to kill her children, she believed the voice, and she did it; but, she was unable to stop herself.

Eleven jurors believed she was not guilty by reason of insanity, and one decided against that verdict.

The thing about America is we operate on Natural Rights.  Checks and balances exist across the board so that the mob can’t simply get their way.  Even in our justice system, the Founding Fathers placed strict restrictions on the mob, believing that even the accused has rights and that the right to innocence until absolutely proven guilty must be preserved.  A jury cannot convict with a simple majority, or a super-majority.  It requires a fully unanimous decision.  And in a jury trial, the judge cannot legally do or say anything to influence the jury’s decision.   Even the guilty has rights.  They are innocent until proven guilty.  The proof has to be so compelling that all of the jurors cannot come to any decision other than a guilty verdict, beyond reasonable doubt.  If only one juror is not sure about the guilt, or the lack of guilt, it ends with a hung jury and the process takes a different path.

Is Lindsay Clancy guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt?  I wasn’t in the courtroom, so I don’t know every single thing that the jury saw in there, or their discussions in their chamber.  But, based on what I saw and what I know, in my opinion it seems like she’s guilty.  She did admit to killing her children.  She premeditated her actions and then either felt guilty or wished to escape the consequences, so she tried to commit suicide.  As the prosecutors argued, she planned the murders and understood the wrongfulness of her actions.

One juror agreed with that assessment.  One juror decided that a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity was not the proper decision.  So, he held out.

Eleven jurors, nine women and two men, all white, decided Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity.  One juror, Michael P. Desronvil, the only “person of color” on the jury panel, decided the verdict by the other eleven was in error.  He believed she was guilty.

In interviews later, Desronvil said that eight of the jurors behaved like “activists” who wanted her found not guilty from the first day of deliberations.  After more than 38 hours of deliberation, and no unanimous verdict, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4, 2026 – three and a half years after the actual crime. 

Desronvil said he concluded she was guilty based on the evidence presented in court.  He believes she knew what she was doing.  But, from day one, eight of the jurors were going for “not guilty,” and they were not willing to be swayed.  Originally, one other juror agreed with Desronvil, but “caved in at the last moment.” 

Think about that for a moment.  Eight jurors, before the evidence was even presented, decided they were going to vote not guilty, and according to Desronvil, “acted like activists” regarding their early decision. 

Sure, I can see believing certain things going in, “leaning in a particular direction” one might say; but as a juror your job is to come to your conclusions based on the evidence.  Nothing is final until the final argument has been presented.  Perhaps, along the way the evidence confirmed what those eight were already thinking in their minds.  I can see that.  But, the “acted like activists” comment caught my attention.  Considering the fact that they are all women, and from what I’ve heard “hard-left, progressive” women from a political standpoint, we need to start asking questions about whether or not they were as unbiased as our judicial system requires.

This whole thing becomes even more concerning when you take into consideration that Desronvil feels like he is now being targeted because “he is a black Republican with conservative values.”  His lawyer dubbed him as “an American Hero and Champion of Justice” who loves the USA and President Trump.

Desronvil said, according to the New York Post, “I didn’t have any doubts.  As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence present… Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses, and what the prosecution presents, I thought it was enough proof that she [Clancy] knew exactly what she was doing and planned.” 

His fellow jurors have indicated otherwise, claiming Desronvil appeared to acknowledge reasonable doubt during deliberation, which led to the judge repeatedly explaining to the jury pool the meaning of “reasonable doubt.” 

Now, thanks to the backlash from the leftist side of the aisle, Desronvil is lying low in an undisclosed “rural area” in New England.

Plymouth County prosecutors are now trying to decide if to retry Clancy, or perhaps to try to resolve the case without another jury trial.  The alternative is to accept that there are three dead children, but there’s no avenue available for winning the case.  Lindsay Clancy is being held at Tewksbury State Hospital in Massachusetts as the prosecution decides what to do next in the case.

Now, Desronvil faces death threats, doxxing, and harassment by a lunatic mob, not just from the eight jurors who decided Clancy was guilty from day one, but from thousands of liberal-progressive women expressing support for Clancy and who believes she should not be held accountable for her actions. 

As the cacophony around the country gets louder and louder, the question becomes, Why are so many people not only trying to defend Clancy, but to the point of being a rabid lunatic mob towards Desronvil?

Cultural Marxism has led our culture to a point where many Americans have been programmed to be anti-family, and with abortion as normalized as it has become over the last half-century, a segment of America has come to believe that a child’s life does not hold the kind of value that it ought to.  A child’s death, after 64 million abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973, is being treated by the culture as secondary to a mother’s distress.  The thinking seems to be that if a woman can kill her child for whatever distressful reason she can come up with during pregnancy, why can’t she take the same action after they’re born?  Postpartum mental illness is a reality, but killing one’s children is still heinous and wrong, and the killer should still be criminally responsible. 

In biblical times, being with child was considered a blessing.  Now, it’s seen as a curse; especially if you can come up with an excuse to feel that way.  Abortion, the murder of children in the womb, has become so normalized that now we have a countrywide mob that seems to think that if we come to the conclusion that Clancy is guilty, we are somehow targeting women and their “right” to abortion and any other female thing they can clamp on to their argument.  Somehow, in their minds, it is okay to kill another human being if someone is going through something tough in their life, and they are mentally off-balance as a result.  Abortion has taught us to think about our feelings, and desires, and how tough it might be to have the child before even considering that the life of a child is in the balance. 

Life is tough.  Things are a struggle.  Things don’t always go our way.  But that doesn’t mean we should avoid taking responsibility for our actions by killing our children.  As I have told my own children, “suck it up and do what’s right.  Take responsibility for your actions, don’t blame everyone else or everything else, and do what’s you’ve gotta do.  In the end, the decision is still yours, and the consequences of those decisions are also yours.”

Unfortunately, thanks to a culture war that the virtuous segment of society seems to be losing, we have a segment of society that has placed “feelings” above everything – even the life of a child.  I get it.  Things were tough for Clancy for whatever reason, and I think we should have compassion for anyone who’s going through tough times or even tough mental challenges – but that still doesn’t make it okay to commit a crime – especially murder – and even more so when it comes to the precious lives of your children.  Mental suffering or the level of difficulty regarding whatever is going on is not, and should not be, justification for doing something wrong, be it murder, theft, or whatever else we wish to throw on that pile of issues.  The fact is, a mother killed her own children, and a segment of the population has been championing the killing of one’s children through abortion for over fifty years in America.  In the name of feelings and “but, you’ve got to understand,” they are doing more than merely defending the barbarous practice of abortion.  They’ve been pushing it and celebrating it.  In a number of states, the practice is even being legally okay’d up to the moment of birth.  What did we think was going to happen when the envelope got pushed that far?  The culture has been programming mothers through indoctrination from all directions that a mother’s stress is more important than the life of a child in the womb, and now we have eight angry female jurors and a massive mob claiming that the child’s humanity vanishes in the face of fear, stress, depression, or any other mental situation the mother might be experiencing.

NO!  Three children died that day.  Three children were supposed to be safe in their own home, safe in the hands of their own mother, and now because of a culture that celebrates the death of children those three children will never grow up, never experience the wonders of life, and never be parents of their own.

They were murdered by the hands of their own mother, and a man is being targeted and threatened because he was the only sane person on the jury who saw it for what it was: Murder.  That Clancy was fully capable of preventing herself from committing those murders.  Instead, she planned the killings, carried out the killings, and then tried to escape the consequences through suicide.

She, in my opinion, should have been found guilty as charged by all twelve jurors, and should have been dealt the death penalty.

Anything less makes us no more than reasonless animals who have turned our backs on our children, and are willing to let them die like some ritualistic bloody sacrifice dedicated to some evil entity who lusts for our embrace of a culture of death.

— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary