The Lindsay Clancy mistrial has reignited debate over insanity, criminal responsibility, and mental illness. In this episode, Trent examines the history of the insanity defense, the consequences of deinstitutionalization, and why some modern definitions of insanity risk excusing people who know exactly what they are doing.

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Transcript:

The Insanity of Modern “Insanity”

The recent mistrial of Lindsay Clancy has people discussing the issue of insanity and whether it justifies not sending someone to prison, even if there was no doubt that person purposefully killed their children.

So in today’s episode, we’ll talk about the concept of insanity and how some modern concepts of insanity are, well, insane.

And to do that, we need to talk about what is insane or an indication of severe mental illness.

And while it isn’t strictly an indicator, it is troubling if someone is not subscribed to the Counsel of Trent, since that helps our channel and it helps them. And if you really want to show that you’re of sound mind, you can’t go wrong supporting us for as little as $5 a month at TrentHornPodcast.com, which makes this show possible and sponsor-free.

Now, to understand insanity, we need to look at mental illness in general. Because while insanity is primarily a legal concept today, it first emerged in the 16th century as the Latin insanus and just referred to mental derangement.

In ancient Rome, valetudinaria were medical facilities for soldiers and the rich, but it was fourth-century Christians who created the first hospitals for all people, such as the Basileias named after St. Basil the Great. These hospitals also sometimes had morotrophiums dedicated to helping people who had mental derangement.

But in the absence of treatment for mental issues, most people relied on prayer to God for a cure. And by the Middle Ages, there was even a patron saint for this affliction.

According to legend, in the seventh century a woman named Dymphna was the daughter of a pagan Irish king and a Christian mother who secretly baptized her. When Dymphna was 14 years old, her mother died, and her father became mentally deranged at the loss of his wife. He wanted to marry his daughter Dymphna because she seemed as beautiful as her mother, and no one else was.

Dymphna then fled to Belgium, where she used her wealth to care for the poor. This alerted her father to her location, and when she refused to return to Ireland, he had her beheaded.

Being reminded of her father’s madness, people with mental health issues made pilgrimages to Geel for healing. Local residents and religious sisters then took in many of these sick and mentally ill people to care for them. By the 13th century, Dymphna was canonized, and homes named after her were created to care for the mentally ill.

Then, in 1409, a Spanish priest named Joan-Gilabert Jofré came across a severely mentally disabled man being mocked and beaten by a crowd of children who believed, as was commonly thought at the time, that the man was demonically possessed.

In the Middle Ages, it was common for people with mental illnesses and disabilities to be put in so-called “idiot cages,” where crowds could mock them. Fr. Jofré denounced this abuse against the mentally ill and preached the following sermon, whose substance was preserved in a very early official archive. Of the mentally ill, he said:

Due to their innocence and rage, they do not know how to earn their living nor ask for the maintenance they need for their living. Therefore, they sleep in the streets and die from hunger and cold, and many evil persons who do not have God in their conscience hurt them.

It also occurs that the frenzied poor hurt many of the persons who are out wandering through the city. These things are known in the entire city of Valencia.

Thus, it would be a very holy thing and work for Valencia to build a hostel or hospital where such insane or innocent persons could be housed so that they would not be wandering through the city and could not hurt nor be hurt.

The next year, Fr. Jofré helped create the Hospital de los Inocentes, or Hospital of the Innocents, which is now recognized as the world’s first psychiatric hospital.

But as Fr. Jofré noted, the mentally ill would sometimes attack people and then be brought to trial. So over the next few centuries, English common law would adopt statutes related to insanity: the legal concept of not being guilty of a crime because a person did not understand right from wrong or the nature of what he or she did.

That didn’t mean these people would suffer no consequences for their actions, only that they would not be found guilty of a crime but would instead be committed to mental asylums or other places to protect people from their unpredictable behavior.

However, the advent of 20th-century psychiatric drugs that could possibly cure mental illness and allow previously insane people to return to a normal life marked a dramatic change in society’s treatment of the insane and mentally ill.

In 1961, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness, claiming that mental illness was just a metaphor for people who don’t behave in ways we wish they’d behave. And he fiercely objected to forced psychiatric care.

The next year, Ken Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, later adapted into a 1975 film with Jack Nicholson, which spread the narrative that mental asylums make people sick and that the best thing to do for the mentally ill is to just give them freedom.

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, French philosopher Michel Foucault claimed mentally ill people were better off in the Middle Ages, when they were free to enjoy life outside. He was also a critic of the Catholic Church having pastoral power to judge people for their sins.

Oh, and another fun, unrelated fact: Foucault signed a 1977 statement demanding an end to age-of-consent laws prohibiting sexual relationships between adults and children. And in 2021, he was accused of sexually abusing boys in the 1960s, which liberals still defend in articles like one titled, “Why We Shouldn’t Cancel Foucault Even if He Did Have Sex with Underage Boys in a Tunisian Cemetery in the Sixties.”

In the 2013 book American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System, E. Fuller Torrey shows the disastrous consequences of the mass closure of mental institutions in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. This includes many cases of the mentally ill living in decrepit conditions on the street, violently attacking people, and then reoffending after being released from custody.

Now, it’s true many of these asylums were poorly run, but that’s an argument to make them better, not to simply get rid of them.

As I noted earlier, the Church once filled a crucial role in society of looking after the severely mentally ill so that they would be treated with dignity while being prevented from hurting other people.

So one problem we face is that our modern culture values autonomy over all else. As a result, judges and lawmakers prefer to put ordinary people in danger instead of forcibly medicating or even indefinitely institutionalizing people who have committed grave crimes and are likely to commit those crimes again.

A prime example of this would be the 2025 case of Decarlos Brown Jr., who is alleged to have killed Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina. He had been arrested 14 times before this but is still considered not mentally competent to stand trial.

Well, if you’re not competent to appear in a courtroom, then you aren’t competent to live in society with the rest of us.

Yet permanently incarcerating or institutionalizing someone like that is considered cruel, while what happened to Iryna is just considered “one of those things” we’re told we have to live with. And I will tell you: we do not have to live like this.

Well, except when certain people are killed.

For example, if Lindsay Clancy was found not guilty by reason of insanity for methodically strangling three black children that she had adopted before giving birth to her own child, most American cities would be burned to the ground.

But my main point is that we do not have to live with killers going free because we can’t hold “insane” people accountable for their actions, or even just contain them and protect society from them.

News clip:

And he was accused, not convicted, of murdering his landlord in 2019. Now, he was not convicted because a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to a mental health facility in Northern Virginia in 2022.

In June of this year, a judge stipulated that he should not be released from custody or hospitalization without further order from the court. But there’s a Virginia law that allows mental health facilities in the Commonwealth to grant people who are committed permission to leave a facility without an escort on a day or a 48-hour weekend pass.

He was allowed to leave on July 6th, about a month ago, on a 48-hour weekend pass. He never came back to the hospital. He boarded a flight at Dulles Airport, flew to Istanbul, and flew on to Sudan.

As I said before, we don’t have to live like this.

But it’s not just people who are identifiably mentally ill who we fail to secure as a society. We also have to deal with evildoers who claim insanity to evade punishment for their crimes. And this has happened because modern definitions of insanity are insanely wide.

In 1843, English common law defined insanity under the so-called M’Naghten Rule, which said insanity occurred when the defendant did “not know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”

But in 1954, the Supreme Court replaced this with the Durham standard, which says, “An accused is not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or mental defect.”

That means even if the accused knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong, he could still be excused because of some kind of mental defect that allegedly caused him or her to commit the crime.

For example, in 1993, Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife while he slept. She had previously accused her husband of marital rape and abuse. Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was simply observed for 45 days at a state hospital before being released.

The jury claimed Bobbitt was not legally responsible because she had an “irresistible impulse” to cut off her husband’s penis.

But if we start saying people are not criminally responsible for their “irresistible impulses,” you create an exception so wide you could drive a truck through it, run over a dozen people, and then be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

This is why Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act in 1984 in response to cases like John Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty by reason of insanity even though he planned and knew it was illegal to attempt to assassinate the president of the United States.

As a result of this law, in federal cases the burden was now on the defense to prove insanity, not the prosecution to disprove that a suspect is insane.

Now, the Catholic Church does teach that some people are less culpable for their sins even if they know what they are doing is wrong because they have a strong impulse that was difficult to control, like early adolescent temptation to engage in masturbation, for example.

But an omniscient God mercifully judging us for our sins is far different than modern concepts of insanity that allow any mental difficulty to absolve people of their evil behavior.

For example, do you remember the “Affluenza Kid”?

In 2013, at the age of 16, Ethan Couch killed four people while going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit and driving under the influence after he stole beer from a Walmart.

His attorneys, however, said he should not be punished because his rich parents never gave him boundaries growing up, saying his affluent lifestyle gave him “affluenza,” a mental defect that reduced his legal responsibility.

Couch only got ten years’ probation and then spent only two years in prison after being caught drinking at a party and fleeing to Mexico in violation of his probation terms.

Now, obviously, we should have empathy toward people who are truly mentally ill and are sick, pray for their healing, and even have mercy toward those who are evil and claim to be sick to escape punishment.

But that doesn’t take away from our duty to establish justice in this life. This is why the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith said, “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”

When it comes to the Lindsay Clancy case, some jurors voted not guilty by reason of insanity so Clancy could, in their words, “get the help she needed.”

They also said she must be insane because the prosecution never proved she was a bad mother, even though strangling your children absolutely makes you a bad mother.

One juror even said she was baffled at the only male juror who voted guilty being unable to get over the fact that Clancy viciously killed her children.

Clip:

This is the definition of reasonable doubt. But he had the hardest time getting on with the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.

Yeah, it’s kind of hard to “get over” that.

Now, I know some people are going to screech at me about psychiatric drugs, which toxicology proved were not at acute or toxic levels when Clancy killed her children, and postpartum depression.

I mean, lots of people on these drugs methodically strangle their children after they gave birth eight months ago.

Oh, wait. They don’t, actually.

You mean postpartum psychosis almost never happens more than six months after birth? By some people’s logic, a mom could kill her 20-year-old and still say that she had postpartum psychosis.

And if you think I’m being a mean guy for saying all of this, here’s my confession.

A little voice inside my head that I’ve never heard before recording this episode—like the voice Lindsay Clancy said that she heard—told me to say all of this stuff. As a father who would do anything for his children, I just couldn’t resist what that little voice told me.

So if you’re defending Lindsay Clancy for following her little voice that told her to methodically strangle her children and meticulously plan the killings so that her husband wasn’t home to care for her, then you can’t be mad at me for doing what the little voice in my head told me to do.

Oh, and isn’t it a strange coincidence that when so many people are allegedly “temporarily insane,” they still have enough impulse control and foresight to avoid being caught? And they usually choose to attack someone who is defenseless and can’t fight back.

Frankly, I’m more apt to believe a person is temporarily insane when they try to attack someone they know can’t possibly harm them.

The idea of “X is insane, so only an insane person would do X,” and thus people can’t be held responsible when they do X, is a very dangerous idea.

You can see this in Clancy supporters who say women just don’t strangle their children. And so, if Clancy did do this, well, then she just must be insane.

Clip:

Women typically don’t strangle. It’s so awful to even say, but that isn’t what a woman would do. They don’t strangle.

Now, it’s one thing for someone to be accused of something without evidence that is totally out of character for them. But it is another thing for that person to admit to doing the out-of-character thing.

Sometimes seemingly normal people just choose evil because we live in an evil world.

In her 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout estimates that one in 25 people do not feel shame, guilt, or remorse when they do evil, including women.

You can see this in people like Marie Fikáčková, a Czech nurse who confessed to killing ten newborns, often by cracking their skulls with her bare hands, as she demonstrated in this trial photo. She was convicted of murder in 1960 and executed the following year.

But even some Christians fall into this mindset when they say no woman should ever be held responsible for having an abortion and that they are always abortion’s other victim.

Now, some women are coerced into having abortions, and some women are truly ignorant of their child’s humanity. But other women are not, and they and their willing partners should be held responsible for their actions.

Some women who have abortions, and the men who help them or ignore their child’s fate, are just cruel.

So, to pull everything together, there is a correct definition of insanity rooted in a person being unable to know right from wrong, or what they are doing, or being unable to legitimately control their body.

If someone is insane in that sense, we should have pity on this person while recognizing it isn’t wrong to restrict their freedom to protect the common good of society, especially if we lack certainty about how they will behave in the future.

For example, in 1954, Constance Fisher drowned her three children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was released from a mental hospital five years later and had three more children.

She then drowned those three children in a bathtub in 1966 and was once again found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Granted, there will be cases where we aren’t sure if a person is of sound mind. But those doubtful cases do not justify embracing the false notion that human beings are just meat machines whose actions can always be blamed on how they were raised or some other “mental defect,” and that they can never take responsibility for their actions.

Even Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children and had some evidence of insanity in her acts, has since 2006 voluntarily waived hearings that could have released her from the mental hospital where she is committed.

The general presumption should be that an adult human being who was aware of what they did and that it was wrong is responsible for their actions, and modern insanity loopholes destroy that presumption.

The only way to fix this is to, at the very least, make insanity defenses something the defense must prove.

In Massachusetts, the prosecution had the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was not insane, whereas in 30 states and under federal law since 1984, the defense has the burden of proving insanity with clear and convincing evidence.

In fact, states like Utah and Montana have even done away with “not guilty because of insanity” pleas and have instead changed them to “guilty but insane.”

And in Wednesday’s episode, we will continue with part two of this discussion as we talk about how false concepts of insanity undermine our ability to preach how God saves us from eternal damnation.

That’s right. This was a sneaky part one of two episodes, so stay tuned for that.

And thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you have a very blessed day.