The Act and the Agent
Treatment is not the judgment the deed is owed. Part 1 of 2
It’s commonly believed that when an act is horrific and a serious diagnosis exists, justice must choose between two horns: punish the actor or treat the illness and refuse punishment. Jay Atkins, writing on the Clancy case, takes the second horn when postpartum psychosis is taken to have erased criminal capacity. I shall take the first. What mode of punishment the deed requires will be the thesis of Part 2. This part is only the claim that the deed still requires a punitive judgment.
The Slide
Let the facts Atkins grants remain granted. Lindsay Clancy strangled Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months) in 2023. Call that slaying S. The defense says psychosis took the capacity to know the act was wrong or to conform to law. The prosecution says she understood and planned it. In Massachusetts, the jury was deadlocked 11–1 in favor of a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. She had sought care and was sent home. None of that is here denied as report.
Atkins’ analysis, tightened, begins from a true-looking pair. Moral culpability tracks mind, heart, and will, not horror alone. Scripture distinguishes killing without hatred from murder, and the knowing servant from the ignorant one. He then adds a further claim: if a severe diagnosis — call it D — destroyed capacity, the ordinary purposes of punishment misfire. Call that destroyed capacity C. From D and C he concludes that justice is psychiatric commitment, not a punitive sentence. Call a punitive judgment P, and call treatment offered as a substitute for that judgment T. His conclusion is T and ¬P.
The first pair is not nothing. God judges the heart. Cities of refuge are in the law. Mens rea is not a modern invention. The slide is the third step: from “the heart matters” to “D, if C is believed, retires P.” That slide is what the following cases refuse.
Case I. Diagnosis is not acquittal
Suppose D is genuine and the children are still dead by her hands. Atkins treats D as if it could cancel S as a matter for the sword. It cannot. The magistrate judges a public deed under God. He is not required to treat S as a weather event because a clinic has a name for the storm. From D it does not follow that ¬P. The first horn says: S is still owed an answer as deed. Treatment may accompany P. T does not replace it.
Case II. Refuge is a class, not a solvent
Deuteronomy 19 and Numbers 35 distinguish the man who kills without prior hatred, or suddenly without enmity, from the man who lies in wait. Call that refuge class U. The texts do not offer an inner weather report. They name public marks: no hatred beforehand, no lying in wait, an act that can be described as sudden or unseen. The congregation judges between the slayer and the avenger on those marks, not on whether a later clinic has a name for the storm. Strangling three children in their beds is not already U because a diagnosis exists. If Atkins wants the refuge texts, he must show that this killing bears the marks the law already uses to separate U from murder. He cannot treat D as if it were itself one of those marks. The refuge is a class the statute draws. It is not a solvent that dissolves S once D is entered.
Case III. Fewer stripes are still stripes
Luke 12 distinguishes the servant who knew the master’s will from the one who did not. The point is degrees of culpability among servants who still answer. It is not a rule that the ignorant servant is owed no stroke. “Fewer stripes” are still stripes. If her mind was darkened, that may bear on measure. It does not, by itself, commute S into a medical episode.
Case IV. The image is in the slain
Assume, for Atkins, that deterrence and ordinary retribution feel uncomfortable if she could not process the act. Uncomfortable is not the analysis. The sword is not first a therapy for the offender’s future calculations. It is a public declaration that this kind of deed is bloodguilt. Genesis 9:6 names the image in the victim. That image was in Cora, Dawson, and Callan whether or not their mother could complete a syllogism that morning. A system that can only offer T after S has decided that the victims’ blood is a clinical problem.
Case V. The scandal does not retire the deed
The system failed her. That can be true and still not decide the horn. A late hospital and a dead child are two facts. The first is a scandal of care. The second is S. From the scandal it does not follow that S has no punitive remainder. Micah requires justice, mercy, and humility together. Mercy is not the abolition of P. Humility is not the claim that we cannot know a mother killed her children.
So S does not by itself prove a theory of mind, and a theory of mind does not by itself retire P. The household as first society and the image in the child both remain after D is entered. If the deed is this slaying, P is still required. T as a substitute for P is not justice under Atkins’ own sentences about hearts. It is the second horn smuggled through a true observation.
Conclusion
Atkins’ load-bearing claim, tightened, is:
(A) If D destroyed capacity, justice is T and ¬P
The first pair he uses is true: culpability tracks heart and will, and Scripture knows degrees. (A) does not follow from that pair. From D it does not follow that S is no longer a deed for the sword. From the refuge texts it does not follow that this slaying is already U. From darkened mind it does not follow that there is no stroke. From discomfort about deterrence it does not follow that the image in the slain has become a clinical problem. From a failed hospital it does not follow that P has no remainder.
So (A) is not established. T may accompany P. T is not the name of the duty S is owed. Atkins is right that vengeance is not a synonym for justice, that Clancy is not the principal victim, and that other mothers need a system that would have held her before the house went quiet. He is wrong if those sentences are allowed to mean that the first horn has been sawn off. The act remains an act. The agent, however darkened, remains the one whose hands did it. Justice still has to say so in a punitive voice.
What the voice must say –confinement under sentence, or death –is not the topic of this essay. Part 2 takes up the mode. The claim here is only that the mode, whatever it is, is still P, and that T is not the name of that duty.
Notes
- Letter-symbols in this note are local to this note only; they are not the series alphabet. S, D, C, P, T, U and related letters in this note (and its continuation) are not series defaults.
2. Jay Atkins, “Lindsay Clancy trial: Insanity defense isn’t a loophole but justice,” The Christian Post, 9 September 2026.
3. Deuteronomy 19; Numbers 35 name a class of unpremeditated killing. They are not a solvent for D. They name U. They do not identify D with U.
4. Luke 12:47–48: measure of stripes, not the absence of stripes.
5. Genesis 9:6: the image in the slain. Part 2 returns to this for the mode.
6. Massachusetts commitment after a finding of no criminal responsibility is a legal alternative to a punitive sentence. This essay denies that the alternative is the judgment S requires.
7. Nothing here denies postpartum illness as a medical fact. The denial is that D, if present, already chooses Atkins’ horn.