Two dead families’ worth of grief, and one theory

Two courtrooms, an ocean apart in relevance but identical in structure.

In Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers have rested their case, having spent days establishing that the woman who allegedly strangled her three children was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, and should therefore not be held criminally responsible.

In North Carolina, Decarlos Brown Jr., who allegedly stabbed Iryna Zarutska to death on a train for no reason he could later explain, has been ruled incompetent to stand trial. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, he may never face a jury at all.

Two dead families’ worth of grief, and one theory doing all the explaining: the mind broke, therefore the person cannot answer for what the broken mind has done.

Here is the question neither courtroom will tolerate. A mind does not arrive at that cliff by accident. It is walked there, step by step, by its owner, and the steps have names. How many drinks poured to blur what needed facing? How many pills swallowed for escape, how many treatments abandoned once they demanded effort, how many warnings waved away? How many small moral surrenders, trivial in isolation, freely made, each one easing the way for the next? The insanity plea invites a jury to examine one night and ignore the ten thousand days that produced it. Every one of those days had an author. The diagnosis is where the inquiry stops. It ought to be where the indictment begins.

That question isn’t asked because asking it would mean treating Clancy and Brown as what they have been all along: agents. People whose choices, year upon year, accumulated into the act. Our culture no longer believes in that person. It believes in symptoms wearing a human shape, pushed around by chemistry and circumstance, arriving at the courthouse as pure effect with no cause worth interrogating.

Notice who is making this argument, and notice what else they argue. The same coalition insisting addiction is a disease rather than a chain of choices, that a decade of untreated homelessness is a housing failure rather than anyone’s decision, that crime is trauma wearing a disguise, that coalition is, unsurprisingly, first in line with the psychiatric defence once the trauma turns lethal. The arsonist does not merely light the fire. He is also first to the podium afterwards, explaining why nobody could have prevented it.

A person not held responsible is being erased as a person, reduced to weather, to a system malfunction, to an event with no author. Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy did not die of weather. Iryna Zarutska was not killed by a system. They were killed by human beings who arrived at that moment through a thousand prior moments, every one of which belonged to somebody capable, at the time, of choosing otherwise.