Fallout from Lindsay Clancy Case

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The issues that matter most, right here. The Drew Mariani Show on Relevant Radio.

Ed Morrissey (0:09)

Welcome back, everyone. I'm Ed Morrissey of hotair.com. Filling in for Drew today and taking your calls at 888-914-9149.

888-914-9149. I hope you all had a blessed and peaceful and happy Labor Day weekend. We are coming right back into the thick of things today. We've got a great show lined up for you today. We're going to be talking about the great revivals in our third hour today. We're going to also be talking about Catholic Singles and the Fulton Sheen beatification in our second hour after the Divine Mercy Chaplet, which will be coming up at the top of the next hour. So be sure to get your prayer intentions ready for that.

This hour, we're going to be talking more about the Lindsay Clancy Case and sort of the cultural and legal questions that it has been raising ever since the murder of those three children took place. We had a mistrial in the trial last week. It created a lot of blowback, I think, towards everybody involved in this case. The defense attorney in this case was out attacking a juror. Today, he's asking for a pardon from Donald Trump on a case that doesn't have anything to do with federal law, at least at this stage. So there's a lot of confusion going on around the Lindsay Clancy Case. Here to help us try to untangle a little bit of it is Lauretta Froelich. She's an attorney and retired prosecutor with the office of Cook County State's Attorney in Chicago. She's a graduate of St. Mary's of Notre Dame, Indiana, and received her law degree from John Marshall Law School in 1997 Lauretta, thank you so much for being with us today.

Lauretta M. Froelich (1:47)

Well, Ed, thank you for the privilege of being able to talk with your listeners.

Ed Morrissey (1:53)

Look, I am blessed that Drew allows me to do that from time to time. So we're both happy to be here, I think, Lauretta.

Lauretta M. Froelich (2:01)

Always, always. God is so good.

Ed Morrissey (2:04)

God is good all the time.

The Lindsay Clancy Case, this is a difficult case. I know a lot of people want to reduce it to it's an easy call one way or the other. When you're dealing with profound mental illness and intersecting with deadly serious crime here, it's always going to be difficult for juries. My sympathy in this case has always been with the 12 jurors who were called upon to try to figure out whether or not Lindsay Clancy was legally responsible for the murders that she is admitting through her defense is admitting that she committed. Not an easy call because I think all of us, when we hear something like this, say, our very first thing is you've got to be crazy to do something like that.

Lauretta M. Froelich (2:57)

Yeah.

Ed Morrissey (2:58)

But you can be crazy and still be legally responsible. In fact, that happens a lot. That's the reason why the law draws distinctions.

That's the reason why I wanted to bring you on here because I think that people are not quite cognizant of the nuances of a legal insanity plea and what a jury has to find to get there.

Lauretta M. Froelich (3:21)

Right. You hit it right on the head when you opened by acknowledging that this is a case about Cora, Dawson, and Callan, the three children who were murdered.

Ed Morrissey (3:33)

Exactly.

Lauretta M. Froelich (3:34)

And, you know, the question that remains throughout the entire jury, was Lindsay Clancy criminally responsible for her actions?

Did she lack substantial capacity to appreciate that what she was doing was wrong, or she lacked the ability to conform her conduct to the requirement of the law? And so, it's not just was she insane because you, like you said, you hear that a mother killed her three babies, and you're like, she has to be out of her mind. But that's what the defense had approved and obviously convinced 11 jurors. And it was the prosecution who came out hitting hard that she was this cold-blooded murderer, that during the case had to kind of draw it back and kind of be like, okay, fine, she was suffering from something, but she's still responsible. She's still acted intentionally in doing certain steps, and these steps ended up in the murder of her children.

Ed Morrissey (4:50)

Lauretta, that used to be, I mean, this is going way back. I don't think that they, I don't think this is necessarily the baseline anymore, but it used to be called the Monotone Rule in legal terms when dealing with insanity, because American law has long understood insanity to be a complicating factor at the very least. And as I know it, as a layman, because I'm not an attorney.