Another Woman Charged with Murdering Her Child Is Following in Lindsay Clancy’s Footsteps in ‘Eerily Similar’ Case

For those of us who’ve been forced into following the Lindsay Clancy trial, the question didn’t seem to be if the mother’s case would present a moral contagion, but when the contagion would hit.

The answer apparently is, sooner than we would have thought.

In Durham County Superior Court in North Carolina, attorneys for a 41-year-old mother who killed her child informed the court they intend to use an insanity plea based on “postpartum psychosis.”

And, in a statement to WRAL-TV, the attorney for the mother drew specific parallels between her client’s case and that of Clancy.

Andrea Faust faces murder and attempted murder charges after she killed her 3-year-old and tried to kill her 2-year-old. She was found incapable of proceeding to trial after two suicide attempts and evidence she was planning another behind bars.

“It is evident that she is a danger to herself and requires immediate and intensive psychiatric attention,” a court document read. “Further evaluation is also necessary in order to determine her capacity to proceed.”

This doesn’t mean that she won’t go to trial. It just means that she needs to be brought into a state of mind where she can proceed with her own defense.

However, when the case does happen, her attorneys say she’ll plead not guilty by reason of insanity and diminished capacity.

“I suspected this would be a postpartum psychosis case from reading the headlines and, after my first meeting with my client, I knew this was a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity [NGRI] psychosis case,” Faust’s attorney, Nicole Galinsky, said in a statement to WRAL.

“Defense expert Adrienne Saxton has already found that Andrea was incapable of distinguishing right from wrong in relation to [the incident].”

Really? Sounds suspiciously like someone else in the news getting a lot of unearned support at the moment. In case you needed a mallet over the head to get the point, Galinsky was ready to rhetorically supply it. From her statement:

Andrea and [Lindsay Clancy’s] cases are eerily similar, though not entirely the same. Both women were known to be loving, doting, responsible mothers who were worried about and caring for their children up until the very-second they decided to kill them. Both women were reaching out to their own mothers to come help them because they both recognized that they were having “horrible” (intrusive) thoughts and both, at some point, did not feel safe around their children. Both were beginning to have auditory hallucinations which they were doing everything in their power to ignore or make go away (including seeking out psychiatric help, being prescribed medication, etc.). Both were psychiatrically hospitalized before the killings happened. Neither woman did this out of the blue. Both were struggling enormously with their mental health. But, like most women and almost-all moms, they were just trying to get through each day, care for their children, be a good mom/wife/employee. Both were seeking help from doctors who weren’t really taking their concerns seriously.

The jury in the Clancy case is still deliberating over whether the mother of three, who killed her children in January 2023 by strangling them with exercise bands, is guilty of murder or not guilty by reason of insanity.

The defense says that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was prescribed a cocktail of medication that didn’t make her symptoms better. The prosecution has countered by arguing that the amount of planning that went into the murders was too elaborate for someone incapacitated by insanity.

Clancy often didn’t take her medication as prescribed, and her defense of “postpartum psychosis” has serious evidentiary issues inasmuch as her account of how it manifested differs wildly from how the disease is known to manifest.

Now, the two cases definitely will differ, legally speaking, in the tenability of the defense. Part of the reason the Clancy trial may end in acquittal is that Massachusetts’ insanity plea rules are unusually lenient, while North Carolina’s very much are not.

In Massachusetts, the burden of proof falls on the prosecution to either convince the jury the defendant wasn’t mentally ill or, while mentally ill, “nonetheless retained the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness or criminality of their conduct and to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.” This is known as the American Law Institute Model Penal Code standard, which was developed in the 1960s and adopted by many states, but fell out of favor after John Hinckley, the man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity because of its definition of insanity, as a PBS Frontline primer on the history of the insanity defense notes.

North Carolina, meanwhile, puts the burden of proof on the defendant and follows the older “M’Naughten rule,” where a defendant must either not have the cognitive capacity to know right from wrong or have an “irresistible impulse” to commit the crime due to a provable mental defect.

This is a much higher bar to clear — and part of the reason why the Clancy case originally got attention, due to the perfect storm of the nature of the crime, the state’s low bar for determining criminal insanity, and the potential that, due to the transient nature of postpartum psychosis and Clancy’s paralysis from her own suicide attempt, she could effectively be a free woman quite soon despite killing three children.

However, the Clancy case has morphed into something more than just a morbidly sensational case meeting bad progressive lawmaking. Everyone from conspiracy-prone wine mommy true-crime podcast addicts to homicidal feminist grievance hustlers has latched onto Clancy’s cause like remoras to a shark.

Ask them about the Model Penal Code rule versus the M’Naughten rule and their faces will go blanker than Tara Reid’s answer sheet on an MIT physics exam. Ask them why Lindsay Clancy didn’t do it and they’ll talk your ear off about 162 different ways Patrick Clancy really committed the crime or how Clancy snapped due to the “emotional labor” forced upon her due to “patriarchal structures.”

Clancy’s case has morphed from a referendum on the rule of law to one on the nature of motherhood, and whether children are disposable. A certain segment of the population is telling us, loud and clear, that human life is now expendable when they’re outside the womb, not just inside it, when they become an annoyance.

Oh, and it’s Patrick’s fault, anyway. They heard it all on pods like “Who Done It? (Spoiler: It Was the Husband… Probably)” and “Crime Junkie: Personality Disorder-o-Rama.”

The Clancy jury is currently about to enter its fourth day of deliberations without a verdict. If the verdict does end up reflecting those twisted perceptions, differences in burden of proof and insanity standards might not matter much anymore, and the moral contagion can only spread from there. When moral monsters are given the ultimate excuse for the ultimate sin, after all, why wouldn’t they use it?

Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.