Frank's Musings

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy has stumped its jury. First degree murder is an impossible verdict— no woman who has gone through the ecstasy and agony of conceiving, bearing, and nurturing her own three children can have brutally killed them in her right mind. How lucky are I and my wife not to have experienced such a tragic consequence of our humanity.

We must realize that only hubris can justify concluding that mankind’s code of ethics is hardwired into our physiological psychologies. Unfortunately for Ms. Clancy, her children and their father, a biological aberration is the only reasonable cause to which any of us should attribute such a horrendous violation of self-imposed human values.

Even the God who instilled in us those rules of behavior only exists in human consciousness as a result of our belief in Him. Denying Ms. Clancy’s vulnerability, and that of all of us, to ultimate biological weaknesses is another form of hubris. While we can seek to pretend that humanity lives according to its own sacred rules, we cannot ignore that in the end evolution has built this edifice called human nature from available materialsof which we may never know the origin.

Maternal infanticide proves how inescapable is the mystery of human life. Terminating any lives for having violated our rules of behavior is typically a judgment call based on its likelihood of preventing similar future crimes. However much we rely on human nature to prevent repetition of a mother’s infanticide, society still must prevent Ms. Clancy from ever again similarly violating its rules. That doesn’t mean execution, but it requires everlasting detention.