Check Your Wrath and Scorn

 A judge in Massachusetts yesterday apparently denied Lindsay Clancy's request to dismiss the murder charges against her, after a jury failed to reach consensus in the first trial. This means she could be tried again for the same alleged offenses. 

It's hard to understand the position of anyone who wants to punish a mother more after losing three children—even if allegedly by her own hand. 

A character in Norman Mailer's Barbary Shore argues (only half-in-earnest) that for a parent to murder their children is "the least reprehensible form of murder," since—unlike a crime in which you cause unknown pain to strangers, here, "the emotional price is yours alone." 

It's impossible to take that literally, of course. What about the emotional price exacted from the children themselves? What about the future lives that are denied them? What about the pain of the other parent or the other people who knew or might have known the children? 

But Mailer's hyperbole here gets at something that everyone who followed the Lindsay Clancy case this summer (and who could avoid it?) must acknowledge: if the horrific allegations are true, that means she already inflicted on herself the worst possible thing a parent can endure. 

So who would have the heart to hurt her further? And what purpose could such punishment possibly serve? 

It's not for me to weigh in on her alleged guilt or innocence. But even supposing the allegations are all true, I think Bertolt Brecht was right in what he said in his poem about "the Infanticide, Marie Farrar" (Hays trans.): 

You who bear pleasantly between clean sheets

And give the name "blessed" to your womb's weight

Must not damn the weakness of the outcast,

For her sin was black but her pain was great.

Therefore, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn

For man needs help from every creature born.