Stripping a wrongdoer of moral status would have far greater ramifications than any single evil act.
Page B7From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 15 September 2026
Examiner brands public sympathy 'moral rot'; National Review says her actual acquittal would corrode society's moral order
As it ran on the front
DUXBURY, MASS. — The presumption of innocence died this week, survived by no verdict, no jury, and no say in the matter, only two newspaper columns confident enough to bury it early.
It was born, as best anyone can trace it, in English common law long before this country existed: the plain rule that a person accused keeps her innocence until twelve strangers take it from her, and not one moment sooner. In the case of Lindsay Clancy, whose three children died in Duxbury in January 2023, it did not survive the commentary that followed.…
…(cont) Clancy's first trial did not end in a verdict. It ended in a mistrial, and the record credits one specific fact for that outcome: one lone juror stood between her and an acquittal by reason of insanity, and nothing else did.
On September 12, the Washington Examiner filed against that near-acquittal anyway, under the headline "'Same, Lindsay' isn't empathy," and found the day's real damage not in a courtroom but in "our culture's moral rot" — the ordinary sympathy that had come, by the paper's own telling, within one vote of setting her free.
Three days later, National Review stopped blaming the sympathy and started pricing the verdict itself. "What Our Society Would Lose If Lindsay Clancy Is Exonerated," the headline read, framed in the conditional because no jury had yet said so. Stripping a "wrongdoer" of moral status, the piece argued, would carry "far greater ramifications than any single evil act." The word arrived a full trial ahead of the finding that was supposed to earn it.
This is the entire obituary of the presumption of innocence, September 2026 edition: doubted for existing, then condemned for what it might still produce, with the case still unresolved beneath both columns. No legislature repealed it. No court struck it down. Two op-eds and a slow news week did what used to take an amendment.
The principle is survived by future defendants whose juries may read the columns first. It is preceded in death by the old, unfashionable notion that a hung jury means doubt, not depravity — and by the plain old hogwash that a headline can hand down a verdict a courtroom has not reached.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next verdict, whatever it turns out to be, come from twelve jurors in a courtroom, after the evidence — not from a columnist, before it.
— mort
“Here's the con: they convict her in the op-ed section so the actual jury's got less work to do. One holdout juror gets called "moral rot" on Tuesday, and by Friday the whole idea of waiting for a verdict is the thing killing society — that's not commentary, that's jury tampering with a byline. Next twelve people who sit in that box already read the paper.”
“National Review isn't calling for a verdict, they're raising a philosophical question about what society loses — that's not prejudging anything, that's just, well, deciding in advance what the loss would be if a jury reaches a specific conclusion. Which — okay, hearing it out loud, that is prejudging it. But principled prejudging. Did I just say "principled prejudging"? Strike that.”
The receipts
· ‘Same, Lindsay’ isn’t empathy: The Clancy mistrial exposed our culture’s moral rot from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.