---
title: When a Mother Is Accused
description: Using the Lindsay Clancy case, bestselling author Sharon Virts muses, what would have happened to Emily Lloyd if women were allowed to sit on her trial.
image: https://blog.sharonvirts.com/hubfs/ChatGPT%20Image%20Sep%2027%2c%202026%2c%2012_24_14%20PM.png
---

[![sharonvirts](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/hubfs/raw_assets/public/Sharonvirts_July2020/images/logo.png "sharonvirts")](https://sharonvirts.com/)

- [ABOUT SHARON](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/about)
- NOVELS 
    - [BARGAINS OF FATE](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/books/6a2f1ace5a83ac928168485a)
    - [MASQUE OF HONOR](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/books/6a2f1ace5a83ac9281684859)
    - [THE GRAYS OF TRUTH](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/books/6a2f1ace5a83ac9281684860)
    - [VEIL OF DOUBT](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/books/6a2f1ace5a83ac928168485f)
- [FIELD OF HONOR SERIES](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/series-world)
- [BOOK CLUB](https://theartoflivinghistory.com/book-club)

## When a Mother Is Accused

### Emily Lloyd and Lindsay Clancy: Two Mothers, Two Courtrooms, 154 Years Apart

When I began researching the 1872 trial that became the foundation for Veil of Doubt, one question kept nagging at me: **What would have happened to Emily Lloyd if women had been allowed to sit on her jury?**

My conclusion may surprise you.

I think they might have hanged her.

Emily was accused of poisoning all four of her children. The accusation was almost incomprehensible in 1872, when motherhood occupied a near-sacred place in Victorian society. Women were expected to be nurturing, self-sacrificing and morally responsible for the home. But as I worked my way through the surviving testimony, I noticed something I hadn't expected.

The women were hard on Emily. They noticed things. They judged things. They interpreted her behavior through their own understanding of what a wife and mother should be. Again and again, I was struck by how unforgiving some of their testimony could be.

The men seemed different.  Emily's jury was entirely male because women could not serve. And those twelve men were ultimately unable to accept that this young mother was criminally responsible for murdering her children. She was acquitted.

For years afterward, I have wondered whether Emily might have walked from that courtroom because twelve men judged her—and whether twelve women, applying the expectations of nineteenth-century motherhood, might have sent her to the gallows instead. Then, 154 years later, I watched another courtroom wrestle with another mother accused of killing her children. Her name was Lindsay Clancy.

### Two Mothers. Two Very Different Worlds.

Clancy, a Massachusetts mother and former labor-and-delivery nurse, was charged with murdering her three young children in 2023. Her attorneys did not dispute that she killed them. The central question was whether mental illness left her criminally responsible for what she had done. The defense argued that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis; prosecutors challenged that account and argued that she understood her actions.  And this time, the jury looked very different.

**Nine women. Three men.**

After seven days of deliberations, eleven of those twelve jurors were prepared to find Clancy not guilty for lack of criminal responsibility. One juror held out, and the judge declared a mistrial on September 4. I couldn't help thinking about Emily Lloyd. Because at first glance, the comparison seems to turn my old theory completely on its head.

#### What Changed?

 Certainly, far more than the gender of the people sitting in the jury box. In Emily Lloyd's world, the legal understanding of insanity was governed by the nineteenth-century **M'Naghten rule**. In simplified terms, the question centered on whether mental illness prevented the accused from understanding the nature of her act or knowing that it was wrong. Massachusetts no longer uses that standard.

Under its modern **McHoul standard**, a defendant can lack criminal responsibility if mental disease or defect left her without substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or **to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law**. Once sufficient evidence raises the issue, Massachusetts requires prosecutors to prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the law isn't the only thing that changed. Medicine changed. Our understanding of mental illness changed. Our understanding of postpartum disorders changed. And perhaps most profoundly, **women's understanding of one another changed because women's lives changed**.

The women who judged Emily from the witness stand in 1872 lived within a culture with extraordinarily rigid expectations about what constituted a “good” woman, a “good” wife and, especially, a “good” mother. My reading of their testimony left me with the impression that some measured Emily against those expectations mercilessly.

A modern woman sitting in a jury box brings a very different lifetime of experience to the question of motherhood. That doesn't mean women are naturally more sympathetic to women. Emily's trial certainly convinced me otherwise. Nor can we know that gender determined the Clancy jurors' views. But it does make the comparison fascinating.

### 154 Years Later

 For years, my research into Emily Lloyd made me wonder whether an all-female jury in 1872 might have condemned her rather than saved her.

Now we have watched a predominantly female jury confront another mother accused of the unimaginable—and nearly reach the opposite conclusion.

So what changed? Was it the law? Medicine? Our understanding of mental illness? The expectations we place upon mothers?  Or simply the accumulated experience of 154 years in which women moved from the witness stand into the jury box, the courtroom, the medical profession and nearly every other place from which their lives had once been interpreted almost entirely by men?

There is no tidy answer. Nor should there be.

Lindsay Clancy's criminal case remains unresolved; a mistrial is not an acquittal, and prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will retry her. But for me, the two cases leave behind one extraordinary historical question.

**In 1872, twelve men were asked to judge whether a mother could be responsible for the unthinkable. In 2026, nine women and three men were asked essentially the same thing.**

The courtroom changed. The law changed. Women changed. Perhaps what we really have to ask, 154 years later, is:

**Did our definition of a “good mother” change with them?**

![Sharon Virts](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/hubfs/Sharon-4232.jpg)

[Sharon Virts](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/blog/author/sharon-virts) [September 28, 2026](https://sharonvirts.com/2020/04/28/the-lovely-lee-sisters-of-coton-farm/)

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### Categories

- [Musings (5)](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/blog/tag/musings)
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- [Bargains of Fate (1)](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/blog/tag/bargains-of-fate)
- [Behind the Book (1)](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/blog/tag/behind-the-book)
- [Fields of Honor (1)](https://blog.sharonvirts.com/blog/tag/fields-of-honor)

see all

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