In a commentary published by American Thinker, writer J.R. Dunn argues that the national conversation around the Lindsay Clancy trial revealed a one-sided reflexes about gender and murder — one that he says runs in the opposite direction from the usual feminist complaint.
Dunn’s central claim is that even the most committed advocates for women made no attempt, in the wake of the Clancy proceedings, to argue that men are treated more harshly for the same crime. He contends they stayed quiet because making that argument would have been indefensible. From his vantage point, the evidence points the other way: when the accused is a mother, sympathetic framing and ideological explanations get a hearing; when the accused is a father, they do not.
The piece is opinion, and Dunn is frank about his sympathies and antipathies. But the factual spine of his argument is a pair of cases he treats as a natural experiment.
The Doerman Case as a Benchmark
Dunn opens his comparison with Chad Doerman, the Ohio man who, in 2023, shot his wife and four children. Three of the boys died; the wife and daughter survived. According to Dunn’s account, Doerman had attended church earlier that day and came to believe that God was demanding a sacrifice from him. He reportedly spent hours moving through the house with a Bible in one hand, repeating a phrase about knowing what is right.
Dunn’s treatment of the religious dimension is caustic rather than analytic. He notes, with evident contempt, that Doerman apparently never opened the book he was carrying — which, in Dunn’s telling, contains the story of Abraham being stopped by an angel before he could sacrifice his son, a passage Dunn reads as an implicit prohibition on the practice. The point is less theological than rhetorical: Dunn wants readers to see Doerman’s claimed motive as incoherent on its own terms.
He is equally unsparing about Doerman’s conduct after the killings. Dunn describes him attempting to play the indignant homeowner when police arrived, sitting on his stoop with a rifle after having chased down and shot his oldest son, and being slammed to the ground when he resisted. At arraignment, Dunn writes, Doerman shifted into what he calls a tormented stoicism routine, working his jaw and producing small whimpers and half-sobs.
None of it worked, according to the piece. Dunn emphasizes that the trial proceeded without outside ideological interference, without anyone pressuring the jury, and without anyone arguing that Doerman deserved another chance. An insanity plea failed to gain traction. On August 2, 2024, Doerman pleaded guilty to avoid a possible death penalty and received three life sentences without the possibility of parole. Dunn adds, in a line meant to land hard, that Doerman is now being brutalized by other inmates.
That last detail is delivered as grim satisfaction rather than neutral reporting, and readers will recognize it as such. But the procedural contrast Dunn is drawing is the real argument: whatever one thinks of the outcome, the system processed Doerman without the kind of sympathetic theorizing that Dunn says surrounded Clancy.
What the Comparison Is Meant to Prove
The comparison is not offered as a strict legal equivalence. Dunn acknowledges that fathers murder their children only rarely, and that when they do, the motive is often spite toward the mother. He also notes that child murders stemming from psychotic breaks are rarer still, citing Doerman as the last case of note. That concession matters, because it means the two cases are not perfectly matched — a point critics of Dunn’s argument would likely seize on.
His claim is narrower and more pointed: the difference in how the two defendants were discussed is not explained by the facts of the crimes but by the gender of the accused. If a defense team or a sympathetic commentator had made, on Doerman’s behalf, the same kinds of suggestions raised in Clancy’s trial, Dunn writes, it would have been received as the blackest comedy. The implication is that certain arguments — about mental health, about maternal strain, about diminished capacity — are available in some cases and simply off the table in others.
Dunn’s conclusion is blunt: if a double standard exists, it is in the legal treatment of female murderers. Doerman, he writes, got what was coming to him with little absurdity or foolishness attached. And he closes with a hope rather than a prediction — that Lindsay Clancy will get the same.
Where the Argument Is Contested
The piece will draw objections on several fronts, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not establish.
First, Dunn’s account of the Clancy trial is largely assumed rather than documented. He refers to suggestions made on her behalf and to ideological interference, but he does not lay out the specific claims, expert testimony, or advocacy he has in mind. Readers who want to evaluate the comparison on the merits would need that detail, and the commentary does not supply it.
Second, the two cases differ in ways that bear directly on legal strategy. Doerman’s insanity plea, by Dunn’s own account, failed to gain traction, and he then pleaded guilty to escape a possible death penalty. That is a defendant making a pragmatic calculation in the face of overwhelming evidence, not necessarily a defendant denied a sympathetic hearing by a biased system. Whether Clancy’s case involved a genuinely comparable plea posture is a question the piece leaves open.
Third, Dunn’s characterization of Doerman is deliberately inflammatory — he describes him in terms that would not survive a newsroom style guide — and he does not pretend to neutrality about the man. That is a legitimate move in an opinion column, and it is also a signal to readers about how much weight to place on the piece’s framing of the two defendants’ relative humanity.
Why It Matters Beyond Two Cases
Strip away the invective and Dunn is raising a question that courts, defense attorneys, and commentators do argue about in earnest: how consistently do we apply concepts like mental illness, postpartum crisis, and diminished responsibility across defendants? There is a real scholarly and legal debate about whether such defenses are invoked selectively, and about whether the resulting disparities track gender, race, or class.
Dunn’s answer is unambiguous, and he states it as a matter of common sense rather than empirical study. He does not present data on sentencing outcomes, charging decisions, or plea bargains across a broader set of cases. He presents two men and one woman — or rather, one man in detail and one woman by reference — and asks readers to draw the inference.
That is the shape of the piece: an argument from contrast, delivered with a polemicist’s confidence, aimed at readers who already suspect that the culture applies its compassion unevenly. Whether the comparison holds up depends on facts Dunn mostly leaves to the side — the specific record in the Clancy case, the specific record in Doerman’s, and the broader pattern of how these defenses actually fare in American courtrooms.
What the commentary does accomplish is to invert a familiar framing. The usual complaint is that men who kill are treated as monsters while women who kill are treated as victims, or that the reverse is true, depending on who is talking. Dunn picks a side, names his villains and his benchmarks, and dares readers to find the asymmetry he claims is hiding in plain sight.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/a-double-standard-for-murder/