The Lindsay Clancy trial has dominated headlines, but according to legal commentator Matthew G. Andersson, the real story isn’t the defendantāit’s the criminal justice system that failed to convict a self-confessed murderer. In a sharp critique published by American Thinker, Andersson argues that centuries-old legal doctrines and a modern reluctance to punish have turned criminal law into a form of therapy, where sympathy for the accused trumps justice for the victims.
The Problem With Blackstone’s Ratio
Andersson traces the trouble to the 18th-century English legal tradition known as Blackstone’s Ratio, which holds that it is better for ten guilty people to go free than for one innocent person to be wrongfully convicted. While often cited as a cornerstone of justice, Andersson argues that this principle is not rooted in law but in a ‘vague progressive social belief.’ He contends that it fails to explain why innocent people are convicted or why the guilty are set free to commit more crimes.
The ‘presumption of innocence’ and the ambiguous ‘reasonable doubt’ standard, he says, facilitate Blackstone’s Ratio. But does this philosophy truly serve justice, or does it merely make innocence the ‘default position’ in difficult cases, akin to treating it as a ‘null hypothesis’? Andersson suggests that instead of using pragmatic reason to establish what is probably true about an actual criminal act, the system defaults to a moral preference for innocence.
From Reasonable Doubt to ‘Reasonable Compassion’
In cases like Clancy, Andersson argues, the debate isn’t even about guilt or innocenceāit’s about excusable behavior. This draws even more deeply on the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard, allowing reasonable doubt to morph into ‘reasonable compassion’ for the accused, even when three dead children are at the center of the crime. He criticizes the legally irrelevant empathy that supports the misleading language of ‘not guilty,’ which doesn’t mean innocent but gives jurors a way to sympathize with the defendant while hiding behind their legal duty.
Mill’s Forgotten Warning
Andersson invokes John Stuart Mill’s famous 1868 speech in favor of capital punishment, which he says stated the problem perfectly: penalties for atrocious offenses are ‘ludicrously inadequate as to be almost an encouragement to the crime.’ Mill observed that prisons were ‘too comfortable’ and ‘almost a reward.’ For aggravated murderāmurder that includes additional components like rape or infanticideāMill called it ‘the greatest crime known to the law’ and argued that such criminals must face a system that would ‘solemnly blot him out from the fellowship of mankind.’
Andersson highlights Mill’s point that for some criminals, the crime is not an exception to their character but consistent with it. Mill defended the death penalty on grounds of ‘humanity to the criminal,’ arguing it was the least cruel mode of adequate deterrence. Andersson notes that death was considered less cruel because societies once devised punishments worse than death. Today, with no such alternatives, capital punishment is artificially elevated as the harshest penalty while still being argued as cruel, when in context it is not.
Law Turned Into Sociology
The core issue, Andersson argues, is that criminal law has been turned into ‘criminal therapy,’ and law into sociology. In service to these ideologies, ‘reasonable doubt’ replaces ‘reasonable confidence.’ Doubt will always exist, but a doubt standard reinforces human weaknesses in self-confidence, giving jurors a legal rule that validates their pre-existing bias to doubt themselves. This creates ‘reasonable crimes’ because it frames verdicts on the wrong standard: doubt versus confidence, and with confidence, a moral conviction of right and wrong.
Andersson points to the trial’s front-page coverage in the New York Times as evidence of ‘ideological solidarity with the accused.’ He argues that progressive ideology subordinates the rights of babies and infants to the mother, blurring abortion doctrine with what some might consider technical infanticide. He cites a New York Times writer who deflected personal blame to ‘the system,’ reflecting what he calls a ‘psychological disorder in personal responsibility.’
Flawed Jury Instructions
Andersson also criticizes the judge’s jury instructions, which reinforced the concept of ‘in dubio reo’āwhen in doubt, rule for the accused. The judge instructed that a charge is proved beyond a reasonable doubt if jurors have ‘an abiding conviction to a moral certainty that the charge is true.’ Andersson argues this is incorrect, as such certainty is unattainable.
He notes that courts haven’t clearly defined ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ with some federal courts even saying it shouldn’t be defined. Judges often accommodate lawyers who confuse juries on the standard, leaving out that doubt must be relevant to the criminal facts and justifiable. Any reasonable doubt must be greater than minor doubtsāa jury can have many insignificant uncertainties and still issue a guilty verdict.
A Better Standard?
Andersson points to a 1987 model jury charge from the U.S. Judicial Conference that proposed: ‘Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is proof that leaves you firmly convinced of the defendant’s guilt.’ This standard of being ‘convinced’ puts the burden where it belongsāon the prosecution’s caseāwhile focusing on proof and criminal guilt, rather than mental or physiological accountability, which allows law to slip into clinical psychology and identity politics.
Ultimately, Andersson argues that the Clancy case reveals a system where juries become entertained audiences for defense stories of human dysfunction, rather than examiners of facts surrounding violence against innocent victimsāand punishers of perpetrators. His critique raises uncomfortable questions about whether the scales of justice have tipped too far in favor of the accused, at the expense of the victims and society.
Source: www.americanthinker.com ā https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/the-crime-in-criminal-law/