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Lindsay Clancy deserves to spend her life in prison. She strangled her three children, one after another. She knew what she was doing and knew it was wrong. She did it anyway. She is a murderer and should be treated as one.

Of course she was mentally ill. So what? Many -- maybe most -- people who commit heinous crimes are not mentally healthy. If mental illness were an excuse for committing crimes, we could empty out the prisons and put some of the most dangerous people in the world back on the streets.

That is not the test. Mental illness is not an excuse for criminality. The prosecution did not pretend that Lindsay Clancy was mentally healthy. She wasn't. But the evidence was clear that she understood what she was doing, knew the difference between right and wrong and was capable of controlling her conduct. Under Massachusetts law, that is enough for criminal responsibility.

The majority of the jury was ready to acquit her. Apparently, they felt sorry for her. Perhaps they bought her story that voices were telling her to kill her children. Hogwash. As the prosecution expert forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun testified, she wasn't acutely psychotic; he did not believe her account that a voice told her to kill the children. Dr. Gregory Saathoff also found aspects of Clancy's voice excuse clinically unusual, to say the least, undermining her claim that the voice allegedly appeared that evening, persisted through the killings and then abruptly disappeared. Not credible. Dr. Heilbrun characterized her motive as an extended-suicide rationale -- she intended to die and killed the children so they would not be left to suffer. In my book, that's murder.

Clancy planned the murders. She arranged for her husband to leave the house, asked him to pick up food and medication, and calculated how long he would be away so she would have time to kill her children and herself. That sequence of events demonstrated planning and awareness, not psychosis. It made clear that she knew what she was doing. How could she not know it was wrong?

Does Clancy need treatment? Sure. But so do lots of people who suffer from serious mental illness and don't commit murder and try to get away with it. I'm all for treating serious mental illness, but I wouldn't begin with a murderer. Murderers deserve punishment, not state-funded treatment.

Maybe it's just me. I'm a mother. I suffer from depression. But I simply cannot fathom a mother who would strangle her three children, one by one, after assuring that their father, who could have protected them, was out of the house. There is simply no excuse that can justify such horror. And the message that is sent by letting her off the hook is too horrible to contemplate.

Both Clancy and her former husband, Patrick Clancy, filed civil lawsuits against her former healthcare providers, alleging that medical malpractice and negligence had contributed to the deaths of their children. A strong case can be made that the medical system failed the Clancy family. Clancy did not get the help she needed. She obviously should have been hospitalized, and her children protected from her. If any good is to come from this horror show, it is the recognition of the need for better mental health treatment for those in desperate need of it. But that doesn't negate the rule of responsibility. Mental illness does not negate criminal responsibility. Clancy is a murderer. She should spend the rest of her life in prison.

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To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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