The Lindsay Clancy murder trial is about as far removed from an ordinary Utah divorce case as one can imagine. Clancy admitted killing her three young children in Massachusetts in 2023. The central issue at her 2026 trial was not whether she killed them, but whether severe mental illness rendered her legally not criminally responsible when she did it. Prosecutors argued that the killings were deliberate and planned. The defense argued that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and lacked criminal responsibility. After nearly six weeks of trial and seven days of deliberations, the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial on September 4, 2026.
What could such an extraordinary criminal case possibly teach us about Utah family law?
Quite a bit, if we focus not on the killings themselves but on one deceptively simple question: Who gets the benefit of unresolved doubt?
“Benefit of the Doubt” Is Not Necessarily Favoritism
In casual conversation, saying that someone received “the benefit of the doubt” often suggests indulgence. We might say that a judge gave a sympathetic defendant the benefit of the doubt, or that a court seemed inclined to believe a mother rather than a father.
That is not what a burden of proof means.
Massachusetts law placed the burden on the Commonwealth to prove Clancy’s criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt once that issue was properly raised. The Massachusetts model homicide instruction is explicit: the prosecution bears that burden, and the defendant has no burden to prove that she lacked criminal responsibility.
That means if the jury genuinely remained in reasonable doubt about Clancy’s criminal responsibility, the law told the jurors what to do with that uncertainty. They were not supposed to ask which outcome felt safer, which outcome better honored the victims, or which mistake they could more comfortably live with. The burden of proof allocated the consequence of unresolved doubt.
Utah family law uses a much lower standard, of course. Nobody should confuse proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a murder case with proof by a preponderance of the evidence in a child custody dispute. But the underlying function of the burden is the same: when uncertainty remains, the burden tells the decision-maker who bears its consequences.
Utah Has Already Decided How the Risk of Uncertainty Is Allocated
Utah Code § 81-9-204(2) provides that whether a custody or parent-time order is in a child’s best interest is determined by a preponderance of the evidence. The standard asks whether the relevant proposition is more likely true than not.
The Legislature went further. Section 81-9-204(11) provides that, absent a showing by a preponderance of the evidence of real harm or substantiated potential harm to the child, frequent, meaningful, and continuing access to each parent is presumed to be in the child’s best interest.
That provision matters enormously in child custody disputes because it answers a question courts sometimes try to answer through instinct instead: What should happen when serious allegations have been made but the evidence does not establish the alleged danger?
The statute does not say, “When uncertain, restrict parent-time until the accused parent proves there is nothing to worry about.” It puts the relevant burden where the Legislature put it.
That does not mean a court needs certainty before imposing restrictions. A preponderance is not a high standard. Fifty-one beats forty-nine. But fifty does not beat fifty, and “I cannot tell” is not another way of saying “more likely than not.”
Protective Orders Show Why Procedural Stage Matters
Protective-order law demonstrates that Utah understands the difference between precaution and adjudication.
Utah Code § 78B-7-603 allows a court to issue an ex parte cohabitant abuse protective order without notice when it appears from the petition that domestic violence or abuse has occurred or that there is a substantial likelihood it will occur. That is intentional. When someone may be in immediate danger, the Legislature does not require a full adversarial trial before allowing temporary protection.
But the statute also separately contemplates a protective order entered upon notice and after a hearing. That distinction matters. An emergency mechanism cannot sensibly become a permanent method of adjudication. “We do not yet know, so we will protect first and hear evidence promptly” is fundamentally different from “we heard the evidence, still do not know, and therefore will find against the respondent anyway.”
The first can be exactly what an emergency legal system is designed to do. The second risks turning uncertainty itself into proof.
The Clancy Case Also Warns Us About Narrative
The Clancy trial presented two enormously powerful narratives. The prosecution saw planning, deliberate actions, and consciousness of wrongdoing. The defense saw a previously loving mother overtaken by profound psychiatric illness. Expert witnesses disagreed about what her mental state meant legally.
That is another lesson for family court. Litigation naturally reduces complicated events to competing stories: protective parent versus abusive parent, frightened child versus manipulated child, concerned parent versus alienating parent, dangerous parent versus falsely accused parent.
But deciding which story sounds better is not necessarily fact-finding.
The relevant question is which specific factual propositions the evidence proves under the applicable burden. One party’s explanation may be unconvincing without the other party’s explanation necessarily being true. There may be another explanation neither side has identified completely.
This is particularly important when credibility becomes shorthand for proof. A court can reasonably conclude that a father gave evasive testimony without logically following that every accusation against him therefore occurred. Likewise, a mother’s visible distress may be completely genuine without proving that her interpretation of an ambiguous event is accurate.
Utah appellate law requires findings detailed enough to disclose the evidentiary and analytical steps leading to the ultimate conclusion. Shuman v. Shuman, 2017 UT App 192, ¶¶ 5–7. That requirement helps guard against replacing analysis with an impression that one party simply “seemed more credible.”
Does Clancy Show That Women Get the Benefit of the Doubt?
It would be tempting—especially for people who believe family courts systematically favor mothers—to look at the extraordinary sympathy generated around Clancy and say, “There it is. Even a mother who killed three children gets the benefit of the doubt.” The Lindsay Clancy case does not prove that.
What it does show is that gendered expectations can influence the narratives people find intuitively plausible. Cornell professor Jessica Salerno, who studies juror decision-making, explained during the trial that Clancy’s identity as a woman and mother could cut both ways. Jurors might have greater difficulty imagining a mother killing her children unless she were profoundly mentally ill. But those same expectations of maternal nurturance could cause people to judge a mother who kills her children especially harshly.
That is the more useful lesson for Utah family court.
We all carry templates about mothers and fathers. A distraught mother may fit our image of a protective parent frightened for her children. An angry father may fit a familiar image of danger or intimidation. In another case, an emotional mother may be viewed as unstable while a controlled father is perceived as rational. The same behavior can be interpreted differently depending upon the story we already expect to see.
Judges and commissioners are no more immune from ordinary human cognition than jurors are. The answer is not to accuse judicial officers of bias whenever we dislike a ruling. It is to insist upon legal disciplines designed to reduce the effects of intuition: identify the allegation, identify who bears the burden, identify the evidence supporting it, consider reasonable competing explanations, and make the finding the evidence actually permits.
The Hardest Cases Are Why We Have Burdens of Proof
The Clancy case is horrifying precisely because either possible legal error carries tremendous moral weight. If Clancy was criminally responsible, wrongly excusing her would be a grave injustice. If she was legally not criminally responsible because of severe mental disease, convicting her of deliberate murder would also be a grave error.
Yet Massachusetts did not solve that dilemma by instructing the jury to choose whichever possible mistake seemed less frightening. It assigned a burden of proof.
That is exactly when burdens matter.
The same principle operates, at a different standard and with different stakes, in Utah family law. A court faced with credible evidence that a child is in danger should not hesitate to act when the governing legal standard is satisfied. Protective orders and restrictions on custody or parent-time exist because real abuse exists, and failing to protect children can have devastating consequences.
But there is another possible error. A court can wrongly brand an innocent parent dangerous, impose supervision or minimal parent-time, and separate a child from a safe and loving parent for months while everyone waits for “more information.” Those months do not come back. The damage to the parent child relationship is done.
The law cannot eliminate either risk. What it can do—and does—is determine how disputed facts are to be proved.
That leads to an idea that sounds paradoxical but is not: giving someone the benefit of unresolved doubt is not necessarily favoritism. Sometimes it is simply what the burden of proof requires.
The more emotionally intolerable one possible error feels, the greater the temptation to change the burden without admitting that we are doing so. The Clancy trial is an extreme reminder of why courts must resist that temptation.
Utah family courts should protect children from dangers that the evidence establishes. They should protect victims when the legal grounds for a protective order are established. They should restrict parent-time when the evidence and governing law justify restriction.
But neither motherhood, fatherhood, sympathy, fear, nor “erring on the side of caution” can answer the question the burden of proof exists to answer.
When the evidence remains genuinely uncertain, the law—not our discomfort with uncertainty—must decide who bears that uncertainty.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277