The Selective Compassion Racket |
A Massachusetts jury is deciding this week whether a mother who strangled her three children with resistance bands belongs in a psychiatric hospital instead of a prison cell. Last week, a Texas judge decided a teenager already convicted of stabbing a classmate at a track meet would not get a second trial. In Manhattan, a self-styled folk hero who shot a father of two in the back just watched his legal defense fund cross $1.5 million, just days after admitting in federal court that he did it. Three killers. Millions raised for some. Sympathetic op-eds for the rest. A country of strangers who never met the victims and don't seem to have lost much sleep over it.
I've spent a career managing other people's money and testifying in courtrooms as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, which means acting in someone else's interest instead of your own feelings about them. That job taught me something simple: a society only works when its members can tell right from wrong without waiting for the killer's backstory. What I'm watching here isn't compassion. It's a country that's lost the habit of making that call on its own, so it outsources the judgment to whichever narrative flatters its politics.
None of these cases is a whodunit. Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty this month to stalking and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson at point-blank range. Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out on an errand, then strangled her own three children with exercise bands, one at a time, before her defense rested on postpartum psychosis. That sequence doesn't describe a mind that slipped its moorings.........