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. It describes careful planning. Karmelo Anthony admitted to police that he stabbed 17-year-old Austin Metcalf to death at a Frisco track meet and got 35 years, a verdict his lawyers are now appealing. Guilt was never in serious question, and the support poured in anyway: Mangione's GiveSendGo campaign has raised more than $1.5 million from over 40,000 donors, and Anthony's family collected more than $600,000 before the platform pulled the page, only for a replacement fund to appear under his mother's name within hours. These aren't legal defense funds the way most people picture them. They're crowdsourced folk-hero campaigns, built on the idea that the killer's grievance matters more than the victim.
Each case draws its sympathy from a different well, and that's the tell. Mangione's fans call it a protest against the health insurance industry. Clancy's supporters point to postpartum psychosis. Anthony's defenders see a racially charged prosecution. Every grievance is real as a social problem. None answers the question a jury actually has to decide: is this person criminally responsible for this death? A society with its moral footing intact can hold two thoughts at once: a grievance can be real, and it still doesn't excuse the person who acted on it. Ours increasingly can't.
That reflex isn't new, and it doesn't run only in the direction conservatives find comfortable. When Tyler Robinson allegedly shot Charlie Kirk from a rooftop at Utah Valley University, prosecutors say text messages to his transgender partner spelled out the motive: he'd "had enough of his hatred." GoFundMe pulled attempted fundraisers for Robinson's defense within hours, while more than two dozen people were fired or placed on leave for celebrating online that a father of two had just been shot in the neck. The same reflex that excuses Mangione excused, for a moment, a bullet fired into a man's neck over a disagreement about biology.
Euripides wrote Medea to test this trade-off 2,500 years ago. Jason betrays her, the audience feels the injustice, and then Medea murders her own children to punish him. The play never lets her grievance erase the horror of the act. Her suffering is real. It's not a blank check. A playwright understood back then that confusing an explanation for an acquittal is how a society loses its footing. Modern America seems to have skipped that class.
Mental illness isn't a talking point, and I don't think everyone writing a check to Clancy's defense is cheering for dead children. Postpartum psychosis is documented and devastating, and if a jury finds it robbed her of the capacity to know right from wrong, that's what an insanity defense exists to determine. But the prosecution's rebuttal psychiatrist testified Clancy showed no psychosis and understood right from wrong throughout. A woman capable of sending her husband on an errand before she acts is capable of planning. My quarrel is with a public that decided the verdict in advance, then treats the actual verdict as an inconvenience to be crowdfunded around.
That selective compassion cuts one direction until it's inconvenient, then it cuts the other way, too. Imagine strangers raising $600,000 for a white teenager who stabbed a black classmate, or the same explanations offered in advance for whoever someday aims a rifle at a progressive activist. Thompson was a husband and father before he became a symbol of a broken system. Metcalf was 17 before a hashtag about race. Kirk was 31, married with two children, before a referendum on somebody else's politics. None of the dead get a vote in how their killers get rebranded.
I went through Marine Corps officer candidate school in 1988, and the lesson that's stuck for four decades isn't tactics. The mission doesn't care how you feel about it. You do the job because it's the job, not because someone finds your excuses sympathetic. A jury's task is to weigh what a person did against what the law allows as a defense, and rule accordingly, regardless of how well the GoFundMe copy reads. If we want a country where the law still means something, we could start by refusing to fund its erosion one donation at a time.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPenn, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.