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I kept coming back to the same thing during Friday’s Rush Hour:

The children.

Three children are dead in the Lindsay Clancy case, and yet so much of the public conversation has somehow become about Lindsay Clancy.

Her mental state.

Her medications.

Her suffering.

Her wheelchair.

Whether she got enough help.

Whether she should ever return to society.

And yes, all of those things can matter in a courtroom.

This is an enormously difficult case. I said on the air that I’m glad I’m not sitting on that jury.

There is serious testimony about the medications she was taking. Dr. Marc Siegel went through the drugs involved and explained that some can, in rare cases, produce severe psychiatric effects.

I know firsthand that medications can affect people in very strange ways.

Years ago, I took Ambien.

Apparently, while under the influence of it, I sat stark naked in my living room with a bowl of cereal and started throwing the cereal into the air.

I remember none of it.

My family certainly did.

So I am not going to sit here and tell you that powerful medications cannot produce bizarre behavior in some people.

They can.

But three children are still dead.

That is the part I refuse to lose sight of.

I listened to women outside the courthouse talking about how much they sympathized with Clancy.

One talked about how she had “lost all of her babies.”

Another said she was remorseful.

Another said she did not mean to do it.

And I kept thinking:

The children lost everything.

Not temporarily.

Not until treatment works.

Everything.

Their lives ended.

That does not mean we throw away compassion.

It means compassion cannot become selective.

That same problem surfaced later in the show when we talked about Rikers Island.

A 27-year-old inmate named Clarence Woodward died there.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a statement offering condolences to Woodward’s family and promising continued work to improve the jail system.

And I understand part of that.

Rikers has been a disgrace for decades.

I have seen footage from jails around this country that would make you sick.

People packed into filthy rooms.

Mold.

Rust.

Men sleeping on floors.

Dozens of people sharing a toilet.

You can believe criminals should be punished and still believe America should not keep human beings in medieval conditions.

Those ideas are not contradictory.

But Woodward had also been charged in an unprovoked meat-cleaver killing at a Bronx laundromat.

He had 27 prior arrests and had reportedly been paroled about a month before that alleged murder.

So when the mayor speaks publicly about his death, why not also mention the people allegedly harmed by him?

Why not acknowledge that family too?

That is what bothered me.

You can care about what happens to people in jail without erasing why some of them are there.

You can believe someone suffering from severe mental illness deserves treatment without forgetting the people harmed during that illness.

You can believe in mercy without pretending accountability is cruelty.

Somewhere along the way, parts of our culture began treating compassion as though it has only one direction.

The accused gets context.

The criminal gets a backstory.

The inmate gets a statement.

The victim gets a sentence near the bottom.

That is backwards.

And none of this requires us to become bloodthirsty.

In fact, I said the opposite on the show.

If a man dies in custody, investigate it.

If jail conditions are inhumane, fix them.

If medication played a role in a horrific crime, examine it honestly.

If someone is mentally ill, treat the illness seriously.

But please stop telling me that recognizing victims somehow interferes with compassion.

It does not.

The most basic moral responsibility we have is to remember who suffered.

In the Clancy case, three little children suffered.

In the Rikers story, there is an alleged murder victim and a grieving family whose pain did not begin when an inmate died.

Justice has to be capable of holding more than one thought at a time.

We can be humane.

We can ask difficult questions.

We can demand better prisons.

We can take mental illness seriously.

And we can still say:

Do not forget the victims.

Because lately, it seems like somebody has to.

— Bo Snerdley

Rush Hour airs Monday through Friday and moves quickly through the day’s hottest political stories, breaking developments and media absurdities. It is the fastest hour in American media because there is always more happening than the legacy media has time—or desire—to explain.

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