The amount of people bending over backwards to defend Lindsey Clancy is mind-blowing to me.

Three children are dead. That should remain at the center of every conversation surrounding this case.

Instead, much of the public discussion has shifted toward sympathy for Clancy, her mental health, the medications she was prescribed and what she may or may not have understood at the time. Those are legitimate issues for a courtroom to examine. Mental illness is real. Postpartum psychiatric conditions can be devastating. And if medication or severe mental illness affected her state of mind, that evidence deserves to be heard.

But somewhere along the way, it feels like the three children have become secondary characters in their own tragedy.

That bothers me. There is an important distinction between explaining someone’s behavior and excusing its consequences.

We can have compassion for people suffering from severe mental illness without forgetting the victims. We can question whether someone was legally responsible for their actions without turning that person into the primary victim of the story. Those ideas can exist at the same time.

This case has also exposed something uncomfortable about the way we discuss tragedy. Once people identify with one side, they sometimes begin defending that position as if they’re rooting for a sports team. Every piece of evidence becomes something to explain away. Every criticism becomes an attack. The conversation stops being about what happened and starts being about protecting the person they’ve decided deserves their sympathy.

But three children don’t get to tell their side. They don’t get interviews. They don’t get supporters explaining what they experienced. They don’t get another chance at life.

That’s why I struggle when the overwhelming emotional energy surrounding this case seems directed toward the adult accused of taking their lives.

This doesn’t mean Clancy should be convicted simply because the outcome was horrific. That’s not how our justice system works. Prosecutors still have to prove the charges, and the defense has every right to challenge the state’s evidence and present evidence concerning her mental condition.

A mistrial isn’t a conviction, and it isn’t an acquittal either. The legal process still has to play itself out.

But the public conversation is different from the legal standard. We should be capable of discussing mental illness seriously while still saying something very simple: Three innocent children died, and they deserve to remain the heart of this story.

Compassion doesn’t have to be a limited resource. Feeling sympathy for someone experiencing severe psychiatric illness doesn’t require us to minimize the lives that were lost. And accountability doesn’t require us to pretend mental illness doesn’t exist.

The challenge is holding both truths at once.

For me, however, the starting point will always be the children.

Before debating medications, diagnoses, legal strategies or which side performed better in court, remember who can never walk out of that courtroom.

Three children are gone.

Whatever ultimately happens to Lindsey Clancy, their lives should never become a footnote in the discussion about hers.