From a Massachusetts courtroom to a grieving mother in Japan, remembering innocent lives can be an act of defiance.

As Lindsay Clancy sat on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three small children, it looked as though her defense counsel, Kevin Reddington, had all but secured a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The burden of proof in Massachusetts for such defense strategies rests on the McHoul standard, which makes it more difficult than in other states for the prosecution to prove that someone was sane at the time a crime was committed. Not only that, but the courtroom where Clancy was being tried was often surrounded by and filled with her supporters. Everyone in Massachusetts, it seemed, was putting Lindsay Clancy at the center of the murder trial. It appeared almost certain that she would not be held accountable to the law for killing three innocents.

There was one man, though, who understood that the trial was ultimately not about Clancy, but about the people whose lives she had taken. Michael Desronvil, the so-called “holdout juror” in the Clancy trial, released a statement recently explaining why he had refused to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty. “The focus,” Desronvil said, needs to be “on the three angels,” Cora, Dawson, and Callan, “the ones that can’t speak for themselves, the ones that can’t defend themselves, and the ones that can’t fight the battles.”

Desronvil had been vilified in the press for his refusal to minimize the murder of children. His fellow jurors were among the worst of his accusers, denouncing him as “arrogant.” Another juror, stupefied, said that Desronvil “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsey viciously killed her children.” The murder of children was precisely what many in Massachusetts—a state where it is now legal for doctors to kill children as they exit the womb—wanted everyone to overlook.

Desronvil’s defiance of the culture of death in that Massachusetts courtroom was an act of moral heroism. While Lindsay Clancy’s emotional and spiritual anguish over having killed her children were apparent—I pray for her, and for everyone like her who has suffered mental torment and the horror of having taken innocent life—what Desronvil refused to do was to establish a moral equivalence between the murderer and the murdered. He refused to allow the departed “angels” to be forgotten in a wave of politically-charged media coverage. Desronvil had the courage to remember those who died, even when it would have been so much easier, for so many, to pretend that they had never even existed.

The Courage to Remember

On August 25, 2006, a vehicle carrying Onuma Kaori, her husband, and their three small children was struck by a speeding drunk driver on a bridge in the city of Fukuoka, in southern Honshu, Japan. The Onumas’ car plunged into the water some fifteen yards below. The Onumas’ two sons, Hiroaki (4) and Tomoaki (3), and daughter Saaya (1), did not come out of the water alive. Onuma Kaori, their mother, nearly died herself, of grief. Depression and PTSD addled her mind, while the memory of her lost children gnawed at her heart. She moved away from her city, unable to bear living in the place where her children had died.

Onuma went on to have four more children after the accident. But the day of the accident “never leaves my mind,” she says, twenty years later. “That is something I can’t change. I don’t think it ever will change.”

Eventually, Onuma started speaking out. She began a movement to eradicate drunk driving in Japan. She did it in memory of three children whom a drunk driver took from her that August night in 2006.

I suspect it nearly cost her everything to be able to stand up, go outside, and walk around among the living again. It was the memory of her children that kept her going, she says.

“I used to count the number of days that I had not seen them,” she explains. “Now I count the number of days until I can see them again.”

In the United States, more than sixty-five million children have been murdered in utero in the past five-plus decades. They were killed mainly because they were inconvenient to one or both of their parents. In many cases, only their mothers, and the doctors who killed them, know that they ever existed.

It would take an extraordinary act of bravery to remember those children. Even if we wish it could go away, Michael Desronvil and Onuma Kaori have shown us that it is possible to keep murdered innocents alive in our memories. Perhaps it is time that everyone who knows of a child taken from among us call them to mind, and keep them there.