When I started reading about the Lindsay Clancy case, I thought there was almost no way she could prevail on an insanity defense. I couldn’t see how a mother could methodically kill three children and then persuade a jury that she didn’t understand what she was doing.
She arranged for her husband to leave the house. She then strangled the kids with an exercise band in the basement of her home. And then she tried to kill herself. She had carried out a sequence of actions that, on the surface, looked deliberate and purposeful.
My first reaction was the one I suspect many people had: How could someone do all of that and NOT understand what she was doing?
And I have covered many similar cases involving complex psychiatric defenses. Take, for example, the Renato Seabra case in New York or the recent high-profile case involving Nick Reiner, the son of Hollywood icon Rob Reiner.
After testimony and evidence presented at the five-weeks long trial, I now actually believe there is a very compelling case that she is NOT criminally responsible.
That does not mean I know what happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind on January 24, 2023, but I no longer think the answer is obvious.
The Question Isn’t Whether She Killed Her Children
There is remarkably little dispute about the central physical fact of this case. Lindsay Clancy killed her three children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan.
Her defense has never been, I didn’t do it, so the question before the jury is much more difficult: Was she ‘criminally responsible’ for what she did?
Unlike states like New York and California - which strictly follow variations of the 1843 English M’Naghten Rule focusing solely on whether a defendant knew right from wrong -, Massachusetts applies a broader standard. Under Commonwealth law, jurors evaluate not only whether mental disease left a defendant unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct, but also whether it left her completely unable to control her actions.
Another particularity of Massachusetts is that the burden rests on prosecutors to prove ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ that a defendant was sane, rather than forcing the defense to prove insanity.
So this is not a simple horrific story about a mother who killed her children, but rather a profoundly complicated story about the human mind and the limits of legal accountability.
I came into this case thinking Clancy’s organization was the problem. How could someone experiencing psychosis plan? How could she send her husband out? How could she communicate normally? How could she care for her children? How could she execute a sequence of actions and then attempt suicide?
And obviously, the prosecution has leaned heavily into those questions. They did not contest that Lindsay Clancy was deeply depressed, suicidal, and overwhelmed, but their core theory throughout the trial has been that depression is not psychosis.
The prosecution’s argument is essentially that she remained capable of understanding and controlling her actions. During the trial, the state attorneys contend that she made a deliberate choice to kill her children while her husband was away and actively questioned the nature of her subsequent jump from a second-story window (which left her paralyzed and in a wheelchair) - arguing that her hesitation and self-inflicted injuries (superficially cutting her wrists and neck) showed self-preservation, rather than an unguided psychotic murder-suicide.
There are also serious questions surrounding Clancy’s account of a male voice commanding her to kill the children. Prosecutors and their experts challenged the credibility and timing of that account, including the fact that there was no earlier medical documentation of such a voice.
No doubt that those are problems for the defense, but the psychiatric evidence is quite significant - something that was absent in the Seabra case, for instance.
The Paper Trail of Medication: In the three months leading up to the tragedy, Clancy was prescribed a cocktail of at least 13 different psychiatric medications, including sedatives, anti-anxiety drugs, and antidepressants. Defense experts argued that this aggressive cycling caused severe akathisia (an uncontrollable inner restlessness), depersonalization (a profound detachment from body and mind), and heightened psychotic risk.
The Clinical Diagnosis: Multiple psychiatric experts retained by the defense concluded she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis with delusional thinking - a rare condition affecting roughly 1 to 2 per 1,000 postpartum American women, where a mother loses total contact with reality. Though prosecution experts strongly disagreed.
The Absence of Prior Malice: Before committing the killings on January 24, 2023, there was no documented history of abuse, neglect, or hostility toward her children. Friends, family, and healthcare colleagues consistently described her as a devoted, loving mother whose journals reflected a desperate struggle to find help for her deteriorating state.
Defining Psychosis
And there is something else that I want you to consider: psychosis does not necessarily look like psychosis.
We tend to imagine psychosis as obvious: someone who is incoherent, hallucinating openly, someone who cannot hold a conversation and looks completely disconnected from reality. But, according to experts, that is not necessarily what psychosis looks like. A person experiencing psychosis can sometimes appear organized such as communicate, perform familiar tasks, make plans. They can even behave in ways that look rational, because they are behaving rationally inside a reality that has become profoundly distorted.
The fact that Lindsay Clancy was capable of organizing her actions - like checking delivery times or sending her husband out for food - does not, by itself, answer the question of whether she understood the reality or wrongfulness of those actions. While it shows that she was capable of organizing behavior, it does not necessarily tell us what was happening in her mind.
Then There Was Patrick
For me, Lindsay’s now former husband, Patrick Clancy, was one of the most consequential testimonies of this trial. He knew the defendant probably better than anyone else.
His testimony did not paint a picture of a marriage collapsing under resentment, hostility or hatred - a pattern in so many domestic homicide cases we have seen before. Patrick painted a picture of a family struggling with a woman whose mental health was deteriorating. He described a loving mother who was deeply involved in the lives of her children. He knew she was struggling, about the suicidal thoughts, and he even knew about disturbing thoughts involving the children. Patrick understood those thoughts as something she was horrified by, but not as an intention to act on them.
In the months leading up to the tragedy, Lindsay had sought psychiatric treatment, voluntarily checking herself into McLean Hospital, one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the U.S..
And when she returned home after being discharged from the hospital, less than three weeks before the killings, Patrick believed she was getting better.
And while Patrick testified for the prosecution, just days after the tragedy three years ago, he had released a widely publicized statement asking the public to forgive her, framing her actions as the result of a severe, uncontrollable illness rather than a conscious crime.
The Evidence the Jury has Asked for So Far
On the second day of deliberations, the jury asked to see two pieces of evidence that had not initially been sent into the jury room after they began deliberating last week: the knife used in Clancy’s suicide attempt and bags containing prescription medication bottles.
It is said in popular legal culture in the U.S. that reading the jurors’ notes during deliberations is like trying to read tea leaves, and I personally always need to force myself to pause before trying to interpret what’s going on in jurors’ minds.
However, it is interesting that the two categories of evidence sit at the center of the case. While the knife points to the sequence of the killings and the suicide attempt, the medication speaks to the months of psychiatric treatment and the question of what was happening to Clancy’s mental state before the deaths.
During closing arguments, the defense emphasized the medication history and questioned whether Clancy’s psychiatric treatment had actually helped her, or whether the treatment itself may have contributed to her deterioration.
The judge also instructed jurors that they could consider the effects of prescription medication on Clancy’s mental state.
The jury could be simply reviewing the evidence carefully or perhaps they are trying to reconcile contradictory testimony. Perhaps the objects mean nothing beyond that. Again, tea leaves.
The Uncomfortable Lesson
We assume that a mother who loves her children could not possibly kill them. That instinct is understandable and it is also what makes postpartum psychosis so terrifying. It is also what spurred a movement, led overwhelmingly by women, that has gathered hundreds outside the courthouse to protest against a healthcare system that failed Lindsay Clancy.
A woman can love her children deeply and still, during a psychotic episode, become convinced of something that is completely incompatible with that love.
That does not make the deaths less horrific, it does not erase the suffering of Patrick Clancy or the families who lost those children, and it certainly does not mean every defendant who claims psychosis should be acquitted. In fact, it is a persistent misconception that insanity is an easy or frequent defense: juries in America rarely accept it, even in cases involving documented, severe mental illness.
Now, we wait. The 12 jurors - nine women and three men - are in their fourth day of deliberations, spending roughly 20 hours weighing five weeks of harrowing evidence and testimony from more than 80 witnesses. That nine-woman majority is not a footnote. In a trial centered on maternal distress, postpartum health, and caregiving, the human composition of this panel carries an undeniable weight, but a unanimous decision is required.
Their extended time in the room comes as no surprise because they have a lot to consider and it has now brought the trial to a critical standoff. Shortly after resuming their work this morning at Plymouth Superior Court, in Massachusetts, the jury informed the judge that they are deadlocked. But as is standard procedure when a jury reaches an early impasse, the judge declined to declare a mistrial and instead instructed them to return to work - meant to encourage jurors to re-examine their positions before any mistrial could be considered.
There are six possible outcomes from this trial: not guilty (Clancy is immediately released); not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility (committing her to a state psychiatric facility); first-degree murder (punishable by a mandatory life sentence); second-degree murder (life sentence with the possibility of parole); manslaughter (which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison); a mistrial, should the deadlock prove unbreakable, which leaves the charges active and Clancy in custody while state prosecutors decide whether to retry the case.
Lindsay Clancy: What the Jurors’ Bombshell Interview Reveals About the Holdout
I have to confess: one of my favorite parts of a major trial comes after the verdict - or, in this case, the lack of one -, it’s …
Beyond a reasonable doubt. I believe the reasonable is where emotions and logic meet because a mother killed her kids. Emotionally and logically that is not (also society wants it not to be) reasonable or logical.
But as a society we just can’t automatically allow a mother to kill her children without criminal responsibility because of res ipsa loquitur. The act of a mother killing her kids can’t be the thing that proves she is insane. As society we can’t allow that.
I look at reasonable doubt as a bouncer at a club. It decides what evidence comes in to prove quilt. All others have to stay out because that evidence is unreasonable. I also believe juries are allowed to use their common sense and life experiences as well. Just like the bouncer in letting folks in.
I think it is unreasonable for her to have told her ex she had thoughts of harming her children but didn’t until a voice told her. She told her ex she had thoughts of harming them but didn’t tell him of the voice but sent him out of the house. She didn’t argue with or fight the voice but she was able to fight the urge to kill het children up unto the voice? Why didn’t she tell her ex of the voice?
I would not allow that evidence past the bouncer at the door. It us unreasonable
What is left.
She meet with multiple mental health experts. She was medicated. Including admitting herself to McLean . She was not diagnosed with psychosis. She was depressed, suicidal but no diagnosis of psychosis from multiple health professionals and a mental institution.
This is reasonable verifiable evidence. This evidence gets past the bouncer.
Also there is a question of why didn’t Patrick tell the health professionals of her having thoughts or afraid of harming the kids?
I think it is reasonable to believe that if they had the kids would have most likely been removed from her in someway.
Also I think short of mental health professionals acquiring the abilities to read a patient’s mind, they didn’t fail her. I think this notion needs to stop.
The adults around those kids failed them not the mental health professionals failed a sane woman who killed her kids.
my understanding is while she was prescribed 13 medications she was never on more than 3-4 medications at a time — which is not to discredit the very real possibility or even likelihood she was suffering from psychosis but it does muddy the waters even more. None of us want to believe illness could make an otherwise stable and loving person kill their children because then we’d have to contend with the reality it could happen to us too. It’s a truly heartbreaking and terrifying case.