Jury Weighs Insanity Defense in Clancy Child Killings

A Massachusetts jury is deliberating whether Lindsay Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse who admits killing her three young children in 2023, is criminally responsible for their deaths.

Clancy is charged with three counts of first-degree murder at Plymouth Superior Court. Neither side disputes that she strangled the children at the family's Massachusetts home.

Her lawyer argues she was suffering postpartum psychosis and could not tell right from wrong. Prosecutors say she planned the killings and knew exactly what she was doing.

The jury of nine women and three men began deliberating last week and returned to the jury room Monday. The Boston Globe reports they have deliberated more than 10 hours over two days.

The Five Options

The BBC reports jurors have five verdicts available: not guilty, not guilty by reason of insanity, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter.

First-degree murder — an intentional, premeditated killing — carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole in Massachusetts. Jurors would have to find extreme atrocity or extreme cruelty, and that prosecutors had proven there were no mitigating factors, including mental disease or defect.

Second-degree murder covers unlawful killings committed with malice or extreme recklessness but without prior planning. It also carries a life sentence, but with the possibility of parole.

Manslaughter — causing death by an unintentional, mistaken or neglectful act — carries a maximum of 20 years per count. The judge added that option over what had been a point of contention between the two sides.

A not guilty verdict would send Clancy free; a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity would result in her being detained at a hospital.

Criminal defense lawyer Elyse Hershon told the BBC that under Massachusetts law Clancy carries no burden to prove her mental illness. Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible — either that she had no mental illness at the time, or that she had one but still controlled her actions and knew they were wrong.

"The case really comes down to where she is going to serve the rest of her life; the defence thinks it should be a psychiatric facility, the prosecution thinks it should be in a state prison," Hershon said.

What the Jury Heard

Patrick Clancy, now her former husband, was the first witness. Jurors listened to his 911 call: he speaks with his wife, tells the dispatcher he is going to check on the children, then howls and cries. "She killed the kids!" he yells.

Clancy's mother, mother-in-law, sister, friends and co-workers testified she struggled with her mental health after giving birth to Callan, the youngest of the three children.

Her mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, also a labor and delivery nurse, called her a wonderful mother but said she had become anxious, paranoid and suicidal, and that psychiatric care wasn't helping. "She felt unwell. She had insomnia. She was losing her appetite. She was very anxious and sad," she testified. "She was begging for help."

Musgrove testified her daughter was scared of sleeping alone, became paranoid and believed her medications "were destroying her mind."

Defense lawyer Kevin Reddington argued Clancy was misdiagnosed and overmedicated, and pressed psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts over her prescribing decisions and her use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy, at one point implying she was a box-checking "robot." Tufts testified she told Clancy "that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs."

Clinical and forensic psychologist Paul Zeizel, who saw Clancy in the hospital after the killings, testified he overheard her say a disembodied male voice told her she had no choice but to kill her children and then herself. He said he believed she was not responsible for her actions.

Prosecutors countered with forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who said he did not believe Clancy hallucinated voices. He testified she told him that while strangling each child she said, "Go to God, baby. Go to God" — part of an expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a senior psychiatrist for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, testified Clancy "had the capacity to know right from wrong."