The Lindsay Clancy trial — a harrowing Massachusetts case involving family tragedy, murder charges and claims of postpartum psychosis — has unfolded in court over the past six and a half weeks, drawing intense attention far beyond the state.
Clancy, who once spent summer vacations on Cape Cod with her husband and their three small children, has spent much of July and August before a jury. She is on trial for the first-degree murders of her five-year-old daughter Cora, her three-year-old son Dawson and her eight-month-old son Callan.
A conviction would carry the most severe penalty available in the case: life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Her defense team has not contested that the former labor and delivery nurse killed the children. Instead, they argue she should not be found criminally responsible because she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis at the time.
Yet as observers focus on whether jurors will return a guilty or not guilty verdict, several legal experts who spoke with Our News Outlet said another outcome remains firmly on the table in the closely watched case: a mistrial.
Criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor Mark Bederow said such a result would be nothing short of a “disaster.”
Bederow told Our News Outlet: “There’s no way the Plymouth DA is going to reverse course,” adding, “They’re so dug in they almost have no choice, politically, but to dig in deeper.”
“Can you imagine a case like this being retried?” he asked. “It would be a horrible thing.”
The Lindsay Clancy trial – an unfathomable story of family, murder and alleged postpartum psychosis – has played out in a Massachusetts courtroom and held a global audience in thrall
Clancy is standing trial for the first-degree murder of her five-year-old daughter Cora, three-year-old son Dawson and eight-month-old son Callan
Clancy had sent her then-husband Patrick out to pick up dinner and when he returned to their coastal Duxbury home, he discovered that his wife had strangled their three children
If convicted, she faces life in prison without the possibility of parole
Dozens of witnesses have testified to the horror that met Clancy’s then-husband, Patrick, on January 24, 2023. Clancy had sent him out to pick up dinner and when he returned to their coastal Duxbury home, he discovered that his wife had strangled their three children with exercise resistance bands.
She then slit her wrists and neck and jumped from a window on the top floor of the house.
Now paralyzed from the waist down and wheelchair bound as a result, the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse has cast a pitiful figure at the defendant’s table.
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent and law enforcement expert, is also fearful that it could come down to a hung jury. He said he sensed that there will be one or two jurors who may hold out to hang the jury, which would force the state to try the case again.
‘The prosecution was better today and it will resonate in juror’s minds,’ Gagliano tweeted after both sides finished their closing arguments on Thursday.
‘The last thing the jury takes away (closing arguments today) might very well be what makes the case. Still fear a hung jury. But now feel conviction on a lesser charge than Murder One (at the very least) will be the order of the day. Time will tell.’
The Plymouth District Attorney’s office has asked the jury not to view the trial as a public debate on maternal health. But former judge Carol Erskine told Our News Outlet that would be hard to avoid.
Witness after witness told the court that they knew Clancy had suicidal thoughts and called a crisis hotline more than once, and still, could not admit her for hospitalization because there was no suicide plan in place.
‘I’ve seen suicides in my courtrooms,’ Erskine said. ‘Not one case that I ever saw was anything other than impulsive. The notion that there has to be a plan in Massachusetts in order to get the degree of help you need is outrageous and needs to change.’
The fact that this is a case that came to trial at all is a source of outrage to some. But Bederow told Our News Outlet that it was one prosecutors had no choice but to bring, however difficult. Yet, while he defended the decision to prosecute, he had harsh words for the way in which the case has been argued.
‘This is a very clunky, choppy, disjointed case put together by a prosecution team who just doesn’t seem to appreciate the intricacies and nuances of these kinds of cases.’
Bederow, who has represented clients struggling with mental health, said it has been ‘shocking’ to watch prosecutors portray Clancy as a ‘selfish’ mother who ‘calculated’ the murder of her children and faked her own suicide.
He described the prosecution’s approach to mental health as ‘very antiquated,’ expecting a defendant who is claiming an insanity defense to be ‘standing in a corner, staring at the wall, rocking back and forth, talking nonsense.’
In Massachusetts, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution when a defendant makes an insanity defense, meaning the defendant only has to prove they were insane at the time of the killing. Meanwhile, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant could not conform her actions to the tenets of the law.
Her lawyers and her ex-husband, who has now remarried and says he has forgiven her, claim that her actions were contaminated by more than a dozen medications that she had been prescribed for her worsening psychiatric condition and suicidal thoughts. Clancy is suing her medical providers for failing to properly diagnose and treat her.
The heart-wrenching trial, which is being televised, has seen a swell in public interest, and Clancy has garnered support both online and in-person.
The case, which has renewed criticisms over how the mental health system treats women, has not only sparked conspiracy theories on social media, but drawn hundreds of women to Plymouth, where they have stood outside the courthouse in pink clothing, protested at the state hospital where Clancy is being held and raised more than $1 million for family through a GoFundMe.
Clancy has also received support from Russell ‘Rusty’ Yates, the ex-husband of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001. After being convicted of five counts of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison, Andrea’s verdict was overturned and she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
‘If someone driving a car lost control because of a sudden heart attack and the car ran over and killed a pedestrian would you convict the driver of murder?’ asked Yates’s attorney, Wendell Odom, Jr, who wrote on the subject for Our News Outlet. ‘The answer is obvious.’
For his part, Bederow said he’ll ‘never understand’ why prosecutors didn’t try to get ahead of Clancy’s mental health struggles by acknowledging them – a move that could have helped them gain credibility and trust with the jury.
Instead, he said, the DA’s office likely ‘pissed off’ jurors with their ‘wooden’ treatment of Clancy’s ex-husband Patrick and their ‘inappropriate’ ‘stunt’ of asking Clancy’s former mother-in-law Susan about whether her Catholic faith led her to consider murder as ‘a mortal sin.’
‘That’s a dog whistle for the jury,’ Bederow said of the Catholicism question. ‘I can’t fathom that was an accident.’
On Monday, religion was raised again by a state witness, prompting the defense to move for a mistrial.
Judge William Sullivan denied the motion but instructed the jury to disregard the statement from the prosecution’s psychologist, who testified that he had asked Clancy if she knew suicide was a ‘mortal sin.’
‘Raising Catholicism or religion is a violation under Massachusetts General Rules of Evidence,’ Erskine said. ‘It’s expressly barred.’
The heart wrenching trial, which is being livestreamed, has seen a swell in public interest, and Clancy has garnered support both online and in-person
Her lawyers claim that her actions were contaminated by more than a dozen medications that she had been prescribed for her worsening psychiatric condition and suicidal thoughts
The case has renewed criticisms over how the mental health system treats women and has drawn hundreds of women to Plymouth, where they have stood outside the courthouse in pink clothing
Clancy has also received support from Russell ‘Rusty’ Yates, the ex-husband of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001
She called the question that was asked of Susan, ‘one of the most egregious mistakes I’ve ever seen by a prosecutor.’ Although the DA’s office called it an accident, the retired Massachusetts judge said it seemed ‘intentional’ because it would be shocking for a prosecutor not to know that rule.
When Erskine first learned that the case was going to trial and that Clancy was being charged with first-degree murder, she wasn’t surprised. But she noted that those charges came ‘very quickly,’ before there was any investigation into Clancy’s mental health issues.
‘The issue of criminal responsibility is something the Commonwealth may have underestimated,’ Erskine said.
For her part, Erskine said: ‘There’s really no way to assume that a juror is thinking one way or another, and in particular by any facial expressions or anything else that you can see.
‘I never ascribe to the believe that anybody can read what a juror is thinking based on watching them, taking notes or changing their facial expressions.’
‘As a judge, my job was to oversee the trial and make sure that it proceeded fairly and that the rights of the defendants were protected. But beyond that, my philosophy has always been that it’s up to 12 people to make that decision.’
