By Nate Raymond, Maria Alejandra Cardona and Luc Cohen
PLYMOUTH, Massachusetts, Sept 4 (Reuters) – A judge on Friday said he had no choice but to declare a mistrial after the jury deadlocked in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for the killing of her three young children at her home in 2023, a tragedy her attorney said occurred while she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Judge William Sullivan said he would hold off on formally declaring a mistrial for an hour to give Clancy’s defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, the chance to file an emergency appeal so jurors could keep deliberating.
The nearly six-week-long televised trial revived long-simmering debates about how postpartum mental health in women is treated in the U.S., and how the country’s legal system addresses cases when mothers kill their children.
No one disputed that Clancy, 36, strangled her three children to death in January 2023 with exercise bands in the basement of her home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in a failed attempt to end her own life that left her paralyzed.
Reddington throughout the trial sought to convince jurors that she should be found not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility, or reason of insanity, arguing that she was a loving mother who had been in the midst of a psychotic episode when she killed Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan on January 24, 2023.
Testimony from family members including Clancy’s now ex-husband, Patrick, detailed how she had struggled with her mental health in the preceding months following the birth of her third child, repeatedly seeking treatment from healthcare providers who prescribed her a myriad of drugs.
The trial drew comparisons to the case of Andrea Yates, a Texas woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001. After an appeals court overturned her initial murder conviction, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. Her lawyers had said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis.
Prosecutors did not dispute that Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been dealing with mental health issues. But they argued that she was able to appreciate the wrongfulness of killing her children and intentionally chose to do so anyway.
They presented testimony from a psychologist who, after examining Clancy, concluded that she had planned to commit suicide and chose to kill her children because “she was convinced that they would suffer without her.”
Prosecutors focused on evidence showing how shortly before the killings, she sent her husband out to pick up a food order and go to a pharmacy after mapping on her phone the time it would take for him to return home.
Patrick Clancy testified that his wife had been discharged from a psychiatric hospital less than two weeks earlier but showed no signs she planned to hurt herself or her kids in the days that followed. She had a “normal” demeanor when he left to pick up dinner, he said.
He spoke on the phone briefly with his wife while at the pharmacy. Upon his return, he discovered her lying on the ground in the backyard with cuts on her wrists and neck. She told him she had tried to kill herself.
He said he asked where the children were, and she said they were in the basement. After he called 911 and first responders arrived, Patrick Clancy said he ran to the basement and discovered them with exercise bands tied around their necks.
Several witnesses including Patrick Clancy testified that later, while Lindsay Clancy was at a hospital, she spoke about having heard a man’s voice tell her that if she did not act, she would lose her chance.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by David Bario, Rod Nickel and Barbara Lewis)
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