Clancy Trial Day 18: Jury Nears Verdict in Three Children's Deaths

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy entered its 18th day Friday in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Testimony continued, and the jury is expected to begin deliberations once the evidence closes. Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, faces three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. The children died in January 2023 at the family home in Duxbury, south of Boston. This week's testimony sharpened the issue the jury will decide: whether postpartum psychosis left Clancy unable to tell right from wrong.

Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Massachusetts does not apply a simple right-and-wrong test. The controlling standard, from the Supreme Judicial Court's 1968 decision in Commonwealth v. McHoul, asks whether a mental disease or defect left the defendant without substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the law. Once the defense raises the issue, the prosecution must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.

The defense's presentation has rested on one central witness: a clinical psychologist who spent about 20 hours with Clancy and concluded she was in the middle of a postpartum psychotic episode when her children died. The psychologist described a woman whose thinking had collapsed into delusion, a state so disconnected from the events around her that she could not form the deliberate intent the murder statute requires. Under cross-examination, the psychologist conceded that once Clancy was medicated and stabilized, she could describe what she had done and expressed remorse. The prosecution has used that concession to argue that Clancy understood her actions at the time.

Prosecutors have built their case on planning. The state says that in the weeks before the children died, Clancy searched online for life insurance policies on the children and asked whether children feel pain during strangulation. She waited until her husband left the house; Patrick Clancy, the children's father, testified he was out on an errand and came home to find the children unresponsive. Clancy was hospitalized that evening after trying to take her own life. The state's psychiatric expert, who examined her for about eight hours, diagnosed borderline personality disorder and testified she could appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct. In the state's telling, the deaths were deliberate, and the condition Clancy suffered from did not meet the insanity standard.