⏱ 4 min read
The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has moved into deliberations as jurors decide whether the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse is criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three children in January 2023.
Over the past five weeks, the trial, which has been called “America’s saddest murder trial” , has renewed nationwide attention on postpartum mental healthcare. Clancy’s defense maintains that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis – a condition estimated to affect around two women per 1,000 births – and therefore should not be held criminally responsible for her actions.
Prosecutors from the Plymouth county district attorney’s office, meanwhile, argue that Clancy’s actions were planned and deliberate.
Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, began closing arguments on Thursday by pointing to Clancy’s suicide attempt after strangling her three children. She cut her wrists and neck and jumped from the second story of her home, an attempt that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
“She made a very, very significant suicide effort,” Reddington said, arguing that prosecutors are downplaying the severity of Clancy’s suicide attempt. “They were arguing that it was a fake suicide. Dinky little cuts. No bleeding … You know that’s not what happened.”
Reddington went on to say that Clancy was in the “depths of despair” before killing her children. He held up a poster displaying several messages Clancy had written as she struggled with her mental health.
“There’s nothing other than little chicken scratches because her mind was gone,” Reddington, who has repeatedly argued that Clancy was overmedicated, said.
“You have the medical records. You heard the testimony. You know her concerns. You know her fears,” Reddington argued, adding: “Does this sound like a young lady that didn’t care and wanted to score more drugs off somebody? That’s another repulsive allegation.”
At one point, Reddington pointed to Clancy’s efforts to seek help, including researching support for postpartum depression, contacting a suicide hotline, visiting several providers and voluntarily admitting herself to a psychiatric hospital.
“My God, what does she have to do? She was reaching out for help and she wasn’t getting it,” he said.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued that the case is not about the “mental health system or how it treats women”, calling that focus “a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here”.
Sprague acknowledged Clancy’s mental health struggles but pointed to the resources and treatment available to her, saying: “This wasn’t a woman suffering from a lack of care, a lack of resources … She had an abundance of health, an abundance of care. She had all of that and more.”
Sprague continued: “She wanted to get better, but she wanted to get better on her own terms … And as a nurse, she knew that’s not the right way to approach it.”
She also argued that Clancy concealed thoughts about harming her children from mental health providers in December 2022 because she feared she would be separated from them.
after newsletter promotion
“That’s a rational thought,” Sprague said, adding: “It also shows you that she knew it was a bad thought, a wrong thought.”
Sprague argued that Clancy planned the killings by alleging that she sent her then husband, Patrick Clancy, to a takeout restaurant and also checked a map to calculate how long it would take him to pick up the food and return home.
“What she needed to know was how long specifically on that night it would take to get there … because she knew she would have a limited amount of time to do what she wanted to do. And what she had decided to do was to kill the children and then kill herself,” Sprague said.
She added that Clancy asked her then husband to also pick up some medication at a nearby pharmacy, saying: “She’s adding to this errand and she has to make sure she’s not interrupted.”
Sprague ended her closing argument by presenting the state’s explanation for why Clancy killed her three children: “She was depressed. She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged … But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery.”
“She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game … You know to a moral certainty she is guilty,” she added.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
Leave a Reply