A Massachusetts jury began deliberating whether a mother who strangled her three young children was criminally responsible for their deaths, a question that hinges on whether postpartum psychosis stripped her ability to tell right from wrong.
Lindsay Clancy, 36, sat in a Plymouth, Massachusetts, courtroom on Thursday as prosecutors and her defense attorney delivered closing arguments after more than four weeks of testimony. Clancy does not dispute that she killed five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan with exercise bands in the basement of the family's home in Duxbury, a coastal town south of Boston, in January 2023. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. If the jury convicts her of murder, she faces life in prison without parole. If jurors find she lacked criminal responsibility, she could still be committed to a state mental health facility.
The trial, now in its fifth week, has forced jurors to weigh two starkly different accounts of the same act, one framing Clancy as a desperate woman who made a conscious, culpable choice, the other casting her as a patient failed by her own mental healthcare providers and overtaken by psychosis she could not control.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague told jurors that Clancy was exhausted and depressed but understood that killing her children was wrong. Sprague pointed to a specific piece of evidence: in December 2022, roughly a month before the killings, Clancy had thoughts of harming her children but chose not to disclose those thoughts to any of her mental health providers. That decision, Sprague argued, showed Clancy recognized the thoughts were wrong, and concealed them deliberately.
Sprague told the jury:
"It was a choice to take them with her. It was a horrible choice. It is a choice that we don't want to think about that a mother could make, because that doesn't make us feel safe or comfortable in this world. But it's a choice she made."
The prosecution also argued that Clancy did not always take her prescribed medications or give her providers complete and accurate information in the months before the killings, undermining the defense's claim that the mental healthcare system bears responsibility for what happened.
Sprague anticipated the defense strategy and tried to cut it off. She acknowledged that Clancy sought help from multiple providers and even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. But she framed the defense's broader indictment of the mental healthcare system as a courtroom tactic, not a legal defense.
"That's a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that's not on trial here."
Clancy's family has said she was "begging for help" in the months before the killings, a claim the prosecution did not dispute in substance, only in its legal relevance.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington delivered a closing argument built around a single premise: Lindsay Clancy was in deep psychosis when she killed her children, and the mental healthcare system that was supposed to protect her instead pushed her over the edge. Reddington did not soften his language.
"Because of the d***ed medicine and the lousy medical care that she got."
Reddington told jurors that Clancy had been a devoted mother before her mental health deteriorated. He held up a copy of a book called "Good Moms have Scary Thoughts," which investigators found at the Clancy home. Reddington said a mental healthcare provider gave the book to Clancy, and then attacked the prosecution for trying to use it against her.
He also showed jurors a small "wish box" that Clancy and then-husband Patrick Clancy bought on their honeymoon. Over the years, Reddington said, the couple filled it with slips of paper wishing for healthy, successful kids.
"This woman lived for her kids."
When Patrick Clancy took the stand earlier in the trial, he described what he called his ex-wife's "big spiral", testimony that laid the groundwork for the defense's closing narrative.
Reddington traced a timeline: Clancy sought treatment from multiple providers. She started seeing a psychiatrist. After that, he told jurors, "it was not a wonderful life anymore." She checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, and was discharged less than three weeks before she killed her children.
Clancy's mother and sister both testified during the trial that she became anxious, paranoid, and suicidal in the period leading up to the killings.
Reddington pushed back hard against the prosecution's characterization of Clancy's jump from a second-floor window after the killings. The prosecution framed it one way; Reddington called that framing "a fake suicide" characterization and rejected it outright: "You know that is not what happened." Clancy remains paralyzed from the waist down.
The prosecution's rebuttal case included testimony from forensic psychologist Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, who offered a sharply different explanation for the killings. Heilbrun testified that Clancy killed her children for what he described as "altruistic" reasons, believing they would suffer without her, rather than because psychosis had destroyed her ability to distinguish right from wrong.
Heilbrun zeroed in on the defense's claim that Clancy heard a commanding male voice ordering her to kill. He noted that Clancy reported hearing the voice only once, during the approximately eighteen minutes it took to kill the three children, and never before or after.
"She heard a voice that she never heard before and she never experienced it since but she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children. That would be a very very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about."
Heilbrun went further, suggesting the voice claim served a self-interested purpose: "It provides a convenient way of lessening your culpability."
Earlier in the trial, a psychologist testified about the male voice Clancy described to her then-husband, testimony that became central to the defense's case and a focal point for prosecution rebuttal.
Clancy reportedly told her children "Go to God, baby. Go to God" as she killed them, believing she and her children would be together in Heaven, a detail the prosecution cited as evidence of deliberate, purposeful action rather than psychotic detachment from reality.
Attorney Robert Shapiro, providing legal analysis on the case, framed the jury's task in plain terms. The legal standard for Clancy's mental illness defense requires proving she did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the killings. Shapiro told Newsmax the jury faces a genuinely difficult determination.
"Did she know the difference between right and wrong at the time of these horrible human events? That's a very difficult burden to prove."
Shapiro suggested the jury may lean toward accepting the defense's postpartum psychosis claims, particularly if jurors weigh treatment against lifetime imprisonment. "I think the likelihood is that they're going to come out in favor of finding that there was a mental illness so severe that she could not form the intent to commit a murder," he said.
Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder. Fox News reported that the jury must decide both whether Clancy was criminally responsible and, if so, exactly what crimes she committed.
During closing arguments, Clancy dabbed her eyes with a tissue and put a hand to her forehead. She did not testify during the trial.
Outside the courthouse, the case has drawn intense public attention. Hundreds of supporters rallied in pink as the trial neared its final phase, a display that underscored how deeply the case has divided public opinion over maternal mental health, criminal accountability, and the adequacy of the systems meant to catch people before they fall.
Three children are dead. The woman who killed them says she was too sick to know what she was doing. The system that was supposed to help her discharged her less than three weeks before she strangled them in her own basement. Somebody failed Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. The jury's job is to decide who bears the legal responsibility, and whether a broken mental healthcare system is an explanation or an excuse.
