A jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts, began hearing opening statements Monday in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, who prosecutors say killed her three children on Jan. 24, 2023.
Prosecutors are set to argue Clancy carefully planned the killings and bears full responsibility, while her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, will argue she was suffering from postpartum psychosis; Clancy is a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital.
In the months after the birth of her third child, Clancy’s mental health collapsed — she became manic, unable to sleep and had thoughts of harming herself, sought care from experts in postpregnancy mood disorders, was put on multiple psychiatric medications and checked into a psychiatric hospital; she was discharged 19 days before the killings, and on the day of the killings she said she heard voices telling her, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself,” according to her lawyer.
Prosecutors say Clancy strangled her children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — after sending her then-husband, Patrick, out for errands; she then jumped out of the home’s second-story window and was paralyzed from the waist down in the fall.
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole; if found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility. The trial is expected to take several weeks.
Elyse Hershon, a Boston criminal defense attorney and legal analyst, said, “Whenever there are deaths of children, it rattles emotions. Because these actions are incomprehensible and the outcome so horrific, people tend to want to hold someone responsible. Some people naturally will identify and sympathize with Clancy and her postpartum depression, and others will not be able to understand how one could end their children’s lives, and demand responsibility.”
While postpartum depression is fairly common among women who have given birth, postpartum psychosis is estimated to afflict only 1 to 2 per 1,000 women after delivery; symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, mood changes and thoughts of harming yourself or others. Nicole Cirino, the director of the division of reproductive psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, who has been an expert defense witness in infanticide cases, said, “In their own minds, ‘they may be saving their children from damnation.’”
Clancy and her former husband, Patrick Clancy, filed lawsuits accusing her medical providers of failing to properly diagnose and treat her condition. Awareness about postpartum psychosis has grown since the 2001 Andrea Yates case, and advocates say prosecutors rarely consider a mother's mental state; Illinois is the only state with a law allowing for undiagnosed or untreated postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis to be a mitigating factor in sentencing, Dr. Catherine Birndorf, CEO and founder of The Motherhood Center in New York City, said. “Women who kill their children in the throes of this medical illness, postpartum psychosis, are seriously and profoundly mentally ill. They are not evil,” she said. “To me it’s illness until proven otherwise.”