The Lindsay Clancy Jury Was Tasked With an Impossible Question
In the court of public opinion, there is little room for ambiguity here. But those who watched the trial know that reality is far less satisfying.
A jury narrowly deadlocked on Friday in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old Massachusetts woman accused of killing her children. Accused is the correct word in a legal sense. But it feels like the wrong one in a general sense, because it is not in doubt that in January 2023 she killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, her three young kids. She admits as much.
The jurors instead were tasked with analyzing her state of mind. Also not really in dispute is that Clancy was mentally unwell leading up to the killings—she had begged for help from those around her, gone to the emergency room, tried to check herself into a mental health facility, and said she was afraid to be alone. She was prescribed a laundry list of medications. She was, by all accounts, floundering. Did she ultimately plunge into a state of psychosis? Or was she just deeply anxious and depressed?
Absent clairvoyance, how on earth was a jury supposed to know which was more likely to be true? All the evidence in the world cannot transport a juror into Clancy's mind during the moments she killed her children.
The distinction matters. Contrary to many popular narratives, mental illness itself is legally insufficient to acquit someone by reason of insanity, the defense Clancy raised at trial. Even a sociopath knows murder is immoral; he just doesn't care. An individual who is profoundly depressed may take a life in a fragile state, but she still knows it is wrong.
Someone who kills in a state of psychosis, however, often cannot understand that very thing, because their brain has departed so thoroughly from basic reality and descended into delusion. Such defendants would thus not be criminally responsible. Clancy's defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued she suffered from postpartum psychosis—a severe, rare condition that is distinct from postpartum depression—after the birth of her third child, rendering her temporarily incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of her act and unable to conform to the rule of law. The prosecution, meanwhile, agreed she was unwell but, that said, she could still distinguish right from wrong.
The government admittedly appeared a bit desperate at times. In one particularly cringeworthy exchange, prosecutor Shanan Buckingham asked Susan Clancy—Lindsay Clancy's ex–mother in law, who testified in her defense—if she was "aware that murder is considered a mortal sin."
Yet both the state and the defense put forward expert witnesses that attempted to corroborate their dueling theories. The former called psychologist Kirk Heilbrun and FBI psychiatrist Gregory Saathoff, both of whom said they doubted Clancy's claim that she heard a male voice ordering her to kill her children. Heilbrun advanced the theory that Clancy's act was one of "altruistic filicide"—that she killed her children because she believed they would be better off—before she would go on to try to kill herself. She subsequently attempted suicide, jumping out of a second-story window at her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and is now paralyzed.
The defense's expert witnesses obviously painted a different picture. Clancy "was clearly psychotic on that day," forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick, one of the leading filicide experts in the U.S. who has evaluated such cases for decades, testified. "It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings." Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist who first met Clancy in the hospital 11 days after the killings, agreed. Clancy "had said she heard a male voice ordering her, telling her, that she didn't have any choice," he testified, "but she had to kill her children, and then kill herself."
It is, all told, an incredibly unenviable question for a jury to have to weigh. The deadlock reportedly came down to an 11–1 vote. Based on correspondence the jury sent the judge, it appeared to be in favor of an acquittal, which would have seen her committed to a state psychiatric institution instead of prison. "When you have a situation where you have not one, but two notes that indicate that this individual has acknowledged doubt but refuses to apply it to the verdict as the law states," Reddington said, "he is not being honest." Judge William Sullivan instructed each juror again on the meaning of reasonable doubt, which demands a jury acquit if, after considering the totality of the evidence, they do not have a clear moral conviction that a defendant is guilty. Sullivan declared a mistrial after the panel was still unable to reach a consensus.
If you poll the loudest voices in the court of public opinion, where this case was inevitably also tried, there is little room for ambiguity. Clancy has been portrayed as both a monster and a victim; there has been scant room for gray. Those who watched the trial know that reality is far less satisfying. It is very possible to simultaneously wrestle over whether Clancy was psychotic that day, and still vote for an acquittal.
The many people who followed Clancy's trial often demanded it answer a specific set of questions: What kind of mother kills their children? Is she someone who had been abandoned by the medical system and let down by a man? Or is she someone who, in a fraught mental state, had evil coursing through her? Who is Lindsay Clancy?
Those weren't really questions seeking answers as much as they were rhetorical. More importantly, the trial was never designed to answer them anyway.
