Jurors will resume their deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial Monday, marking the third day they’ve had the case.
Clancy is accused of killing her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023.
The Massachusetts mom doesn’t dispute that she killed her children; instead, her lawyers argued over the course of her nearly five-week trial that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and can’t be held criminally responsible for her children’s deaths.
When Judge William Sullivan read the jury instructions, he told them the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible for the killings to convict her of a crime.
Prosecutors and Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington agree that Clancy had a mental condition but disagree on whether it affected her ability to appreciate the difference between right and wrong or comport her behavior to the law.
Clancy told doctors that she heard a voice telling her it was her last chance, and that she needed to kill her kids so she could kill herself right before and during the killings. Every day at trial, she sat in her wheelchair; she’s paralyzed from jumping out her second-story bedroom window after strangling the kids in the basement.
Prosecutors presented evidence to try to discredit the auditory hallucination and offer an alternative theory that she was extremely depressed, with one of their experts calling the acts “altruistic filicide.”
Criminal responsibility and murder
In addition to the criminal responsibility instructions, Judge Sullivan gave the jurors the standards for convicting someone of first- and second-degree murder, as well as manslaughter.
He also noted that if Clancy is found not guilty by reason of insanity, the government can and likely will petition to institutionalize her if a court finds that she is a danger to herself or the public.
Members of the jury heard from more than 80 witnesses and will have access in the deliberation room to hundreds of exhibits, including medical records, text messages and autopsy photos. However, transcripts of testimony are not available to them, leaving them to rely on their memory.
On Friday, the nine women and three men on the jury asked to examine Clancy’s pill bottles and a knife used in a suicide attempt.
Sullivan warned them several times throughout the trial that they would have to separate their emotional response to the circumstances from the facts and evidence in the case.
He also told them each day that they had to avoid talking about, reading or listening to anything about the case, whether it was on the news or on social media.
Since the trial began at the end of July, interest in the case has grown steadily online. One person who initially commented on the case on TikTok was called in for a voir dire to see if she could testify to the care Clancy received at McLean Hospital before the killings.
That potential witness and licensed social worker, Emily Thorndike, was ultimately not allowed to testify.
Like the internet attention, news outlets have flocked to the Plymouth courthouse in larger numbers as the proceedings drew to a close.
At times there have been more than 40 journalists in the courtroom, with additional members of the press not making it into the proceedings due to space.