Crime
Lawyers on both sides of Lindsay Clancy’s case will have an hour to make their final pitches before jurors begin deliberations.
Livestream via Law & Crime.
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This story may contain content readers find disturbing. For help with postpartum mood disorders, text or call 1-833-TLC-MAMA for the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call 988 or go to https://988lifeline.org/ to chat online.
Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial nears its end Thursday as both sides offer their closing arguments, making one final pitch to jurors ahead of deliberations.
The defense and prosecution will each have one hour to present their closing arguments, Judge William Sullivan said Wednesday. Sullivan will also address jurors before they begin to discuss a potential verdict, and he confirmed he will give an instruction for a lesser-included offense of manslaughter to Clancy’s first-degree murder charges.
A total of 18 jurors — 12 women and six men — have sat through more than four weeks of testimony, though only 12 of them will actually decide Clancy’s fate.
Clancy, 36, doesn’t deny that she strangled her three children at home in Duxbury the evening of Jan. 24, 2023. Rather than weigh her guilt or innocence, her murder trial has focused largely on whether she can be held criminally responsible for killing 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan.
That’s because Clancy has raised what is commonly known as an insanity defense, arguing she was wracked by postpartum mental illness and heard a voice in her head demanding she kill her children and herself. Clancy attempted suicide after strangling her children and remains paralyzed more than three years later.
Dr. Paul Zeizel, a forensic psychologist who testified for the defense, maintained that Clancy didn’t appreciate the “wrongfulness” of killing her children because she has bipolar disorder and was in the throes of a rare mental illness called postpartum psychosis.
Prosecutors, however, say Clancy acted “deliberately and meticulously” the night of the killings. They offered a rebuttal expert who testified that while Clancy was suicidal, her actions on Jan. 24, 2023, were more in line with altruistic filicide than with acute psychosis accompanied by command hallucinations, as the defense has claimed.
“She was in pain. She was suffering,” forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun testified. “I think she was even desperate, and that is something that often characterizes people who try to take their own life.”
He added: “I think when she decided at some point that she was going to put a stop to it, then she had to answer the question of what to do about the kids.”
When a so-called insanity defense is raised in Massachusetts, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the alleged offense. According to the state’s model jury instructions, prosecutors may do so either by proving the defendant was not mentally ill at the time, or by proving that they were still able to act lawfully and retained substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness or criminality of their actions.
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