There is no doubt that Lindsay Clancy murdered her three young children. I think her own legal defense team admits that.
Their defense is Clancy was severely mentally unstable due to a variety of reasons.
I admit I am kinda on the fence about this. I cannot comprehend anyone strangling their little children. I can’t think how “voices” in their head can ever lead to this. But then I do not know what a severe mental condition is really like.
Even leaning toward people being guilty as charged and finding child killings abhorrent, from everything I’ve heard about this case it seems consistent with postpartum psychosis, and it would’ve been very difficult to convict her of murder.
In spite of the post-trial weirdly manipulative behavior of the defense (i.e. asking Trump to pardon her to put pressure on the Republican D.A.), it should be possible to work out a deal where she gets treatment and extended monitoring, rather than wasting everyone’s time and expense on a retrial.
If anyone is to be put on trial, it should be the sickies spreading bullshit rumors about her ex-husband on social media.
In practice, someone who kills someone and is found to be insane isn’t a get out of jail free card as many believe, it just means you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a mental institution instead of a prison. It doesn’t mean you walk free.
The entire prison system is fucked, and I haven’t been following this story too closely, but I went out looking for evidence that her husband was abusive, or that her mental health concerns were being ignored, or that she suffered some previous trauma, and came up empty. I didn’t look very hard though, so maybe this thread will educate me (I’d rather not watch a 40-minute video about someone who calmly strangled 3 children, though).
I can’t say I’d feel comfortable sending someone who had a psychotic episode to prison for life, but I also can’t say I’d feel comfortable sending anyone to prison for any amount of time. I’ve had to do it (on a jury), and it sucked.
It seems reasonable to allow mental psychosis as an affirmative defense. i.e. The defendant admits to the acts but the burden of proof is on them to establish psychosis as the cause of the act.
Murderer? Not guilty by reason of insanity? I didn’t hear the testimony so I don’t know. I do feel, though, that women’s health issues are not taken as seriously as they should, and women’s mental health, in this and so many other cases, too. Just about every woman in my life has at least one story about how their health care providers didn’t take their complaints, questions, and requests seriously. Were I a juror, I think her defense could convince me that she wasn’t in her right mind.
I had something like postpartum psychosis which fortunately did not rise to this level but ever since I experienced it I have understood cases like these too well for my comfort. You don’t ever want to be in a position where you hear something this awful and think, “I get why that happens.”
But here we are.
There’s really no punishment for this woman that could be worse than knowing she killed her own children, so I’m not sure it really matters how this is adjudicated.
But I definitely think it’s very possible she had no idea what she was doing.
The idea that it should have involved some past trauma or that psychosis doesn’t happen when you have access to mental health care is just really not understanding psychosis at all. Psychosis isn’t caused by trauma, it’s biological, and seeing a mental health provider cannot protect you from it. It may take countless medications to find something effective and even medicated you can still have delusions. People in a psychotic episode are unable to reason. Their entire reality is just a different reality. That reality might include the belief that meds are going to kill you or your therapist is poisoning you. My schizophrenic uncle once casually mentioned to me that someone laced his Bangles cassette tape with LSD. People were putting dead bodies in his cigarettes. He believed his therapists were government operatives. Delusions don’t make sense.
My thing was caused by a combination of post-partum hormones and extreme sleep deprivation. I say “thing” because I still don’t totally understand it. It was some combination of extreme OCD alongside beliefs that weren’t true, but were still plausibly true. At any rate, whatever happened happened with no warning and I had no control over it. One moment my reality was reality and the next moment it was something else.
Government-sponsored vengeance for harms done to other citizens? Or protection for everyone else from potential future bad acts?
In the case of postpartum mental issues, as long as she never gives birth again, her nonexistent future infants have nothing to fear. And neither does anyone else.
The same cannot be said of other sorts of violent or career criminals.
Meta-question:
So are postpartum mental issues a mirage or fad, something real but not applicable to her case specifically, or a real problem she really had?
ISTM any discussion of appropriate punishment depends on unequivocally answering this question first.
AIUI, the jury found her 11 to 1 not culpable for killing her three children, which ultimately led to a hung jury. I trust the jury tried to make the right decision, but failed in this case. I hope the prosecution decides to retry the case with a new jury.
The problem I think is that the law doesn’t consider psychosis a sufficient justification for murder. There’s a higher standard where the defense has to prove the psychotic person didn’t know their actions were wrong.
So from a legal perspective it’s very difficult to be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Proving that you’re insane isn’t enough.
That she sent her husband out, answered his call calmly while she killed them shows me there was no delusion. Thank God for that one juror.
Like when Tex Watson killed all at the Tate house he was polite and calm when a house owner confronted him about using their garden hose.
The worst thing that could come out of this case is amplifying the belief some have that “psychiatric meds made them do it”.
It’s possible she didn’t get optimal care. But drugs she was prescribed (at least some of which she evidently didn’t take) have gotten blame without good evidence.
Cases where people didn’t murder or commit suicide because meds alleviated dangerous thoughts seldom make headlines.
I’m surprised how many people reacting to this case style themselves as experts of psychosis when I have two family members with psychosis and I really have no idea what happened in this case. I don’t think we can.
But I think we can say that postpartum psychosis is real and needs to be taken seriously.
It’s far more likely that the meds weren’t effective.
I have not spent any time looking at the particulars of this case, so my comments are general in nature.
Incarceration in a mental facility is not more pleasant than prison. They are scary, dangerous places.
As for whether psychosis is real, it is. I saw it up close and personal more times than I wish I had due to my work in courtrooms in a county that had jurisdiction over the largest mental health facility for men in the State of California. We heard every case where criminal charges were laid, including such things as where one inmate visited violence on another inmate or a staff member. We also heard every regular review hearing for every inmate. There are lots of them.
How psychosis manifests can be highly disturbing, and when you’ve seen it, there can be no doubt that the behavior is involuntary. In my view, as a society, we don’t deal very well with it.
Her actions were not those of a person who is mentally sane at that moment. Nobody plans to kill their children, deliberately does so then attempts suicide by swallowing pills, cutting their wrists and neck and jumping out a window. That’s not a performative suicide attempt to cover a crime. That’s someone trying actively to die. All the evidence is that she loved her children. Why would she actively choose to blow up her life like this? In contrast, there was ample evidence that she and her family knew she was losing touch with reality and tried to get her help.
In the long run, I have to wonder which would serve her and the public better, long-term confinement to jail or long-term confinement in a mental institution. I suspect she already lives in hell every day knowing that she killed her children. I personally think that she is more of a danger to herself than to the general public. Post-partum psychosis is rare but real and delusions can be very real to those having them.
With a mistrial, the conditions for the defendant go back to what they were pretrial, CBS News Boston reported. That means Clancy will remain in custody and under psychiatric care at Tewksbury State Hospital, where she has been held since 2023.