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New photos have emerged of Lindsay Clancy, the mother accused of fatally strangling her three children before jumping out of a window.
The wheelchair-bound Clancy looked stone-faced in the Massachusetts courtroom. The 35-year-old is paralyzed after her suicide attempt during what her attorneys described as a postpartum psychotic state that ended the lives of her children.
Experts say Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis worsened by a cocktail of prescribed drugs. "The whole case is just her state of mind and whether she was aware of right from wrong and literally if [she was aware] what she was doing was going to end up killing her kids," former prosecutor Mark Bederow told The New York Post.
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"Any juror is gonna wanna know why the hell would this woman do this? Why would a seemingly normal young woman living a beautiful life just murder her three children?"
Clancy is accused of using exercise bands to strangle her young children in the basement of the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, before trying to end her own life on Jan. 24, 2023. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said he plans on asking the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds that her mother was hearing voices telling her to carry out the horrific acts.
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Legal experts say that the key to her defense will be educating the jury, through medical witnesses, about the rare mental illness that allegedly led to the tragedy. Clancy's defense will call on medical experts to testify about postpartum psychosis, the treatment the mother is receiving, and the medications she was on — all in an attempt to explain that she wasn't in her right mind during the crimes, the experts said.
Meanwhile, the prosecution will likely call their own medical experts to argue that Clancy wasn't suffering a mental break, but was actually lucid enough to methodically plan how to get her husband out of the house to be alone with their children: Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and 8-month-old Callan.
"It boils down to a battle of the experts," former prosecutor Margaret McLean told the outlet. Bederow added that severe postpartum is "quite obviously a real thing and can lead seemingly normal people to do completely abnormal things."
Clancy and her husband, Patrick Clancy, have both filed lawsuits against doctors who treated her, claiming they failed to diagnose her postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder.
The doctors also had the mother on several powerful antipsychotic drugs and a "polypharmacy" of other psychiatric medications," the lawsuits claim.
McLean believes the defense strategy could raise enough reasonable doubt for jurors to either find her not guilty by reason of insanity or convict Clancy of a lesser charge, such as involuntary manslaughter.
"Here there is so much evidence showing that Lindsay Clancy sought help, and you’re going to have excellent experts come on to talk about what she was going through and the fact that she’s bound to a wheelchair," said McLean. "I think that some people will have sympathy for her."
