SerpApi.Org
Potential jurors in the Lindsay Clancey case keep leaving the Massachusetts courtroom in tears after having to contemplate the murders of Clancey’s three young children.
“I just don’t know if I can handle being on the jury,” the emotional man, who had previously been selected to serve on the jury, told Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan Wednesday.
The man then became one of more than 250 potential deciders who have been excused from the arduous jury selection process since it began Monday.
Ten women and seven men have been selected so far to decide the wheelchair-bound 35-year-old’s fate over the fatal strangling of her three small children.
The judge plans to pick 18 people to serve in the jury pool — 12 of whom will be selected for the jury when it’s time to render a verdict.
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Clancey’s defense has argued the former nurse killed the children while she was in the throes of a postpartum psychotic state that was made worse by her doctors.
While another jury candidate wept while leaving the courtroom Wednesday afternoon, Clancy was seen frowning while waiting for the jury to be picked.
Clancy, clad in a green blouse with lace sleeves, appeared to glare intensely at potential jurors and occasionally look over at her defense attorney from her counsel table and, later, the witness stand.
The Wednesday hearing came to a close without seating the final juror by around 4 p.m., and was expected to continue again starting Thursday morning.
Prospective jurors have been required to answer questions about whether they could remain impartial during the trial, whether they are close with anyone who has suffered from mental health or postpartum issues and whether they are open-minded about the defense’s insanity argument, according to local news outlet WCVB 5.
They’re also required to disclose whether they have any relationship to Clancey or any witnesses who are expected to testify.
Each is then called to speak with attorneys from both the defense and the state, as well as the judge, the outlet reported.
The highly anticipated trial in Plymouth, Mass., will hinge on whether jurors believe the killer mom – paralyzed from a suicide attempt – was suffering from postpartum psychosis worsened by a cocktail of anti-psychotic medication when she committed the unthinkable crime in January 2023, experts previously told The Post.
“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,” said former prosecutor Mark Bederow.
“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?
“It will take a great deal of humanity and compassion for jurors to get past the act itself and really focus on her mental state,” Bederow noted.
Clancey is accused of using exercise bands to kill her young kids in the basement of the family’s Duxbury, Mass., home before becoming paralyzed from the waist down from a botched bid to kill herself.
The former Mass General Hospital labor and delivery nurse tried to end her own life by slicing her wrists and throat and throwing herself out of their home’s second-story window – leaving her paraplegic.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has said he plans to ask the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity because Clancy was hearing a voice in her head – brought on by severe postpartum psychosis – telling her to carry out the heinous acts.
The defense attorney filed a last-ditch motion Tuesday in an attempt to prevent more than a dozen cops and firefighters who responded to the horrific murder scene from testifying in the trial, which is slated to last up to two months and feature testimonies of up to 200 witnesses, including Clancy’s husband, Patrick.
The first responders already “testified in the grand jury to basically the same facts,” and “repeated testimony of this nature is and would be irreparably prejudicial,” Reddington wrote in the filing.
Prosecutors are expected to argue that the mother wasn’t suffering a mental break – rather, she was lucid enough to methodically plan how to get her husband out of the house that day so she could be alone with their children: Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and 8-month-old Callan.
