PLYMOUTH, Mass. (AP) , Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother charged with strangling her three young children in a case that has put a spotlight on postpartum mental health.
Court proceedings are expected to get underway around 9 a.m. in Plymouth Superior Court. The prosecution and defense will each have one hour to deliver their final arguments before the jury is given instructions and begins its deliberations.
Clancy did not take the stand during the trial, which is now in its fifth week. Prosecutors called more than 70 witnesses, including Clancy’s then-husband, while the defense presented 10 witnesses, among them some of Clancy’s friends and family members.
A number of psychologists and psychiatrists also took the stand to discuss Clancy’s mental health, the central issue in the case.
Clancy, 36, has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Her attorneys contend she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan Clancy at the family’s home in coastal Duxbury in January 2023, before attempting to take her own life. Postpartum psychosis is a rare mental illness associated with the stress, sleep deprivation, and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.
Prosecutors argue that Clancy planned the killings and was aware that her actions were wrong.
A murder conviction would carry a mandatory life prison sentence. Should jurors find her not guilty because she lacked criminal responsibility, she would not serve prison time but could be committed to a psychiatric facility.
On Wednesday, testifying as the prosecution’s final rebuttal witness, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit said he did not credit Clancy’s account that a voice instructed her to kill the children.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague put a series of questions to Dr. Gregory Saathoff about Clancy’s account: Did the voice tell her where to kill the children? How to kill them? What to use? In what order? Saathoff answered no each time.
All three children were strangled with exercise bands in the family’s basement before Clancy jumped from a second-floor window while her husband went out to pick up takeout and medication on Jan. 24, 2023. Saathoff said her ability to carry out everything she did without direction showed that Clancy “had control, control of the sequence of what she was doing throughout.”
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington questioned Saathoff about Clancy’s efforts to search online for information about postpartum depression, her visits to multiple maternal and mental health providers, her disclosures to her mother and then-husband that she was suicidal and feared she might harm her children, and her calls to a suicide hotline , all efforts that Reddington argues demonstrate Clancy recognized something was seriously wrong and made a genuine attempt to address it.
Reddington, referring to the prosecutor’s opening statement, asked whether Saathoff believes Clancy decided to kill her children because she “no longer liked the life she thought she wanted” and was making “a selfish choice” to “manipulate her providers, seek out a quick and easy fix when she was feeling depressed and anxious.”
“I think that statement that you read really minimizes what she was going through,” Saathoff replied.