 Lindsay Clancy in court this week. Photograph by David L. Ryan / Boston Globe / Getty  | Eren Orbey
A contributing writer who spent months interviewing Patrick Clancy, the father in this case | The trial of Lindsay Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse accused of murdering her three young children, began this week in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. No one in the courtroom disputes that on January 24, 2023, after sending her husband, Patrick, to pick up takeout and Pedia-Lax, Clancy strangled Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three, and Callan, who was eight months old, before cutting her wrists and jumping from a second-floor window of the family’s home in the well-to-do suburb of Duxbury. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. Her two older children were pronounced dead that night, and Callan died in a hospital three days later. In the preceding months, Clancy had experienced an escalating postpartum mental-health crisis, cycling through a series of prescription drugs and, at one point, checking herself into a psychiatric hospital. She never received a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis, but she claims that on the night in question she heard a voice telling her that “she should die, that this is her last chance, and that her children would suffer if she was gone.” What the jury must decide now is whether Clancy’s condition amounted to legal insanity, or whether, as the prosecution argues, she “coldly and calculatingly” killed her children. “This is not a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women,” one of the prosecutors told the jury, during opening statements, on Monday. Clancy’s defense attorney later shot back: “It sure as hell is.” The first witness the prosecution called was Patrick, Clancy’s now ex-husband, whom I spoke to extensively for a 2024 story about the case. Days after his children’s deaths, he made headlines by publicly forgiving Lindsay. He has since sued her medical providers, arguing that she was misdiagnosed and overmedicated. On the stand this week, taking deep breaths as old family photographs were shown to the jury, he called Lindsay a loving mother and described how, as her condition deteriorated, she had confided thoughts of harming the children. On Wednesday, the prosecution played a 911 call that Patrick made after finding Lindsay in the yard; the line was still recording as he went inside the house, discovered the children, and screamed, “She killed the kids!” The judge excused Patrick from the courtroom so that he wouldn’t have to listen; Lindsay, sitting in a wheelchair beside her lawyer, put her head in her hands and sobbed. As I wrote in my story, cases in which mentally ill mothers kill their children often present a vexing, circular logic: the crime itself seems like evidence that a mother wasn’t in her right mind; it also seems like its own worst punishment. Over the next several weeks, duelling experts will testify to Clancy’s mental state, and the prosecution will cast doubt on the extent of her illness. But the legal system’s binary standard—sane and guilty, or insane and not—fits imperfectly with human intuitions about culpability in tragedies like the Clancys’. In the book “Mothers Who Kill Their Children,” from 2001, the legal scholar Michelle Oberman and the psychologist Cheryl Meyer write that American public policy tends to “studiously ignore” the risk factors for maternal infanticide, “then cleanse our collective conscience” by doling out the harshest sentences. Insanity acquittals are rare. As Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, told me in 2024, of cases involving the killing of children, “Juries don’t want it on their hands.” The question is whether he can persuade this jury to think differently. | 
