Almost nothing about what happened in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on 24 January 2023 is in dispute. Prosecution and defence agree that Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children with exercise bands, and that she then cut her wrists and neck and went out of a window. Her children were Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months.
What the jury is deciding is not what she did. It is whether she was, in the language the law uses, criminally responsible — whether she could appreciate that what she was doing was wrong and could conform her conduct to the law. That single question is the difference between a life sentence and commitment to a psychiatric facility.
Both sides used the same clinical term
The strangeness of this trial, reported by CNN, is how much the two cases have in common. Psychiatric experts called by the prosecution and by the defence both described the killings as altruistic filicide — the term for a parent who kills a child believing it is an act of love. Neither side disputed that Clancy, a 36-year-old labour and delivery nurse, was severely unwell.
The prosecution called more than seventy witnesses and argued she acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly, and that whatever her condition she still knew right from wrong. The final witness, an FBI psychiatrist named Gregory Saathoff, pointed to what he called preparatory planning, and to the absence of any witness: she had asked her husband to go on a longer errand. "The fact that this was done without any witness present," he said, "also I thought was significant."
The defence called ten witnesses and argued postpartum psychosis. In the months before, Clancy had been prescribed more than a dozen psychiatric medications.
The clinical record put before the jury is the part with implications beyond one courtroom. Her difficulties began in September 2022, as she prepared to leave her children and return to work. Her former husband, Patrick Clancy, the trial's first witness, described a spiral of hospital visits and about a dozen medications for insomnia, anxiety and depression. She postponed her return. Things worsened in late 2022, particularly after she began taking Zoloft in October, and she experienced intrusive thoughts and admitted herself to hospital. In a note on her phone she wrote: "Medication stole my motherhood and my life."
Her own doctors testified that she had no suicide plan, no thoughts of harming others and showed no signs of psychosis. She had seen her psychiatrist the day before.
That is what makes this case difficult in a way that a verdict does not resolve. A patient under active psychiatric care, seen by a clinician within twenty-four hours, was assessed as not psychotic. Either the assessment was wrong or the presentation changed faster than the system that was watching her could see. Neither answer is comfortable, and both point at how thinly postpartum psychiatric illness is monitored once a patient is nominally in treatment — a problem that sits close to the arithmetic primary care has been losing for years.
Clancy is partially paralysed as a result of her own injuries and is being held at a hospital in Tewksbury. If convicted of murder she faces life. If the jury returns not guilty by reason of insanity, the court begins the process of committing her.
The jury received the case on Thursday. It had not reported when this was published.
Reporting in this article is drawn from CNN's coverage of the trial, published 26 August 2026 and updated since. The jury began deliberating on 27 August and had not returned a verdict when this was published.
Topics nationalcourtsmental health
