After hung jury, Clancy case raises fundamental questions about accountability
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — A Massachusetts jury spent seven days trying to decide whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible when she strangled her three children. It could not. On Sept. 4, Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan declared a mistrial. The charges remain. So does the fight over what the record actually shows — and over what kind of story the public thinks it has been watching.
Clancy, 36, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, is not contesting that she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023, while her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, was picking up takeout and a child’s laxative. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. Callan died at Boston Children’s Hospital on Jan. 27. She is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in Plymouth Superior Court.
The defense says postpartum psychosis and a command hallucination stripped her of criminal responsibility. Prosecutors say she planned the timing and knew right from wrong. Defense counsel later said 11 of the 12 jurors (9 women and three men) favored acquittal, and one did not. After the mistrial, three women who sat on the Clancy jury — foreperson Roni Carlson, a retired teacher; Kellie Farina, a senior-center chef; and Paula Devlin, who works for a defense contractor — told NBC10 Boston that an 11-1 majority was prepared to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity until a lone male juror refused to join them. Carlson said the man at one point “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” prompting her to begin signing the verdict forms, then added he still would not say Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity. Farina said he “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” Devlin called him “very arrogant” and said he “completely disregarded” explanations nurses on the panel offered about Clancy’s medications and toxicology reports. Those comments quickly drew a second wave of criticism: commentators and at least one trial lawyer argued that jurors may use life experience and common sense, but they are not supposed to become unsworn expert witnesses and press a holdout with professional interpretations that were not presented from the stand. The holdout has not spoken publicly; Judge William Sullivan sealed the jurors’ names.
What the public has been drawn into is harder to look at than a courtroom standard. Three small children were killed by their mother in their own home. The person who did it had been a nurse who delivered other people’s babies. She led an outwardly ordinary life — marriage, house, errands, prescriptions, a husband who worked from home. Then she sent him out to purchase dinner. During the short time he was gone, Lindsay took each child down to the basement individually, strangling each, returning upstairs for the next one, a horrific sequence of acts. Husband Patrick even called home at one point. She missed the call, then called him back while she was in the process of killing the children. She then went upstairs to cut herself and jump from the second-story window. That sequence is why the case became a national feed, and why so many people reached for a simpler villain than the one the evidence actually names.
Two clinics, no shared chart
In the months after Callan’s birth in May 2022, Clancy was treated on two outpatient tracks at once. Dr. Jennifer Tufts, a psychiatrist at Aster Mental Health, saw her by video beginning in September 2022. Nurse practitioners Julie Paul and then Rebecca Jollotta saw her through South Shore Health’s perinatal behavioral clinic starting in November. McLean Hospital admitted her voluntarily Jan. 1–5, 2023, and sent her home with lorazepam and trazodone.
On the stand, Jollotta said she never spoke with Tufts. Tufts said she did not pull the other clinic’s records and did not think she needed to, because Clancy described her other care herself. A Women & Infants note quoted at trial said staff tried to reach Jollotta and got no call back. Both providers testified they relied on the patient as the messenger. Clancy herself told Tufts she kept “reaching out to different people and not sticking with the plan.” Prosecutors used that as proof she steered the prescriptions. The defense used the same split as proof the system failed her.
Pharmacy records shown in court listed about 13 psychiatric drugs and more than 30 fills from September 2022 through Jan. 23, 2023 — sertraline, fluoxetine, mirtazapine, trazodone, amitriptyline, buspirone, hydroxyzine, zolpidem, lorazepam, clonazepam, diazepam, quetiapine, lamotrigine. Pill counts on older bottles showed several were barely used. That is not the same as a confirmed daily regimen on the afternoon of the killings.
What the blood showed
Hospital blood, plasma, and urine drawn after the fall were tested by the Massachusetts State Police Crime Laboratory and NMS Laboratories. The panel was negative for alcohol, cannabis, amphetamines, cocaine, fentanyl and opiates. Present were six prescribed agents: diazepam (Valium) and its metabolites, lorazepam (Ativan), lamotrigine (Lamictal), mirtazapine (Remeron), trazodone and quetiapine (Seroquel). Forensic toxicologist Dr. Justin Brower testified that lamotrigine, mirtazapine, trazodone and diazepam were in therapeutic or subtherapeutic ranges; quetiapine was above typical therapeutic levels but not in a toxic or “handfuls of pills” suicide range. He also said toxicology “doesn’t tell the entire story.” A bedside tumbler with white residue was not tested in the lab. The children’s postmortem toxicology was negative.
Prescribing references do not list that six-drug set as an absolute contraindication. They do warn that two benzodiazepines plus quetiapine, mirtazapine, and trazodone stack sedation, and that some pairs carry QT-interval and serotonin cautions. That is pharmacology. It is not a finding that the combination caused the killings.
The lawyer question and the chaplain
On Jan. 27, still intubated, Clancy wrote on a whiteboard, “Do I need an attorney?” Prosecutors told the court that it showed she knew she had murdered the children and was protecting herself. The defense treated it as the question of a nurse who understood she was in legal jeopardy after a catastrophe.
About a week after the killings, on a call overheard by psychologist Paul Zeizel, she told Patrick she loved him and that a man’s voice had given her no choice: kill the children, then herself. Patrick testified that was the first time he had heard her describe a voice. He also said on an early call she talked about what she had been through, not about the children.
Hospital chaplain Sheila Cavanaugh testified that around Jan. 31, Clancy said she was glad her children were “safe,” and that the voice had said if she did not obey, neither she nor the children would be safe. Defense lawyers offered that as delusion. Prosecutors offered later remarks — including that she told an examiner she said “Go to God, baby” as she killed them — as proof she understood death. In court in 2026, she sobbed through the 911 recording and autopsy testimony and said, “I can’t do this.” Crying is documented. A clean, agreed statement of remorse is not.
Patrick Clancy is not charged and was not in the house. Video and phone records put him at a Kingston CVS and a takeout counter on an errand Lindsay asked him to run. He testified that no doctor told him to keep her from the children, that she had described intrusive thoughts but no plan, and that he thought she was having a good day. He described her as a dedicated mother. Online claims that he killed the children or that he framed her are not supported by the trial evidence. His lawyers say those claims have turned into threats.
Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay, made the 911 call. He got home about 6:09 p.m., found the house silent, unlocked the bloodstained bedroom, and found her in the yard after the window jump. She told him she had tried to kill herself and that the kids were in the basement. She did not say they were dead. It took him a few minutes to reach dispatch because of a phone connection problem. The first minutes of the 7- to 8-minute recording are him keeping her awake and describing her wounds. After paramedics arrived, he went inside still on the line, found the children in the basement, and screamed, “She killed the kids.”
The defense theory is postpartum psychosis. Psychopathy is a personality construct, not the Massachusetts test for criminal responsibility. Prosecutors pointed to the errand window, the exercise bands, the uncoordinated prescriptions she helped steer, the whiteboard question about a lawyer, and the absence of an early, plain statement of grief for the children. Some viewers heard those facts as proof of calculation and self-protection. Others heard the voice, the jump, the “safe with God” language, and the courtroom sobbing as proof of a break with reality.
Both readings can be dressed up as certainty on a phone screen. Neither is a verdict. What is documented is this: she killed them; she looked, to many people who knew her, like a normal mother and nurse until that horrific day; and the record still does not contain one clean, agreed sentence of remorse that both sides accept as such. Concealment of a disordered inner life behind an ordinary face is possible in psychosis. It is also possible in a person who knows exactly what she is doing. The law does not let a jury pick the more comforting story. It asks only whether she had substantial capacity to appreciate wrongfulness and to stop.
What the law actually asks
The mistrial sharpened older questions the livestream never paused to answer.
The idea that a person too disordered to be morally blameworthy should not be punished is ancient. English common law recognized versions of it by the 13th and 14th centuries. In Rex v. Arnold (1724), a judge told jurors the accused had to be “totally deprived of his understanding and memory … no more than a brute or a wild beast.”
The rule still used in much of the English-speaking world was written in 1843, after Daniel M’Naghten, acting on paranoid delusions, tried to kill British Prime Minister Robert Peel and instead killed Peel’s secretary. A jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI). Queen Victoria was outraged. The House of Lords asked the judges to state the law. Their answer became the M’Naghten Rules: a defendant is not responsible if, at the time of the act, a “disease of the mind” left him unable to know the nature and quality of the act, or unable to know that it was wrong.
That cognitive test remains the core standard in most U.S. states. Other states add a volitional question — whether the person could control the conduct even if they knew it was wrong. Massachusetts uses a broader test drawn from the Model Penal Code and adopted in Commonwealth v. McHoul (1967): as a result of mental disease or defect, did the person lack substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or to conform conduct to the law? Massachusetts is also unusual in placing the burden on the prosecution. Once the defense is raised by evidence that could create a reasonable doubt, the state must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
Legal insanity is not a medical diagnosis, and it is not a synonym for “no remorse.” A Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) label — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, postpartum psychosis — is evidence. So is a claim of voices. So is an ordinary-looking life. The verdict is whether the condition produced the specific incapacity the statute requires, at the moment of the act.
Courts do not ask whether a defendant is ill today. They ask what her mind was like when the act occurred. A person can be lucid the day before and the day after and still meet the legal test during the crime, if the evidence supports it. “Temporary insanity” is not a separate loophole in most states. It is the same test applied to a short window. Rage, jealousy, voluntary drunkenness, and “I snapped” do not qualify by themselves. Neither does an unattractive personality.
If the killing is admitted, the jury is not finished. It weighs competing experts; medical and pharmacy records; texts and statements before and after; and conduct that looks organized or disorganized. Planning, concealment, and a later request for a lawyer often suggest the person appreciated wrongfulness. Command hallucinations, bizarre delusions, and an immediate suicide attempt are used to argue the opposite. Jurors are not psychiatrists. Massachusetts courts have said they are still “no less equipped than medical experts” to assess capacity for responsible action. That is a policy choice, not a scientific claim.
The defense is rarely a free pass. It is raised in well under 1 percent of felony cases and succeeds in roughly a quarter of those, many by plea. A story about voices, without a documented mental disease or defect that meets the legal test, almost never gets an instruction. After John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan and was found NGRI in 1982, Congress and many states tightened the rules.
Prescribed medication can contribute to a psychotic state. It rarely excuses a homicide by itself. Appellate courts have occasionally ordered jury instructions on SSRIs and other psychotropics. Juries still usually convict. In Clancy’s trial, the defense treated the rapidly changing mix of drugs as a clue that her illness was psychosis, not ordinary depression. Prosecutors treated the same records as evidence she was being treated, functioning, and making choices. Toxicology showed six prescribed agents after the fall. It did not show that the combination caused the killings.
Postpartum depression, by itself, is generally not a complete defense. Reality-testing is usually intact. Postpartum psychosis is rare — on the order of one to two cases per 1,000 births — and involves delusions and hallucinations and usually occurs within four weeks after giving birth. When that is the claimed condition, the legal question is still the statutory one, not the diagnosis. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Houston in 2001 while in a delusional state that she was saving them from damnation. A first Texas jury convicted her. A second found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. She has remained hospitalized ever since.
If she is found NGRI, what happens next?
A not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict in Massachusetts is an acquittal of the crime. It is not an automatic release from custody, but it is possible that Lindsay Clancy could be released after just 40 days.
Under G.L. c. 123, § 16, the judge can order up to 40 days of hospital observation. Within 60 days, the district attorney or the facility can petition for civil commitment. If the court finds she is mentally ill and that discharge would create a likelihood of serious harm to herself or others, she is committed for up to six months. After that, the state may seek one-year renewals with no legal cap. Release requires a later court finding that she is no longer mentally ill and dangerous. The district attorney gets notice and can fight it. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that an insanity acquittee may be confined longer than the prison sentence she would have served if convicted.
Massachusetts lawyers who handle these cases have said they do not know of a murder NGRI acquittee released in under a matter of years. Clancy is already at Tewksbury Hospital. The lock would change from “criminal defendant awaiting trial” to “civilly committed patient,” with the prosecutor still at the table every time release is proposed.
After mistrial, what happens next?
A mistrial is not an acquittal. Clancy remains held without bail at Tewksbury on the murder charges. Massachusetts law does not let a first-degree murder defendant waive a jury if the charge stays first-degree.
Judge Sullivan set a status hearing for Sept. 29. Reddington has said he will seek a directed finding of not guilty — a long-shot argument that the Commonwealth failed to prove criminal responsibility. He asked for a second trial as soon as the calendar allows. Sullivan said he would rather try the case sooner than later but needed to check the court’s schedule. Reddington has also estimated that a full retrial, if one is ordered, could be six months to a year out.
The decision to retry belongs to Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz. After court on Sept. 4, he said there would be “no decisions made today,” that the case was about “getting justice for those three little babies,” and that he would meet with his team. Options as a matter of law are: retry first-degree murder; reduce the charge, which could open a plea or a bench trial; negotiate a plea that likely still means long confinement, in prison or a hospital; or dismiss, which legal observers call unlikely. Even without a criminal conviction, civil commitment could keep her hospitalized under periodic review.
A second jury would hear the same core facts: the errand, the bands, the window, the uncoordinated prescriptions, the six drugs in post-fall blood, the whiteboard, the chaplain, the experts who split on whether she could appreciate wrongfulness or stop herself. It would also hear, again, the part of the story that made strangers pick sides on the courthouse lawn — a mother who looked well enough to be left alone with three children, and three children who were not safe.
Congressman Clay Fuller for Georgia's 14th District posted on his X account that "You shouldn't get to murder three kids in cold blood and plead insanity to escape accountability. I'm introducing federal legislation to limit the insanity defense in federal crimes. Mental illness is not a get out of jail free card. Lindsay Clancy is a monster."
Four days after the children died, Patrick Clancy asked the public to forgive Lindsay as he had. He wrote that the real Lindsay was loving “in the very fibers of her soul” and that he wanted her to find peace. In 2024 he put it more sharply: he had not married a monster; he had married someone who got sick. That was a statement about her mind, not a decision to stay. He sold the Duxbury house, moved to New York, filed for divorce in February 2024, and married Dr. Rachel Danis in April 2026.
A GoFundMe started in August 2026 for Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, has raised more than $1.2 million. The organizer, a TikTok user who is not a relative, says the money is for the couple’s travel, lodging, and living costs after they left Connecticut to stay near their daughter. The page names the parents as beneficiaries and says the funds cannot go to Lindsay’s legal defense. Critics call the haul unseemly.
The trial was televised on Court TV. To see the videos, go to:
