Can Insanity Excuse Murder? The Troubling Questions in the Lindsay Clancy Case
By Eugene Nanven
Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out of the house, remained alone with their three children, took them to the basement one by one, strangled them with exercise bands, and then attempted to kill herself. By the time Patrick Clancy returned, his children were dead and his wife was lying badly injured in the backyard after jumping from a second-storey window. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.
That much is not really in dispute. What remains in dispute is the condition of the mind that did it.
As of Tuesday, September 1, the jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts, had been deliberating for four days when it told Judge William Sullivan that it could not reach a unanimous verdict. The judge ordered the jurors to continue deliberating. More than 80 witnesses testified during a trial that lasted nearly six weeks, and the jury was presented with roughly 300 exhibits.
This is therefore not a case in which the facts have been hidden behind some impenetrable mystery. The mystery is narrower, and more uncomfortable. It is whether a woman who was plainly suffering from serious psychiatric problems nevertheless remained sufficiently capable of understanding the wrongfulness of killing her children, and of controlling her conduct, to be held criminally responsible for it.
I believe she should be.
This conclusion requires some intellectual discipline because the defence has presented evidence that deserves respect. Postpartum psychosis is actually a real psychiatric emergency, capable of producing hallucinations, delusions, profound confusion and a devastating rupture between a person’s perception and reality. A woman can be desperately ill after childbirth without being wicked, manipulative or morally defective. Anyone who doubts that should spend less time on the internet and more time listening to psychiatrists who treat women in genuine postpartum crises.
Clancy’s history gives the defence substantial material to work with. After the birth of Callan, she experienced severe anxiety, depression, insomnia and suicidal thinking. She sought psychiatric treatment repeatedly and was voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility. Her lawyers argue that she had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, that her condition deteriorated under a succession of medications, and that she eventually developed postpartum psychosis. They point to writings that became increasingly disordered, her attempts to obtain help and her reports that she heard a man’s voice commanding her to kill her children.
Dr. Phillip Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist who testified for the defence, told the jury that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” on the day of the killings and was not in control of her actions. He compared her behaviour to that of a puppet whose strings were being pulled by someone else. Dr. Paul Zeizel likewise supported the conclusion that Clancy lacked criminal responsibility.
There is nothing frivolous about that argument.
Indeed, one of the dangers in writing about this case is that opposition to Clancy’s insanity defence can easily become opposition to the very idea of psychiatric illness. That would be both cruel and intellectually lazy. The fact that some people have used mental illness as an explanation for crimes they committed does not make mental illness imaginary, any more than the existence of false medical claims makes cancer imaginary.
The defence is also entitled to make a second argument that should trouble anyone interested in the quality of mental-health care. Clancy had been seeing psychiatrist Jennifer Tufts through telehealth appointments, including a final appointment on January 23, the day before the killings. Tufts testified that Clancy showed no signs of psychosis at that appointment and denied suicidal or homicidal thoughts. The defence attacked the adequacy of that treatment and argued that important warning signs were missed.
There may be a serious public-health story here. Perhaps Clancy’s deterioration was underestimated. Perhaps her medication was poorly managed. Perhaps the health system failed to recognise a psychiatric emergency developing in front of it. Those questions deserve their own investigation.
But they do not answer the criminal question.
Massachusetts law is more exacting than ordinary conversation about insanity. The legal phrase is “lack of criminal responsibility”. The Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the offence. If a mental disease or defect existed, the jury must consider whether it deprived the defendant of substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of the conduct or to conform the conduct to the requirements of the law. The defendant does not bear the burden of proving that she was insane. That distinction matters enormously.
A person can be depressed, have bipolar disorder or suffer from postpartum psychosis and still, depending on the evidence at the particular moment, retain the capacity required for criminal responsibility. The diagnosis is just evidence.
And here the prosecution has something that psychiatric labels cannot simply wish away: a sequence of actions that looks remarkably purposeful. Patrick Clancy was sent out of the house to collect food and medication. Prosecutors say Clancy had mapped the journey and knew approximately how long he would be away. Her phone showed searches connected to the restaurant and the pharmacy. She then had the children alone with her. Patrick later testified that when he returned, Clancy was in the backyard after her suicide attempt and told him the children were in the basement. He went downstairs and found them dead.
No single one of those facts proves sanity, that needs to be said plainly. People search for restaurants,send spouses on errands and behave normally shortly before becoming psychiatrically unwell. Psychosis does not operate according to the neat timetable of a railway schedule. A mentally ill person can perform ordinary tasks and still experience extraordinary delusions.
But criminal trials are decided by accumulation. When several apparently purposeful actions point in the same direction, a jury is entitled to consider what they mean together.
The prosecution’s theory is that Clancy wanted her husband out of the house because she intended to kill the children and then herself. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued that the children had become, in Clancy’s suicidal thinking, a “protective factor” preventing her from ending her own life, and that she decided to take them with her. The prosecution says the alleged voice was a later invention rather than the cause of the killings.
This is the part of the prosecution’s case I find most convincing. The defence asks the jury to believe that the killings occurred in the grip of a psychotic episode, with a commanding voice directing Clancy toward an act she could not meaningfully control. The prosecution asks the jury to look at the conduct surrounding the killings and see intention instead.
Those are radically different interpretations of the same woman. The question is whether the second interpretation requires us to disregard too much evidence.
Clancy’s account of the voice was examined by prosecution experts Gregory Saathoff and Kirk Heilbrun. Saathoff testified that there were inconsistencies in Clancy’s accounts of the hallucination, including its timing and characteristics. Heilbrun accepted that Clancy suffered from bipolar disorder and depression and that her insomnia and medication problems had worsened her condition, but concluded that she remained criminally responsible. He believed she killed the children because she intended to die and did not want them left behind to suffer without her.
Again, that does not prove that Clancy fabricated the voice. In fact, I think that it gives them a reason to doubt that the voice explains the killings.
There is an important difference between saying, “I cannot prove this hallucination happened,” and saying, “I know she invented it.” The latter would go beyond the evidence. The former is entirely legitimate. A jury does not need to solve the mysteries of Clancy’s inner life. It needs to decide whether the evidence establishes criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
That is where I part company with the defence. The more I consider the case, the less persuasive I find the idea that Clancy’s psychiatric suffering should settle the question of responsibility. Of course, her suffering is not in doubt. Her capacity for suffering is not in doubt. Her need for better psychiatric care may not be in doubt either. What remains uncertain is whether those facts extinguished her ability to understand and choose.
The law deliberately leaves room for that distinction because otherwise criminal responsibility would become an exercise in diagnosis rather than judgment. Almost every serious offender has a history, a pathology, an injury, an addiction, a trauma, a personality disorder, a depression or some other explanation for how he or she arrived at the point of committing a crime. Understanding causation is one thing. Deciding whether the person remains answerable is another.
That distinction is particularly important here because Clancy’s conduct was directed toward three people who were completely dependent upon her. Cora could not protect herself. Dawson could not protect himself. Callan was eight months old.
The children have occasionally seemed to disappear behind the psychiatric argument, as though the trial were chiefly about a mother’s medical history. That is understandable because the psychiatric evidence is complicated and emotionally compelling. Yet the centre of the case should remain three children whose lives ended in the house where they were supposed to be safest.
There is a temptation to say that because Clancy loved her children, she could not have intended to kill them. The prosecution offers a darker explanation: she may have believed that death was preferable to leaving them behind after she killed herself. Heilbrun described this as a form of killing motivated by the belief that the children would otherwise suffer.
If that was her reasoning, it was profoundly wrong. But wrong reasoning is not necessarily psychotic reasoning, and a terrible decision does not become involuntary merely because the person making it was depressed.
This is where the moral vocabulary surrounding mental illness can become confused. We rightly want compassion for people whose minds are failing them. We should be especially compassionate toward women experiencing severe psychiatric illness after childbirth, because shame and stigma can prevent them from seeking help. But compassion becomes intellectually dangerous when it starts doing the work of evidence.
The fact that Clancy was suffering should make us examine her conduct more carefully.
Trust me, I don’t mean that rejecting the insanity defence should mean treating psychiatric illness as irrelevant. Massachusetts allows jurors to consider evidence of mental impairment even when it does not rise to the level of lack of criminal responsibility. The legal system can recognise diminished mental functioning without declaring that every serious psychiatric disorder abolishes accountability.
The insanity defence itself is not some loophole through which murderers routinely walk. It is a demanding legal doctrine, and a finding of lack of criminal responsibility does not necessarily mean that the defendant simply returns to ordinary life. Massachusetts law provides mechanisms for psychiatric evaluation and, where the legal requirements are met, commitment to a mental-health facility.
So the argument is that even a carefully constructed defence can produce a difficult result when medicine and criminal law are asked to answer slightly different questions.
Medicine asks what happened to a person’s mind. Criminal law asks what that condition did to the person’s capacity for responsibility at the precise time of the act.
That is why I would find a verdict of lack of criminal responsibility troubling in this case because the evidence appears to show a woman who was very ill and yet capable of purposeful conduct. She sought help. She made decisions. She communicated with her husband. She arranged for him to leave. She remained alone with the children. She carried out the killings. She then attempted suicide.
That sequence does not prove, by itself, that she was legally responsible. But it creates a formidable evidentiary obstacle for anyone arguing that her illness deprived her of meaningful control.
There is something uncomfortable about that conclusion, and perhaps that discomfort explains why the jury is struggling.
We would prefer the world to divide neatly between the sane person who chooses evil and the psychotic person who does not know what he is doing. Human beings are rarely so accommodating. The law has to live in that uncomfortable territory. So must we.
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be brought back by a conviction, and a psychiatric hospital cannot restore the years they should have had. Nothing the jury does can make the story less terrible. What a verdict can do is answer a narrower question about responsibility.
My answer is that Lindsay Clancy should be held criminally responsible for the deaths of her children. Other women experiencing postpartum psychiatric emergencies should be helped before their suffering reaches a point of catastrophe.
The most humane view of mental illness is one capable of seeing both the suffering and the agency of the person who caused the harm.
In this case, I believe the evidence leaves enough of that agency standing that criminal responsibility should remain standing with it.
Eugene Nanven a public opinion analyst writes from Gwagwalada Abuja FCT Nigeria
