The defense rested its case on Friday in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother charged with strangling her three young children in 2023, after presenting an expert witness who said he believed Ms. Clancy was psychotic and “did not have control of her own body” at the time.
The high-profile murder trial has been emotionally charged since it started nearly four weeks ago. The trial has not centered on answering whether Ms. Clancy committed the crime — she does not deny killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Rather, her lawyers have pursued an insanity defense, maintaining that she should not be held legally responsible for the killings because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
“Ms. Clancy was frankly psychotic,” Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and the defense’s final witness, said on Friday in reference to her mental state when she wrapped exercise bands around her children’s necks at their home outside Boston on Jan. 24, 2023.
He added, “My opinion is that due to her mental disease, she was unable to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law on the day she killed her children.”
Closing arguments in the case are expected to begin as soon as Monday.
Two other witnesses this week testified that Ms. Clancy, 36, had reported hearing a voice commanding her to kill the children and then herself.
Dr. Resnick described Ms. Clancy as being in a “dream state” when she committed the killings. She experienced a “command hallucination” in the form of a male voice “ordering her to engage in the killing behavior,” he said, and believed that her children would be better off dying with her than if she took her own life and left them without a mother.
After strangling her children, Ms. Clancy cut her own wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window to the ground outside their home in Duxbury, Mass., where her husband found her when he returned home.
Dr. Resnick evaluated Ms. Clancy four months after the killings and diagnosed her with bipolar 2 and severe depression, he said. Ms. Clancy did not fully reveal her impulses to harm her children to health care providers out of fear that social services would separate the family, he added.
The prosecution, which has maintained that Ms. Clancy carefully planned the killings, questioned Dr. Resnick on the severity and validity of her psychosis that day in 2023, citing the minimally reported homicidal ideation in her medical records. The defense and prosecution also argued over whether Ms. Clancy’s mental state began to decline within the postpartum period after her youngest child’s birth.
The prosecution, which rested on Monday, called more than 70 witnesses to back its argument that Ms. Clancy rationally plotted the killings.
Ms. Clancy’s ex-husband, her former mother-in-law, medical experts and others who were close to her in the months ahead of the killings have all taken the stand.
After the defense rested on Friday, prosecutors called Dr. Avram Mack, another forensic psychiatrist who evaluated Ms. Clancy, as a rebuttal witness.
“My opinion is that she retained the capacity that required for having criminal responsibility for these actions,” he said.Ms. Clancy, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, faces a sentence of life in prison without parole if convicted. If found not guilty by reason of insanity, she would very likely be committed to a secure state psychiatric facility.
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