Deliberations are expected to continue on Monday in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murder for strangling her three children before attempting suicide.
Jurors got the high-profile case on Thursday after more than four weeks of testimony. The jurors deliberated for about 10 hours across two days at the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., before the judge, William Sullivan, sent them home for the weekend.
Kevin Reddington, Ms. Clancy’s defense lawyer, said that on Friday the jury asked to look at a knife and prescription pill bottles, which are thought to be connected to Ms. Clancy’s suicide attempt.
Ms. Clancy, 36, doesn’t deny killing her children with exercise bands in 2023, but she has pleaded not guilty, and her lawyers have argued that she should not be held legally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Mr. Reddington argued that Ms. Clancy had been overmedicated for severe postpartum mental illness and had hallucinated a male voice commanding her to kill her children, and then herself.
Jennifer Sprague, a prosecutor, told jurors that Ms. Clancy made a series of premeditated choices before killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Those included asking her husband to leave the house and strangling the older children first because they were more likely to resist.
“You know, to a moral certainty, she is guilty,” Ms. Sprague said.
For a guilty verdict, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Clancy both committed the crime and was criminally responsible for it. If jurors find Ms. Clancy guilty, they must choose among first-degree murder, second-degree murder and manslaughter.
The option of a manslaughter verdict could potentially help jurors reach consensus sooner and make the prospect of a hung jury less likely.
Judge Sullivan instructed jurors that Ms. Clancy would not be criminally responsible if she had a mental disease or defect that prevented her from controlling her actions, or from understanding that they were legally or morally wrong.
In the months leading up to the killings, Ms. Clancy was reporting persistent, disturbing and intrusive thoughts. She was prescribed a plethora of psychiatric medications. At the beginning of January 2023, she self-admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she stayed for five days.
On the evening the children were strangled, Ms. Clancy’s then-husband, Patrick Clancy, said that he found her lying injured in the backyard. Ms. Clancy had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window of their home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
The last week of trial testimony came from rebuttal witnesses brought by the prosecution to respond to claims made by the defense.
The expert witnesses provided their assessments about Ms. Clancy’s state of mind at the time of the killings. They said the killings were not necessarily the result of psychosis and more likely an attempt to take her children with her when she tried to take her own life.
Mr. Reddington, however, said during closing arguments that Ms. Clancy had repeatedly sought help for her deteriorating mental illness but that doctors had failed her.
Ms. Sprague countered, saying that the case was “not about our mental health system, or how it treats women.”
Jenna Russell and Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.
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