When she jumped out a second-story window of her suburban Massachusetts home, Lindsay Clancy did not put her hands out to break her fall.
This detail from the weekslong trial of Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who was charged with murdering her three small children, is one I cannot shake. Both the defense and the prosecution agree that Clancy suffered from mental illness in the period leading up to the killings and her suicide attempt. “She really did a free-fall dive headfirst” onto the “hard, frozen ground,” said Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a forensic pathologist and a former chief medical examiner in Rhode Island, who testified for the defense on Aug. 18.
Clancy, who pleaded not guilty, pitched herself from the window after cutting her wrists and taking pills. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. She has said she heard a voice telling her to kill the kids and herself before she strangled them. The defense argued that she is not criminally responsible for this unconscionable tragedy because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The prosecution’s argument was that even though she was certainly depressed and suffering, the killings were premeditated. It argued that her suicide attempt was not serious — her wounds were superficial, and she described taking the pills in a vague fashion — that it was a cynical, premeditated calculation.
After seven days of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked, and the case was declared a mistrial.
Over the past month, I have struggled to comprehend why so many people, mostly women, followed every moment of Clancy’s trial and why so many strangers showed up to support her at the courthouse. I had to take breaks in paying attention to the coverage, because the whole thing felt ghoulish. Her experience was both awful and foreign to me, and three beautiful children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — are dead. I wanted only to look away, and no outcome seemed fair.
But hearing Clancy’s suicide attempt described as unserious again in the prosecution’s closing argument, I finally understood what has attracted so many to her case: The state is a stand-in for the way women — and especially mothers — are judged, dissected and read in the worst possible light. Don’t get me wrong: What she did is horrible beyond comprehension. But to believe that she did it for wholly selfish reasons ignores the sorry state of postpartum health care and the historical lack of investment or desire to understand women’s bodies and minds.
Even a middle-class, attractive white mother who appeared to be universally beloved and admired by her co-workers and friends before she got sick does not get the benefit of credibility. A woman can slit her wrists, take pills and throw herself out a window, her survival instincts apparently so blunted by her mental illness that she did not even try to stop herself from hitting the ground, and still be painted as a faker, a liar and a tightly regimented manipulator.
The prosecution’s evidence that Clancy is a control freak is that she left detailed instructions for a nanny about what to feed her children, like cutting sweet potatoes into chunks, and that she cared about their sleep schedules. I imagine that if she did not do these things, the prosecution would have painted her as a woman who never cared about her children in the first place.
A woman can ask for psychiatric help multiple times in multiple ways and write the phrase “horrible thoughts” over and over again in her journal, and the prosecution can argue that she’s culpable for her mental state, in part, because she was not a “compliant” patient. Its evidence of noncompliance is that Clancy did not take all of the medication that was prescribed to her, even though she was prescribed 13 medications in the four months leading up to the killings and reported severe side effects with some of them, including unbearable insomnia.
One of the prosecutors, Jennifer Sprague, told jurors not to listen to the defense’s argument that Clancy had received substandard care, because she had paid maternity leave, good health insurance and family support. But pointing out Clancy’s level of relative privilege leaves out crucial context about how poorly postpartum psychosis is understood and how often it is misdiagnosed.
Globally, postpartum health is underresearched and underfunded, despite the fact that every year 40 million women will experience a long-term health problem stemming from giving birth. When we don’t study women’s health adequately, it is so much easier to dismiss and revile mothers when they suffer; in the gap of better-established bodies of knowledge, the cruelest assumptions can grow. With psychosis, it really is possible to go in and out of lucidity, seeming like a normal mother who cared about nap time one moment and being tormented by hallucinated voices in another.
Support for Clancy is not breaking down along the usual culture war lines. Fox News’s Laura Ingraham has been largely sympathetic to Clancy. “She did ask for help over and over again,” Ingraham said on her show on Aug. 13. In contrast, the Republican pundit Matt Walsh, speaking for some portion of people who do not believe Clancy’s defense, called her a “raging narcissist” on X and seemed to doubt the idea that postpartum psychosis exists or that postpartum mental health could cause ugly, intrusive thoughts.
There wasn’t really a way for the State of Massachusetts to argue its case without describing Clancy the way it did. The state’s position is that she was of sound enough mind when she killed her children, so the only path it can follow is one that presumes the worst.
The tragedy of what happened seems to be beyond the black-and-white limits of the justice system. I’m not surprised that the jury of nine women and three men could not come to an agreement about what was going on in Clancy’s mind or what the appropriate punishment might be for her. What appears to be an 11-1 split among the jurors seemed to hinge on two words that are ambiguous: doubt and insanity. Our nation’s psychiatrists cannot even agree on how to classify postpartum psychosis in the first place; if the experts struggle to concur outside the courthouse, it’s tough to imagine that laypeople can reconcile inside it.
I hope Massachusetts does not retry the case, because I don’t think that another jury would be able to come to a different conclusion. Everyone believes Clancy was ill, even if people can’t decide how or if she is culpable. No matter where she ultimately resides, Lindsay Clancy will be in a mental prison for the rest of her life.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
The post I Understand Why a Jury Could Not Convict Lindsay Clancy appeared first on New York Times.
