Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother accused of strangling her three children in 2023, should be driven to court in a hospital van with members of her medical care team, not transported in a prisoner van, her lawyer, Kevin J. Reddington, told a judge during a recent hearing. If her medical needs are not met, she might kill herself, and if that happens, “it’s on somebody, and it’s not on me,” he warned.
In other words, think of Clancy, who is paralyzed below the sternum, as a vulnerable patient, not as a defendant in a triple murder; and think of the judge and prosecution team as responsible for any consequences connected to the precarious state of her mental health.
As veteran defense lawyer Thomas M. Hoopes explained the optics, if the lawyer’s wishes are granted, “She’s coming in an ambulance, not a van. She’s not a criminal, she’s sick.”
Reddington has said in court papers that he plans to assert the insanity defense, which means he will be trying to convince a jury that Clancy is not criminally responsible for her actions due to a mental disease or defect at the time. Statistically, it’s a tough sell. As the Globe’s Yvonne Abraham recently reported in a series that took up the case of another mother found guilty of killing her two children, of 41 jury trials since 1990 in which a defendant who was charged with first-degree murder raised the insanity defense, juries delivered 36 convictions.
With Clancy, “People will ask, how can any mother in her right mind do this?” Dan Conley, a former Suffolk County district attorney now in private practice at Mintz Law Firm, told me. “But if the prosecution can prove she knew what she was doing and is responsible for her acts, they may get a conviction for first-degree murder.”
A recent ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denying a new trial to a Wayland man who was convicted in 2013 of killing his former girlfriend won’t make success with the insanity defense any easier. In it, the SJC unanimously concluded that Nathaniel Fujita was mentally ill at the time but that his “purposeful and controlled actions before, during, and after the killing demonstrated that he appreciated the criminality or wrongfulness of his conduct and retained the ability to conform his behavior to the law. Not every defendant with a mental illness lacks criminal responsibility for his or her acts.”
While it didn’t create new law, “anecdotally, I think you might see good prosecutors stealing the language from the opinion and the methodology of the decision,” noted legal analyst Greg Henning.
Clancy’s trial, which is scheduled to begin in July, is expected to revolve around the issue of her mental state at the time she allegedly strangled her three young children with exercise bands before severely injuring herself in a suicide attempt. Prosecutors have cited evidence that she planned the attack, for example, by sending her husband to pick up medicine for the children and take-out for dinner at a location that gave her time to kill Cora Clancy, 5, Dawson Clancy, 3, and Callan Clancy, who was 8 months old.
Reddington has said she was struggling with postpartum depression and was overmedicated with 13 different drugs.
If she is acquitted, she would be held at a mental health facility, where a periodic review would determine if she could safely return to the general community. She is currently being held and treated at Tewksbury Hospital.
Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, had what looked in photos like a happy life. In an interview he gave to the New Yorker in October 2024, her husband, Patrick Clancy, said, “I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick.”
Can a jury see Clancy as “someone who got sick” and not as a cold-blooded killer of three helpless little children? Views on mental health and the challenges of motherhood will play a role in the jury’s ultimate verdict.
“I can imagine some sympathy from some people. But three of them?” said Hoopes, referring to Clancy’s children. “[Lindsay Clancy] may be sympathetic, but when the prosecution holds up the photos of the three kids, that’s hard as a juror. “
Jurors, Hoopes said, “are always trying to do the right thing,” which means following the evidence and deciding what is best to protect society.
Reddington told the court his request for a hospital van was about protecting Clancy from herself, that “any sort of custody situation [in a prisoner van] would create a sense of helplessness and loss of control that could trigger mental health responses from her.”
To suggest that’s on the judge is legal stagecraft in the extreme. Courts know how to handle defendants in wheelchairs, such as Harvey Weinstein, or potentially suicidal defendants, such as Nick Reiner, who appeared at his arraignment for the alleged murder of his parents in an anti-suicide vest.
A decision on how Clancy gets to court is expected at the next scheduled hearing on Jan. 27. It will be a first step in framing how she looks to the jury and the world — as a patient and victim, deserving of sympathy, or as a defendant charged with murder.
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