How a ‘Not Responsible’ Verdict for Lindsay Clancy Could Set Back Every Working Mother in America

Six days. Nearly 30 hours of deliberation. Two separate notes to the judge saying, in effect, we cannot agree.The jury deciding whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible — or can claim postpartum psychosis as an excuse for strangling her three children — filed back into a Plymouth, Massachusetts, Superior Court deliberation room Thursday morning for a sixth day. Twice this week, the jurors told Judge William F. Sullivan that they were stuck. Each time, Judge Sullivan has sent the panel of nine women and three men back to keep trying.A verdict here, however, is not only a legal outcome. Some advocates warn it is shaping up to be a referendum on what the country is willing to believe about mothers who hold power.If Mrs. Clancy is found not criminally responsible, critics worry less that she walks free. They say it is more what her freedom will cost every other woman — a pilot second-guessed after a rough landing, a candidate for the nation’s highest office asked whether motherhood makes her judgment a liability.Compassion for one woman, some fear, could curdle into permanent suspicion of all of them. If she is convicted instead, the danger runs the other way, in which mothers experiencing symptoms of postpartum psychosis grow too afraid of prosecution to ask for help at all.Both worries are shaping the fight inside the courtroom.A Battle of Dueling ExpertsProsecutors have argued Mrs. Clancy acted with intention and clear-headed planning the night she killed her children, sending her then-husband, Patrick, out on errands that cleared the house first. The defense does not dispute the killings; it argues Mrs. Clancy cannot be held criminally responsible because she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe psychiatric break that can follow childbirth.With the underlying facts largely undisputed, the trial has become a fight over dueling psychiatric experts and Mrs. Clancy’s state of mind that night.Even a favorable verdict would not simply free Mrs. Clancy. A finding of no criminal responsibility would send her into a mental institution for an extended stay, with her eventual release decided by state-appointed clinicians who tend to side with prosecutors rather than defendants, according to a retired judge who now teaches as an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Law, Jack Lu.“In my opinion, the Clancy case is an announcement to the country and to the legal system that we have given grossly inadequate attention and credit to postpartum mental illness, depression, and psychosis,” Mr. Lu tells The New York Sun.“That this defense has such traction with the jury — at a minimum, possibly hanging the jury — says we have neglected this severe mental health affliction, possibly in part because it only affects women.”Mr. Lu isn’t alone in making that argument. Roughly two dozen countries — Britain, Canada, and Australia among them — already have laws that treat mothers who kill during the postpartum period differently than other homicide defendants, directing them toward psychiatric treatment instead of prison.Britain’s version, the Infanticide Act, has stood since 1938 and covers the first full year after childbirth. The United States has no federal equivalent. Only Illinois offers mothers any special consideration for postpartum psychosis or depression, even though that applies solely at sentencing after a conviction, not to the question of guilt itself.The void in the American legal system reflects a wider pattern, as Mr. Lu points out.Women were not required to be included in federally funded clinical research until 1993. Conditions that disproportionately affect women, including postpartum psychiatric illness, still draw a fraction of the funding their toll would suggest.Over the past decade, just 8.8 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s grant spending went toward women’s health research. That share is falling, according to a congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.In addition, legal analysts have long noted that the insanity defense is genuinely difficult to win nationally, raised in only about one percent of felony cases and succeeding roughly a quarter of the time. Massachusetts, however, places the burden of proving sanity on prosecutors, a structure that could favor Mrs. Clancy.The case has drawn more attention than even the lawyers involved expected. Mrs. Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, has reportedly said he did not anticipate the international spotlight the case would draw, calling it a sign of how deeply the story of a devoted nurse accused of killing her own children has struck a nerve, particularly among women.Crowds have gathered outside the Plymouth courthouse in support of Mrs. Clancy, many dressed in pink under a demonstration organizers have called “Stand in Peace for Lindsay,” holding signs and calling for greater attention to postpartum mental health.Whichever way the jury turns, the country will be watching to see which fear wins out — sympathy for a mother in crisis or suspicion of every mother who comes after her.Ongoing Depression or Acute Psychosis“A hung jury on an insanity defense usually reflects the gap between the legal standard and lay intuition, not confusion about the facts,” a professor of law at the University of Texas, Rachel Rebouché, tells the Sun.A not-guilty verdict, she continues, “could shift disclosure norms, making it marginally more legitimate for women to name postpartum struggles without fear it reads as unfitness.”Ms. Rebouché also cautions the opposite is just as possible. High-profile cases may make women “more guarded, worried that any admission of postpartum distress could someday be used against them, professionally or legally, however remote that risk is,” she says.That argument is already making the rounds in the debate around Mrs. Clancy’s case. Several have argued that Mrs. Clancy’s awareness of her actions suggest she was mentally stable enough to plan it and therefore is not suffering from postpartum psychosis. Conservative political commentator Sana Ebrahimi Ledene noted on social media that If Mrs. Clancy is found not responsible for the murders of her children, women will forever be doubted about their emotional stability, and it will be used against them. “Female pilot? Cool. Now the first thing people will ask is whether she’s hormonal, postpartum, or one bad night from crashing a plane into a mountain. Female president? You want the nuclear codes in the hands of someone who can snap and then call it “a psychosis”? That’s the door this verdict opens. And it won’t close,” she posted. But a professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, Susan Hatters Friedman, tells the Sun that the biggest misconception, according to some mental health experts, about postpartum psychosis is that it is the equivalent of an extreme case of depression.“It’s a distinct, rapid-onset psychiatric emergency,” Dr. Friedman says, underscoring that proper treatment “helps prevent tragedies like infanticide and suicide.”Dr. Friedman adds that while the psychosis is treatable, many new mothers experiencing symptoms will avoid seeking care out of fear that “they’ll have their baby taken away.”That wasn’t the case for Mrs. Clancy, who repeatedly sought help for what she recognized was an emergent issue. In the months before the killings, Mrs. Clancy saw multiple psychiatrists, called a suicide hotline, went to the emergency room, and was turned away from inpatient treatment. She was placed on 13 different medications over four months as providers tried, and largely failed, to get ahead of her symptoms, a pattern one perinatal mental health expert testified reflects a broader failure of coordination among providers who rarely communicated with one another.“People think postpartum psychosis can only happen to bad mothers,” Ms. Saujani surmises. “It could, in fact, have been them. It could have been you. Lindsay Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse. She was, by all accounts, a good mother. She asked for help, more than once. She wasn’t a bad mother; she was a mother who was cared for badly.”What Comes NextThe judge could declare a mistrial if the jury is deadlocked after the dynamite charge. Prosecutors must then decide whether to retry Mrs. Clancy, drop the charges or offer a plea deal. None of these options, however, will resolve the legal question.Separately, Mrs. Clancy has filed a civil lawsuit against the medical providers who treated her before the killings, writing in the filing that she “lost all control” and heard a voice in her head, litigation that stays open regardless of how the criminal case ends.For now, the jury is still deliberating. The courthouse hallway outside is too crowded for its benches, filled with reporters and spectators waiting to see whether 12 people can agree on what was happening inside one mother’s mind.That verdict, whenever it comes, won’t stay inside this courtroom. It will follow the next female who tells her boss she’s pregnant, the next mother too afraid to tell her doctor how she’s really doing, and the next woman looking for absolution for killing her children. Whatever the jury decides, Ms. Saujani emphasizes the outcome of a single case will not be enough on its own. “We can’t just hope things will change,” Ms. Saujani adds. “One verdict alone cannot rewrite how this country talks about its mothers. We have to do the work every day to shift the narrative.”

How a ‘Not Responsible’ Verdict for Lindsay Clancy Could Set Back Every Working Mother in America

How a ‘Not Responsible’ Verdict for Lindsay Clancy Could Set Back Every Working Mother in America

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