Hung Jury, Open Wound: Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Puts America’s Postpartum Psychosis Blind Spot on Trial

A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial Friday in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother accused of strangling her three young children in January 2023. A jury had failed for a third time to reach a unanimous verdict on whether she was criminally responsible for the killings.The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for most of a week, repeatedly telling Judge William Sullivan that they could not agree. Under Massachusetts law, a judge may send a jury back to deliberate only twice unless jurors themselves consent to keep trying.When the panel came back deadlocked a third time, Mr. Sullivan announced he would declare a mistrial. Ms. Clancy’s attorney immediately asked for time to appeal, calling the decision “a travesty,” and Mr. Sullivan gave him an hour to petition the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for a stay. Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied the request Friday afternoon, and Mr. Sullivan formally declared the mistrial in front of the jury. A status hearing has been set for Sept. 29.The case, which centered on the deaths of five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan, has become the most closely watched test in years of how the American justice system handles a mother accused of killing her own children while allegedly in the grip of severe postpartum mental illness.Ms. Clancy’s defense never disputed that she caused her children’s deaths. Instead, attorney Kevin Reddington argued she was not criminally responsible because she had postpartum psychosis. This rare and fast-moving psychiatric emergency, experts say, is still poorly understood by doctors, jurors and the public alike.The deadlock traced back to a single juror. A note sent to Sullivan on Thursday indicated 11 of the 12 jurors had settled on a verdict, with one holdout who, in the judge’s own reading of the note, had “acknowledged doubt but refuses to apply it to the verdict.”Mr. Reddington pushed to have the juror removed, telling the court the standoff amounted to “a clear and present danger” of someone disregarding the law no matter what the evidence showed. Mr. Sullivan wasn’t convinced. Siding with either camp inside that deliberation room, he told attorneys, wasn’t his job.Retired adjunct law professor at Boston University, John Lu, says the standoff is itself a verdict of sorts on how the legal system treats this illness.“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, underscoring that he suspects part of the neglect traces to the fact that the condition affects only women.A Condition That Moves Too Fast for The System To CatchPsychiatrists who treat the illness say the case exposes exactly why it slips past providers.Postpartum psychosis blends mood symptoms, hallucinations or delusions, and what the vice chair of research in psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Dr. Jennifer Payne, tells the Sun is “a delirium or confusion” that “can wax and wane.” Thus, a woman evaluated during a lucid stretch, Dr. Payne explains, can look composed even while dangerously unwell.Testimony also described Ms. Clancy being prescribed as many as twelve medications in the months before the killings.Moms First founder and CEO Reshma Saujani tells the Sun that scattershot prescribing reflects a system where a new mother “might get screened for postpartum depression in the hospital using a 10-question survey from 1987, and even that only happens about 30 percent of the time,” after which she is largely on her own until a six-week checkup.Meanwhile, clinical psychologist Susan Benjamin Feingold, who helped write Illinois’s 2018 law allowing courts to weigh postpartum psychosis as a mitigating factor, tells the Sun that “in over 30 countries outside the U.S., there are laws placing treatment over punishment” for mothers in this situation, while Illinois is the only American state with such a statute.Others see it differently. Prosecutors have argued from the outset that the killings were calculated rather than the product of psychiatric collapse, alleging at Ms. Clancy’s arraignment that she asked her husband to run errands so she could time being alone with the children and researched how long he would be gone.To that camp, the defense’s psychiatric narrative is a legal strategy and is not proof that Ms. Clancy lacked the capacity to know right from wrong in what many view as premeditated, cold-blooded killings.What Comes NextA mistrial returns the case essentially to where it stood before trial began.Ms. Clancy, who is paralyzed from the waist down after a suicide attempt the night of the killings, will continue to be held at Tewksbury Hospital for court-ordered treatment while prosecutors decide how to proceed.Most legal observers doubt Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz will walk away. His office has built a reputation for prosecuting hard, and a case this politically charged isn’t the kind he’s likely to let go.Prosecutors could also offer a plea to a lesser charge such as manslaughter, though no such negotiation has been signaled publicly. A retrial, if pursued, would start the process over with a new jury and could take months to schedule, extending a case that has already stretched more than three years since the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy.

Hung Jury, Open Wound: Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Puts America’s Postpartum Psychosis Blind Spot on Trial

Hung Jury, Open Wound: Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Puts America’s Postpartum Psychosis Blind Spot on Trial

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