After five weeks of testimony, a Mᴀssachusetts jury is now deciding whether a former labor-and-delivery nurse who killed her three children was a mother overtaken by postpartum psychosis — or a woman who still knew right from wrong.

As of the latest reports on Friday, August 28, 2026, the 12 jurors in Plymouth Superior Court — nine women and three men — had finished a second day of deliberations without a verdict. They asked to review two bags of prescription bottles and a knife connected to Clancy’s suicide attempt that same night. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, told reporters she was “very sad, scared.” No decision had been announced by Saturday.

This is not a trial about whether the children died at her hands. Both sides agree that on January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, inside the family’s Duxbury home, then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. The fight is over criminal responsibility: did a mental disease or defect rob her of the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of what she was doing, or to control her conduct?

How the case reached this point
Jury selection began in late July. Opening statements and more than 70 witnesses followed. Jurors visited the former family home. They heard Patrick Clancy describe coming back from a short errand to a silent house, an open bedroom window, blood, and his injured wife on the lawn. They then heard his 911 call: first that his wife had tried to kill herself, then the moment he found the children in the basement and shouted that she had killed them. Lindsay Clancy wept at the defense table as the recording played.

Earlier in the trial, jurors also heard diary entries from the months before the killings. Clancy wrote about insomnia, guilt over sleep training and breastfeeding, disconnection from her baby and husband, and “crazy brain fog.” One November 2022 note said she was so desperate for a mental break that her mind was “trying to find something physically wrong” with her. Another said she wanted help and wanted to be well. Those pages became a dual-purpose exhibit: the defense treated them as proof of a collapsing mind; prosecutors treated them as evidence she was still organized enough to document her days.

What each side asked the jury to believe
Reddington’s closing argument framed Clancy as a nurse, daughter, wife, and “darn good mother” who reached out for help and did not get enough of it. He blamed a shifting mix of psychiatric drugs and what he called “lousy medical care,” and he attacked the police investigation and some of the state’s experts. He placed coins on the prosecution table as a theatrical jab at evidence he said had been overplayed. His last theme was simple: she was suffering from a disease or defect, and it is the Commonwealth’s burden to prove otherwise.

Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague did not deny the mental illness or the suicide attempt. She said those facts were not the issue. The issue, she told jurors, was whether Clancy knew right from wrong and could conform her behavior to the law on the night of January 24. Sprague argued Clancy had more care and family support than many mothers receive, that she was not always fully candid with clinicians, and that her actions that day — sending her husband out, the sequence in which the children were killed, and later accounts of a commanding voice — showed planning and awareness, not a mind that had lost contact with reality. She described the children as a “protective factor” that Clancy believed she had to remove in order to end her own misery, and she called the killings a choice, however unbearable that idea is.

The legal test in Mᴀssachusetts
Mᴀssachusetts does not use the everyday label “insanity defense.” The formal doctrine is lack of criminal responsibility. Once the defense raises it, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant either did not have a mental disease or defect, or still had substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct and to obey the law. A formal medical diagnosis is not required; jurors decide whether such a disease or defect existed. A diagnosis, even of psychosis, does not automatically erase responsibility.

That is why this jury’s form is unusually broad. For each child, they can choose:

not guilty
not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility
guilty of first-degree murder (deliberate premeditation, or extreme atrocity and cruelty)
guilty of second-degree murder
guilty of manslaughter
First-degree murder carries mandatory life without parole. A lack-of-responsibility finding is an acquittal of the crime, but it is not a walk out the courthouse door. Mᴀssachusetts law then sends the person into a civil-commitment process at a secure psychiatric facility, typically beginning with a period of observation, with later reviews before any release.

Why the deliberations matter beyond this courtroom
The case has drawn national attention because it sits at the intersection of postpartum mental illness, medication management, and the rarest and most feared outcome of a maternal psychiatric crisis. Prosecutors have repeatedly told the jury that the medical system is not on trial. The defense has argued that the system’s failures cannot be separated from what happened in that house.

Jurors have now asked to look again at the pill bottles and the knife. That request does not reveal which way they are leaning. It only shows they are still working through the physical evidence of both the killings and the suicide attempt — the two events the law requires them to interpret together, through the lens of Clancy’s mental state that night.

Until they return, the only settled facts remain the ones both sides already conceded: three children are ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, their mother is paralyzed, and a Mᴀssachusetts jury must decide whether the law treats that night as murder, a lesser homicide, or a tragedy for which she is not criminally responsible.