The Mᴀssachusetts jury deliberating whether Lindsay Clancy bears criminal responsibility in the killings of her three children also will have to weigh inconsistencies in the evidence presented at trial.

Patrick Clancy, Lindsay Clancy’s former husband, testified that he went out to pick up food and medicine. He returned to find Lindsay Clancy injured outside, claiming she jumped from a second-floor window. He found the children in the basement with exercise bands around their necks.

Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings. Witnesses testified during the trial that Lindsay Clancy reported hearing a male voice that told her to kill the children and then herself.

Here are some of the inconsistencies in the evidence presented at trial:

Did Lindsay Clancy speak with Patrick Clancy after he found her?
Patrick Clancy, the prosecution’s first witness, testified that he came home to find the house quiet. He looked around and yelled down to the basement. Upstairs, he found the door to his bedroom locked. Once he was able to get it open, he found blood sprayed everywhere “almost like with a hose.”

He ran downstairs and outside, where he found Lindsay Clancy beneath the window, he testified.

“I said ‘what happened?’” Patrick Clancy recalled asking her.

“I tried to kill myself,” Lindsay Clancy responded, he testified.

Patrick Clancy said he then asked Lindsay Clancy where the children were.

“She said ‘they’re in the basement,’” he recalled.

Lindsay Clancy did not indicate the children needed help, or were in danger or that they were injured, Patrick Clancy confirmed under questioning by the prosecution.

Reddington has argued the conversation couldn’t have taken place because of the injuries Lindsay Clancy suffered in her attempt to die by suicide.

He pointed to the 911 call that was played for jurors in which Lindsay Clancy can be heard but it’s unclear what she said. The recording of the call was played in court but was not released publicly or livestreamed under an order by Judge William Sullivan.

“You heard the 911 tape,” Reddington told the jury during his closing arguments Thursday. “You draw the inference whether or not there’s a conversation about — where the children are, tried to kill myself, the kids are in the basement — all that.”

The prosecution sought to portray Lindsay Clancy’s words that the kids were in the basement as evidence that she wasn’t acting under the command of a voice.

“It’s not, ‘I heard a voice, I was compelled to do this, I didn’t want to do this. Go help the kids, they’re hurt, they’re in the basement, go save them,’” ᴀssistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague told the jury. “No. It’s, ‘I tried to kill myself and the kids are in the basement.’”

Sprague argued that Lindsay Clancy’s condition was deteriorating, but that she was able to make sounds and communicate.

She said the 911 call revealed Patrick Clancy was talking to Lindsay Clancy, and was answering the 911 dispatchers about what she said. “Even if we can’t hear her clearly, and we can’t understand what she was saying, he could.”

When did Lindsay Clancy strangle her children?
The defense and prosecution also were at odds over the exact time frame in which Lindsay Clancy strangled the children.

Prosecutors contend she killed the three children immediately after Patrick Clancy left to pick up food and medicine. Pointing to a phone call Patrick Clancy made to Lindsay Clancy at 5:33 p.m. while he was out, and data that showed her phone going upstairs to the bedroom about three minutes after the call ended, Sprague argued that other time frames didn’t make sense.

She argued that Lindsay Clancy lied and presented herself as normal on the call.

“When she got the call from him, she had already strangled them,” Sprague told the jury. “And she didn’t tell him. She didn’t ask for help. She didn’t say, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’” Sprague said.

The prosecution argued Lindsay Clancy wrapped exercise bands around each of her children’s necks and continued strangling them for 1 to 2 minutes after they lost consciousness.

But Reddington argued the bands had been knotted around the children’s necks, pointing to Patrick Clancy’s testimony.

He suggested Lindsay Clancy’s phone could have simply been left in the bedroom.

“Was it left on the bed and left there for 20 minutes?” Reddington asked the jury. “She could have been anywhere in the house during all that period of time.”

How did Lindsay Clancy strangle her children?
Testimony confirmed that Lindsay Clancy strangled her children. But there are differing versions presented during the trial on how it was done.

According to Patrick Clancy in his testimony before Sprague, he found the children with the exercise bands “tied around their necks like when you tie your shoes but don’t do the bow,” and then he agreed that he removed the bands from each child’s neck and attempted to perform CPR.

Sprague later maintained during her closing arguments that Lindsay Clancy placed the band around each child’s neck and held it тιԍнт for 30 seconds until they went limp, and then kept strangling each child for one to two minutes “to make sure they were ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.”

Sprague said Lindsay Clancy then left the children on the floor “with the bands around their necks.”

But less than a week before, Sprague had argued with defense expert Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, the former chief medical examiner in Rhode Island, demonstrating that the bands couldn’t have been wrapped around the children’s necks because they immediately sprang apart.

“There was no testimony, no evidence, nothing showed they were knotted and left there; they weren’t tied in a knot and left around their necks, according to any of the evidence, correct?” Sprague said to Laposata.

Reddington called Sprague’s demonstration an “if the glove doesn’t fit” moment, referring to the O.J. Simpson trial, in his closing arguments.

Did Lindsay Clancy slash the window screen?
Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a reʙuттal witness for the prosecution, testified under cross-examination that Lindsay Clancy told him she had slashed the window screen with a knife. However, an evidence pH๏τo from the scene that night shows the window screen was not cut or slashed but had been pushed upward.

Reddington said Lindsay Clancy’s recollection that the screen was slashed was a “delusion.”

“She was in a psychosis when she thought that,” Reddington told the jury during his closing argument.

SOURCE: https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/lindsay-clancy-trial-evidence-inconsistencies-22407714.php