BostonGlobe.com44%
Lindsay Clancy murder trial: Live updates 7%
By Globe Staff29%
8/5/2026, 2:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Framing Effect, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 12.4% saturation with 134 hits. Analysis detected 726 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,084 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 16% and a BS Rank of 7% (28,526 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 93.30% of the article peer group.
Lindsay Clancy murder trial continues with more testimony after agreement could shorten proceedings.
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This story may contain content readers find disturbing or triggering.
For help with postpartum mood disorders, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free, confidential, and 24/7.
Text or call 1-833-TLC-MAMA.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call 988 or go to https://988lifeline.org/ to chat online.
The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother accused of killing her three children, enters its seventh day Wednesday with a half day of testimony.
Before testimony began on Tuesday, Clancy agreed to certain facts in her murder trial for killing her children, an act she says was driven by postpartum psychosis.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said in court that the acknowledgement relates to chain of custody of certain pieces of evidence.
The stipulation should eliminate the need for a number of witnesses to testify, potentially shortening the trial significantly.
So far this week, medical providers who treated Clancy and her children testified.
Jurors also heard entries from journals that investigators seized from Clancy’s home in which she reported feeling overwhelmed after the birth of her third child and suffering from insomnia, anxiety, and depression.
It was the first time they heard evidence related to the defense’s claim that she was suffering from “postpartum psychosis.”
Last week, jurors viewed the home where the children were killed, as well as the two locations her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, went in January 2023, before he returned to find Clancy outside and their children in the home’s basement.
They also heard testimony from Patrick Clancy, who recounted the medications she was taking, her health and demeanor, and the intrusive thoughts she told him she was having about suicide and harming their children.
His anguished 911 call played in court, leaving several members of the jury shaken and fighting back tears.
Clancy, who cut herself and jumped from a second-story window in a failed attempt to end her life after killing her children, remains paralyzed from the waist down.
She has been held without bail at Tewksbury State Hospital where she continues to receive treatment.
Should jurors acquit her in Plymouth Superior Court, she would not go free but would be sent to a state psychiatric hospital where she’d come up for periodic reviews to determine whether she can live safely in the community.
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Earlier this year, Patrick and Lindsay Clancy filed separate lawsuits alleging malpractice and negligence against the providers who treated Lindsay for her postpartum mental health issues.
The civil lawsuits, filed in Norfolk Superior Court, say the providers and their employers failed to properly diagnose and monitor Lindsay Clancy, instead prescribing her a mix of psychiatric medications that worsened her condition and eventually led to the deaths of her children.
Here’s what to know about the two lawsuits.
Watch the trial live:
A surgeon who treated Clancy in the hospital testified Tuesday that her neck and wrist injuries were “superficial,” echoing the assessments of other medical providers.
Dr.
Cristina Carpio, a surgeon at South Shore Hospital, said Clancy, who jumped from a second-floor window of her home after strangling her children, suffered “complex fractures in her spine.”
She said Clancy did not have deep cuts on her wrists.
Authorities have said Clancy cut her wrists and neck before jumping from the window.
In other testimony on Tuesday, State Police Trooper Joseph Rabbitt, said he recovered four pill bottles from the kitchen of the Clancy home on the night of the killings, and that Clancy’s then-husband, Patrick Clancy, provided nine additional bottles of prescription medication to investigators on Feb. 6, 2023, while accompanied by his lawyer David Meier.
Prosecutors have said Lindsay Clancy stopped taking a number of her prescriptions, but Patrick Clancy testified that her prescriptions were often adjusted or terminated based on how she reacted to them.
“I’m completely overwhelmed trying to take care of the 3 kids.
I feel like I’m drowning everyday,” Lindsay Clancy wrote in an undated entry read in court on Monday by State Police Trooper Cory Melo, who was part of a team that searched the Clancy home after the slayings on Jan.
24, 2023.
About two months before, Clancy wrote, “It’s like I’m so desperate to get a mental break taking care of everybody that my mind is trying to feel what’s physically wrong with me.”
Clancy’s attorney suggested during cross-examination of Melo that prosecutors had singled out excerpts that failed to capture the context of Clancy’s postpartum mental health illness and questioned Melo about other entries she had written.
Clancy wrote that she felt she had “horrible PTSD” and felt incredibly guilty for sleep training Callan, who was born in May 2023, when he was a week shy of 4 months old, even though he was still a happy baby and the doctor assured her he was OK.
“Hearing him cry for 1 plus hours and not intervening just about killed me,” Clancy wrote, adding that she had told her husband, Patrick, “I want to die,” while Callan was crying.
“I would also drive him around for car naps for hours everyday,” Clancy wrote, adding that she felt she had handled sleep training wrong.
“I now have horrible insomnia and anxiety which is causing depression.
I have no appetite.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I want help.
I want to be well.”
In the United States, only Illinois has adopted a law that grants special consideration to mothers suffering from postpartum mental illness who kill their children —<b> </b>but only during sentencing after a guilty finding.
Massachusetts and several other states have considered similar laws.<b> </b>The first-degree murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for killing her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months; has revived debate about whether states should adopt some version of the nearly century-old English law.
“The criminal justice system needs to be updated to understand this illness,” said Jessie Colbert, coordinator of the Massachusetts Mind the Gap Coalition, a network working to promote perinatal mental health.
“There needs to be some more clarity and more fairness.”
A mother slaying her own children is among the most appalling crimes imaginable, instinctually repugnant.
Yet debates about how to ensure fair treatment under the law are nuanced, raising big questions about culpability, mental illness, equity, and stereotypes about women that have persisted for centuries, experts said.
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6speakers32%attributed speech733writer words
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100%flagged-word coverageNational Maternal Mental Health Hotline
17 attributed words4.8% of attributed speech57% writer coverage
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