Judge rejects bid to clear Lindsay Clancy of murder charges after mistrial

A Massachusetts judge overseeing Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has rejected a request from her lawyers to declare her not guilty, ruling that prosecutors presented enough evidence for a jury to find her responsible for killing her three young children in 2023, according to Reuters.

Clancy’s lawyers had urged Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth to conclude that prosecutors failed to prove she could be held criminally responsible for her children’s deaths, citing what they described as mental illness. Sullivan had declared a mistrial on September 4 after the jury deadlocked.

No one at trial disputed that Clancy strangled her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan, with exercise bands on January 24, 2023, in the basement of their Duxbury home. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in an apparent suicide attempt, leaving her paralyzed.

This week, Clancy’s lawyers argued that prosecutors had presented no direct evidence proving she carried out the killings, and that the evidence instead showed she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis at the time, warranting a not-guilty verdict by reason of insanity.

Sullivan disagreed, saying prosecutors had presented sufficient physical and circumstantial evidence for a jury to conclude Clancy was criminally responsible. He pointed to testimony from prosecution experts who said Clancy did not lack the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct, adding that it was within the jury’s discretion to give little weight to defense experts who disagreed.