[Source: Reuters]

A Massachusetts jury heard dueling accounts on Monday for why ​a mother killed her three young children in 2023, a tragedy that a defense lawyer said was due to her ‌suffering from postpartum mental illness and that a prosecutor called a planned murder.

Lindsay Clancy admits that she strangled her three children in January 2023 with exercise bands in the basement of her home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury.

She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in a failed attempt to end ​her own life that left her paralyzed.

During his opening statement in Plymouth County Superior Court, defense attorney Kevin Reddington told jurors that ​Clancy, now 35, had struggled for months with postpartum mental health issues following the birth of her third child.

“This ⁠is a woman that was suffering from psychosis at the time that she went down to that basement,” Reddington said.
He portrayed her as a ​loving mother who was plagued with suicidal thoughts and postpartum mental health issues before the killings, leading her to repeatedly seek treatment from multiple healthcare providers ​who had prescribed her a myriad of drugs that did not help.

“She’s living her own hell,” he said. “She knows what happened with those kids.”

Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham did not dispute that Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been dealing with mental health issues before she killed her children, Cora, 5; ​Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.

But Buckingham said, “This is not a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women,” and ​that instead the case turned on the question of whether Clancy appreciated the wrongfulness of killing her children but chose to do so anyway.

She said the evidence showed ‌Clancy sent ⁠her husband at the time, Patrick, out to pick up a food order after mapping on her phone the time it would take for him to return home so she could work “swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal: to kill.”