There is no mystery about who killed 5-year-old Cora Clancy, 3-year-old Dawson Clancy and 8-month-old Callan Clancy inside their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on January 24, 2023. Their mother has admitted that she strangled all three children with exercise bands before cutting herself and jumping from a second-story window in an attempt to take her own life.
What the jury must decide is whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for killing them. After more than five weeks of testimony and more than 80 witnesses, jurors entered their fourth day of deliberations Tuesday.
Prosecutors say Clancy was depressed but understood what she was doing, deliberately created an opportunity to be alone with the children and decided they should die with her. Her defense says postpartum psychosis destroyed her ability to understand or control her actions. If the prosecution prevails, Clancy could spend the rest of her life behind bars. If the defense wins, however, an entirely different story begins, and it could continue for decades.
Would she remain confined inside a psychiatric hospital? Could doctors eventually recommend her release? Could she work, remarry, have more children, change her name or leave America altogether? Could she sell her story while Hollywood turns the killings into documentaries and television dramas?
There are precedents for almost every one of those possibilities, and they reveal something important about what an acquittal would actually mean. A jury may have the power to decide that Massachusetts cannot punish Lindsay Clancy as a murderer, but it has no power to make society forget what she did.
