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Lindsay Clancy’s attorney sought to blunt prosecutors’ portrayal of the Massachusetts mother as organized and calculating, pressing a hospital psychiatrist to acknowledge that a person can communicate, make plans and carry them out while experiencing psychosis.
“People can communicate and plan and act on plans even if they’re in the middle of a psychosis, right?” defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Dr. Sejal Shah Monday.
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“Yes,” Shah replied.
Reddington then asked whether someone must be “drooling and stumbling and unable to walk and talk” to be psychotic. Shah said no and agreed that a person in psychosis can still communicate with others.
Clancy is charged in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, inside the family’s Duxbury home. Her defense maintains she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors argue she acted deliberately and understood what she was doing.
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Seth J. Zuckerman, a celebrity criminal defense attorney, former New York City prosecutor and founder of Zuckerman Legal Group, said the case will turn on Clancy’s mental state at the precise time the children were killed.
“What was in her mind at the exact time that she killed her children?” Zuckerman told Fox News Digital.
He said prosecutors have focused on Patrick Clancy’s trips to CVS and a local restaurant, along with his communications with his wife, to portray her as lucid during the critical time frame.
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Shah, an associate chief of psychiatry and medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, first evaluated Clancy five days after the killings.
She testified that Clancy was confused, made mistakes during a cognitive assessment and had experienced visual hallucinations after spinal surgery.
Shah diagnosed delirium and said possible causes included anesthesia, oxygen problems and an elevated heart rate. The symptoms resolved by the following day, Shah said.
During later evaluations, Clancy appeared calm and cooperative, displayed organized and goal-directed thinking and denied hallucinations and suicidal or homicidal intent.
Reddington used cross-examination to argue those observations did not establish Clancy was free of psychosis at the time of the killings.
“Was she, in your opinion and your experience, an honest patient telling you what her symptoms were, if any?” Reddington asked.
“Yes,” Shah said.
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“She didn’t go off and try to exaggerate to you and say, ‘I’m seeing visions and I’m hearing voices,’ and suicidal ideation and homicidal ideas,” Reddington said. “She didn’t say any of those things to you, did she?”
“Correct,” Shah said.
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“So this is not, in your opinion, someone who was trying to exaggerate her conditions for some legal reason, correct?” Reddington asked.
“No,” Shah replied.
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Zuckerman called that concession “extremely helpful to the defense,” although not decisive.
“They want to portray her as someone who wasn’t manipulative, who didn’t have some grand plan,” he said.
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On redirect, prosecutors challenged the defense’s portrayal by focusing on Clancy’s medication history.
Shah agreed Clancy was not taking every psychiatric medication discussed at the same time and said she had not known some prescriptions were barely used or untouched.
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Shah also confirmed that Clancy requested do-not-resuscitate status after surviving her fall from a second-story window. The hospital did not immediately change her status because of the reported suicide attempt.
Shah said Clancy later agreed her mental health should be stabilized before reconsidering the request.
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Zuckerman said Monday’s cross-examination helped the defense by supplying testimony that Clancy could appear lucid at some moments while experiencing severe psychiatric symptoms at others.
Still, he said its value will depend on whether the defense can connect those symptoms to the moment the children were killed.
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“The burden is on the prosecutors to show that she was criminally responsible at the time of the deaths,” Zuckerman said. “That is unique to Massachusetts, and I think it’s beneficial to the defense here.”
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Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation. Judge William Sullivan told jurors that the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible when the children were killed.