A Plymouth County jury spent seven days locked in a room, trying to decide whether Lindsay Clancy was guilty of murdering her three children or whether the Duxbury, Massachusetts, mother was instead in the throes of postpartum psychosis. Eleven jurors opted for not guilty while one held out, forcing Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial.
The ripple effects of the case, however, are already being felt far and wide.
“There is no question that press coverage of famous, controversial cases can cause seismic shifts in what happens afterward,” a professor at New York Law School, Michael Perlin, tells me. He points to the aftermath of John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Reagan as the clearest historical parallel.
Mr. Hinckley’s 1982 acquittal by reason of insanity set off a wave of state-level reforms that tightened the insanity defense nationwide and led Congress to shift the burden of proof onto defendants in federal cases through the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984.
After the Clancy case, medical experts warn, there’s a real and growing risk of a mother who admits to intrusive thoughts or a dark moment ending up in a hospital bed she didn’t ask for; losing her newborn to child protective service; or even facing legal action. That fear is already taking hold in exam rooms far from Plymouth County.
The Fear of Overtreating
At the trial, much of Ms. Clancy’s defense was aimed squarely her doctors. In his closing argument, the lead defense attorney, Kevin Reddington ,argued that the health care system had doped her up on more than a dozen medications for generalized anxiety disorder, postpartum depression, a major depressive episode and insomnia, without properly treating what was underneath.
He told the jury it was that overmedication, not premeditation, that triggered the killings.
