Latest Trial Update — 15 September 2026: Mistrial, an 11–1 Jury Split, the Rule 25 Application and President Trump’s Refusal to Intervene
Much has changed since I last updated this article on 25 August 2026.
The Lindsay Clancy trial has now ended — but not with a verdict.
On 4 September 2026, after a trial lasting nearly six weeks and approximately seven days of jury deliberations, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial because the jury could not reach a unanimous decision on whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan.
The result is legally important because a mistrial is neither a conviction nor an acquittal. Clancy remains charged with three counts of first-degree murder, and the Commonwealth may in principle seek to try her again unless the proceedings are terminated by some other lawful mechanism. Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz has not yet publicly committed himself to a second trial. Clancy remains confined at a state psychiatric facility while the next stage of the case is determined.
Eleven jurors apparently favoured a finding of no criminal responsibility
What emerged after the mistrial has made the outcome considerably more extraordinary.
Jurors who subsequently spoke publicly have said that the final division was 11–1 in favour of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
That was never converted into a legal verdict because Massachusetts requires unanimity.
According to the jury foreperson and other jurors interviewed after the trial, the sole holdout juror at one stage acknowledged having reasonable doubt but nevertheless would not join the others in returning the proposed verdict. Those statements are, of course, accounts given by individual jurors after their discharge rather than findings made by the court, and they should be described with that qualification. But they demonstrate just how close the case came to ending very differently.
This is also a useful reminder of something easily forgotten amid the emotion surrounding the case.
An 11–1 split does not legally make Clancy “almost acquitted”. There was no verdict.
Yet it plainly matters when considering the practical, ethical and evidential wisdom of putting substantially the same case before another jury.
If eleven citizens who heard approximately six weeks of evidence were ultimately unpersuaded that the Commonwealth had proved criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt, a prosecutor contemplating a retrial must ask more than whether another prosecution is technically permissible.
The harder question is whether it is justifiable.
The defence is now asking the judge to end the prosecution without a second trial
Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has responded to the mistrial by asking Judge Sullivan to enter a required finding of not guilty rather than make Clancy endure a second trial.
Massachusetts Rule of Criminal Procedure 25 is important here. The rule permits a trial judge, where the prosecution’s evidence is legally insufficient to sustain a conviction, to enter a finding of not guilty. It also permits the issue to be addressed after a jury has been discharged without returning a verdict. Massachusetts’ official rule expressly recognises this judicial power following the discharge of a jury.
Reddington’s argument is essentially that, taking the evidential record as a whole, the Commonwealth failed to establish criminal responsibility sufficiently to justify another prosecution. Contemporary reporting states that the application asks Judge Sullivan to find Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility and thereby spare her another trial.
A hearing is presently scheduled for 29 September 2026.
That hearing may therefore become considerably more consequential than an ordinary post-mistrial status conference. It may determine whether the Commonwealth receives another opportunity to prosecute Clancy before a new jury or whether the case is judicially brought to an end.
Until then, it remains important not to write about Clancy as though she has either been convicted or acquitted.
Neither has happened.
Then came the extraordinary request for President Trump to pardon her
After the mistrial, Reddington took the unusual step of publicly appealing to President Donald Trump.
Speaking on national television, he asked President Trump to consider Clancy, her circumstances and what she had endured, and to consider granting her a pardon.
The request immediately created headlines.
Legally, however, there was an elementary constitutional difficulty.
The President of the United States cannot pardon Lindsay Clancy for these charges.
Article II, section 2 of the United States Constitution empowers a President to grant reprieves and pardons only for “Offences against the United States”. The Congressional Constitution Annotated expressly confirms that presidential clemency reaches federal crimes, not offences prosecuted under state law. The United States Department of Justice states the point equally plainly: the President has no authority to grant clemency for a state conviction.
Clancy is being prosecuted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Massachusetts criminal law.
Her case is therefore outside the presidential pardon power.
In Massachusetts, executive clemency for state offences lies with the Governor of Massachusetts, acting with the advice and consent of the Governor’s Council. The Massachusetts Parole Board acts as the Advisory Board of Pardons in that process.
There is an additional problem at present: Clancy has not been convicted.
Governor Maura Healey has accordingly declined to speculate about pardoning her and has pointed out that the existing Massachusetts clemency mechanism concerns a conviction which, in Clancy’s case, does not presently exist.
Trump has now declined to intervene
President Trump was subsequently asked directly about Reddington’s appeal.
On 13 September 2026, Trump indicated that he would not intervene, describing the Clancy case as a “state situation” rather than a federal one. He characterised the entire matter as deeply sad and observed, in substance, that there was no winner in a tragedy involving the deaths of three children.
It would therefore be slightly inaccurate to describe Trump’s response simply as a discretionary “refusal to pardon Lindsay Clancy”.
There was never a valid federal pardon available for him to grant.
The more accurate legal description is that President Trump declined to intervene and acknowledged the constitutional limit upon presidential clemency in a state criminal prosecution.
That distinction is not pedantry.
Federalism matters.
A President does not acquire authority over state criminal proceedings merely because a particular case has become nationally prominent or because defence counsel makes an appeal directly to the White House.
Whatever one’s view of Trump, Clancy, her lawyer or the prosecution, the constitutional boundary is quite straightforward.
What, then, was Reddington trying to achieve?
Reddington is plainly an experienced criminal advocate, and there is little reason to suppose he was unaware of this constitutional limitation.
His public appeal is therefore better understood as political advocacy than as an orthodox clemency application.
Reddington subsequently acknowledged that the President could not legally pardon a Massachusetts state charge, but expressed hope that Trump might exercise political influence concerning whether the prosecution should continue. Reporting has suggested that Reddington hoped presidential attention might encourage District Attorney Tim Cruz to reconsider a second prosecution or entertain some resolution short of another first-degree murder trial.
Whether that was wise advocacy is another question.
There is something uncomfortable about inviting federal political pressure into an unresolved state homicide prosecution.
Prosecutorial discretion certainly permits a District Attorney to reconsider whether another trial serves the public interest. But that decision ought ideally to arise from the evidence, the legal standard, the views of those properly affected by the prosecution and the administration of justice — rather than partisan alignment or pressure from Washington.
One may sympathise with the defence’s objective without approving every mechanism used to achieve it.
The lone-juror controversy should not become another trial by social media
The mistrial has unfortunately created yet another social-media spectacle.
Public attention rapidly turned towards identifying and scrutinising the single juror who declined to join the other eleven. Some jurors themselves have spoken publicly, and considerable commentary has emerged concerning the holdout juror.
I do not believe it is helpful to convert that juror into the next defendant in the court of TikTok.
A juror is entitled to disagree.
If there were genuine misconduct or refusal to follow the court’s directions, that is a matter for proper legal examination. It is not an invitation for the public to dox, threaten or harass someone because his view prevented a preferred verdict.
Indeed, Judge Sullivan has now indefinitely sealed the names of the jurors, citing the extraordinary public attention, safety concerns and incidents involving jurors being recorded or identified without their consent.
That development rather painfully vindicates one of the concerns I expressed when I first wrote this article.
The internet has repeatedly tried to turn this tragedy into content.
First there were mothers placing their own children into “Same, Lindsay” videos.
Then there were competing camps outside the courthouse.
Now the jury itself risks becoming material for online punishment and entertainment.
The law cannot function if jurors believe an unpopular decision will result in their private lives being excavated by hundreds of thousands of strangers.
The mistrial does not answer the moral question either
I have found my original reaction to this case largely unchanged by the verdict that never came.
As a lawyer, I remain convinced that the central question cannot be reduced to whether Clancy physically planned what she did.
A psychotic person can plan.
A person who is mentally ill can also remain criminally responsible.
Both propositions are true.
The juridical task is determining on which side of that terrible boundary this particular defendant stood at the particular moment these children died.
Eleven jurors apparently concluded that the prosecution had not carried its burden on criminal responsibility.
One did not.
That single disagreement was enough to prevent a verdict.
This may frustrate those convinced that the answer is obvious, whatever answer they favour. But unanimity in a serious criminal prosecution exists precisely because the State’s power to punish must not depend upon what is merely probable or popular.
And still: Cora, Dawson and Callan
The mistrial has inevitably shifted enormous attention towards Clancy, her lawyers, the holdout juror, President Trump and the possibility of another trial.
I want to resist allowing that to happen completely.
Cora was five.
Dawson was three.
Callan was eight months old.
Their mother may have been experiencing catastrophic psychosis.
The health system may have failed spectacularly.
The prosecution may now have legitimate reason to reconsider whether another six-week trial serves justice.
The defence may ultimately succeed in persuading Judge Sullivan that the evidence cannot lawfully sustain another prosecution.
All of those questions deserve serious examination.
But the children remain dead.
Compassion for Clancy does not require their disappearance.
Equally, honouring their lives does not require pretending that severe mental illness is morally or legally irrelevant.
That is precisely the difficult territory which criminal-responsibility law exists to navigate.
What Pakistan should notice now
For Pakistani lawyers, the post-mistrial developments make the comparative lesson even stronger.
An equivalent Pakistani proceeding under section 84 of the Pakistan Penal Code would place enormous importance upon forensic psychiatric evidence addressing the accused’s mental condition at the moment of the act.
Yet Pakistan’s statutory language remains more cognitively constrained than the Massachusetts test discussed earlier in this article.
The Clancy trial demonstrates why that matters.
The difficult cases are not usually cases involving someone obviously detached from every aspect of reality.
They are cases involving defendants who can speak, plan, organise and conceal while nevertheless operating within a profoundly pathological understanding of what they are doing.
Modern criminal law must be capable of understanding that distinction without transforming mental illness into an automatic defence.
Pakistan should also notice what happens when psychiatric questions are first neglected medically and then forced to be resolved retrospectively in a murder trial.
By then, the legal system is attempting to reconstruct a mind after irreversible tragedy.
Prevention is both more humane and more just.
Where matters stand on 15 September 2026
The position can therefore be stated with some precision.
Lindsay Clancy has not been acquitted.
She has not been convicted.
Her first trial ended in a mistrial on 4 September 2026 after the jury failed to reach unanimity; post-trial accounts indicate an 11–1 division favouring lack of criminal responsibility.
The prosecution has not yet publicly committed to retrying her.
The defence has asked Judge Sullivan to enter a finding of not guilty and prevent a second trial, with the matter expected to return to court on 29 September 2026.
President Trump has declined to intervene, correctly observing that the case belongs to the State of Massachusetts rather than the federal government. Constitutionally, he could not pardon the Massachusetts charges in any event.
And Massachusetts’ own clemency machinery is not presently the answer either, because there is no conviction to pardon.
So the case returns, rather appropriately, to where it belongs:
the courtroom.
The next important date is 29 September 2026.
What Judge Sullivan does with the defence motion — and what District Attorney Cruz decides about a retrial if that motion fails — may determine whether Lindsay Clancy faces another jury or whether one of America’s most disturbing modern criminal-responsibility cases finally moves from prosecution towards psychiatric disposition.
Whatever happens next, I remain wary of reducing this case to either punishment or sympathy.
Justice requires something more demanding.
It requires us to remember three children, take catastrophic mental illness seriously, respect the burden placed upon the State before it may punish, and resist the temptation to make every participant in an unbearable tragedy into a hero, villain or piece of viral content.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
Their names should remain in the article.
And in the argument.
— Barrister Aemen Zulfikar Maluka
Josh and Mak International
Latest Trial Update — 25th of August 2026
When I first wrote about the Lindsay Clancy case, I described it as a tragedy that demands considerably more seriousness than the internet is often willing to give it. The latest developments in the trial have only reinforced that view.
The defence has now rested. The prosecution’s rebuttal case has continued, and the proceedings have entered what is likely to be their decisive phase. On 24 August 2026, the defence also sought a mistrial following testimony touching upon Clancy’s Catholic religion. Judge William Sullivan declined to terminate the trial and instead directed that the jury disregard the improper religious material. Contemporary reporting indicates that closing arguments are now approaching.
Yet for all of that courtroom drama, the principal legal question has not changed.
It is not simply whether Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill.
There appears to be little serious controversy that she suffered considerable psychiatric distress.
The much harder question is whether, at the precise time she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan, mental disease or defect deprived her of the degree of criminal responsibility Massachusetts law requires before a person may properly be convicted of murder.
Massachusetts’ current homicide instructions require the Commonwealth, once criminal responsibility is properly placed in issue, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the offence. The legal enquiry therefore concerns the effect of the alleged mental disease or defect upon the accused’s relevant capacities, not merely the existence of a psychiatric diagnosis.
That distinction has become particularly important during the prosecution’s rebuttal evidence.
The defence case has presented Clancy as a woman suffering from postpartum psychosis whose perception of reality had catastrophically deteriorated. The prosecution has sought to demonstrate that severe psychiatric illness did not necessarily eliminate intention, appreciation of wrongfulness or behavioural control.
That is a legally legitimate distinction.
A diagnosis is not automatically an acquittal.
But the converse proposition is equally important:
planning is not automatically proof of sanity.
A severely delusional person may still organise conduct.
She may conceal intentions.
She may choose a particular time.
She may carry out a sequence of actions which, viewed externally, appears rational.
The legal problem is that rational organisation can sometimes occur inside an irrational conception of reality.
That is why the jury cannot simply ask whether Lindsay Clancy planned what she did.
It must ask what sort of mind was doing the planning.
The latest rebuttal evidence has therefore sharpened rather than resolved the central conflict. The prosecution is attempting to distinguish profound depression and distorted thinking from psychosis sufficient to destroy criminal responsibility. The defence position remains that the killings occurred inside a pathological mental state so severe that ordinary assumptions about moral and legal agency cannot safely be applied.
The jury must decide between those propositions.
The mistrial application and religion
The unsuccessful mistrial application also deserves brief attention.
Religion may arise evidentially where a defendant’s statements themselves contain religious ideas, particularly where the psychiatric issue concerns delusion. But courts must be exceptionally careful. Religious belief cannot itself become evidence of insanity, nor should a defendant’s faith become a vehicle for moral prejudice.
The reported intervention by Judge Sullivan reflects that danger. Once the challenged references emerged, the court refused to terminate the proceedings but instructed the jury to disregard inappropriate religious material.
That is jurisprudentially important.
A court examining psychosis may legitimately ask whether particular beliefs were pathological.
It must not put religion itself on trial.
The social-media spectacle has become no less troubling
If anything, the progression of the trial has made the online response still more uncomfortable.
As both a lawyer and the mother of three beautiful children, I continue to find the “Same, Lindsay” phenomenon profoundly disturbing when mothers incorporate their own children into content connected with this case.
I understand the message some women are trying to communicate.
Maternal exhaustion is real.
Postpartum depression is real.
Intrusive thoughts can be terrifying.
Postpartum psychosis is a genuine psychiatric emergency.
Women should be able to disclose such experiences without shame.
But empathy must retain boundaries.
A child should not become a prop in an adult’s performance of identification with a woman accused of killing three children.
And the fact that the Clancy case has become culturally resonant should never permit Cora, Dawson and Callan to disappear behind the discourse surrounding their mother.
There are three children at the centre of this case.
Their dignity matters too.
Why the Pakistan comparison is becoming even more important
For Pakistani lawyers, the Clancy proceedings continue to expose a significant difference between Massachusetts criminal-responsibility doctrine and section 84 of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860.
Section 84 PPC essentially asks whether, because of unsoundness of mind at the time of the act, an accused was incapable of knowing the nature of the act or incapable of knowing that what she was doing was wrong or contrary to law.
The Massachusetts formulation is materially broader because its criminal-responsibility doctrine also addresses substantial incapacity to conform one’s conduct to the requirements of law. Massachusetts’ revised homicide instructions continue to emphasise that the Commonwealth bears the ultimate burden of proving criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.
The distinction between knowing and controlling conduct is not semantic.
It goes directly to cases involving command hallucinations, profound delusion and pathological compulsions.
A person may retain some intellectual awareness that society prohibits an act while nevertheless experiencing a psychiatric state that drastically affects the person’s capacity to regulate conduct.
Whether Pakistani section 84 adequately accommodates that territory remains a question worthy of serious judicial and legislative consideration.
The Lindsay Clancy case therefore has significance well beyond Massachusetts.
It forces lawyers everywhere to reconsider the boundaries between mental illness and culpability, cognition and volition, diagnosis and responsibility.
Where I stand as this trial approaches its conclusion
The later evidence has not made me more comfortable choosing a side.
It has made me more convinced that choosing simplistic sides is precisely the wrong way to understand the case.
Mental illness does not automatically extinguish criminal responsibility.
Premeditation does not automatically establish sanity.
Compassion is not exoneration.
Punishment is not synonymous with justice.
And recognising postpartum psychiatric illness does not require us to look away from three dead children.
The jury will shortly have to perform the difficult legal task.
The rest of us might attempt the equally important human one: resisting spectacle long enough to understand what this tragedy is actually telling us.
It tells us to take maternal psychiatric deterioration seriously before catastrophe occurs.
It tells us that criminal responsibility requires something more sophisticated than outrage.
It tells us that children deserve to remain visible even when the defendant’s mental state understandably dominates the litigation.
And it tells us that a legal system worthy of the word justice must be capable of holding uncomfortable truths simultaneously.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
Whatever verdict follows, those names should remain at the centre of the conversation.
Original Article follows Below
By Barrister Aemen Zulfikar Maluka, Josh and Mak International
Published 23 August 2026. This commentary discusses an ongoing criminal trial. At the time of writing, no verdict has been returned. Nothing in this article should be understood as prejudging the determination that properly belongs to the jury.
There are criminal cases one approaches first as a lawyer. There are others which reach you first as a human being.
The Lindsay Clancy case has reached me in both capacities.
I am a lawyer, but I am also the mother of three beautiful children. For that reason, I have found this case particularly difficult to watch. It forces one to contemplate something almost unbearable: three very young children losing their lives at the hands of the person from whom, in the ordinary architecture of childhood, they should have expected the greatest safety.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.
Whatever verdict is eventually returned in Massachusetts, those names should not become footnotes to an argument about psychiatric medicine, feminism, motherhood, punishment or social-media culture. They were children. Their lives possessed value entirely independent of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding their deaths.
At the same time, being horrified by what happened does not relieve a lawyer of the obligation to ask the harder question.
The question before the court is not simply whether Lindsay Clancy killed her children. Her defence has acknowledged that she did. The central contest is whether, when she did so on 24 January 2023, she possessed the degree of criminal responsibility which Massachusetts law requires before the State may convict and punish her for murder.
That distinction is enormously important.
And it is precisely the distinction that much of the internet appears incapable of holding in its head.
A tragedy should not require us to choose between compassion and accountability
I have watched some of the social-media reaction to this case with considerable unease.
There is legitimate discussion to be had about postpartum mental illness. There is legitimate anger about women whose psychiatric symptoms are dismissed as ordinary maternal exhaustion. There is legitimate debate about whether health systems recognise dangerous deterioration early enough.
There is also legitimate sympathy for a woman who, if the defence psychiatric evidence is accepted, may have descended into a catastrophic state of psychosis.
But compassion is not the same thing as identification, and identification is not the same thing as exoneration.
One particularly disturbing development has been the proliferation of TikTok videos in which mothers film themselves crying while holding or interacting with their own babies, using Lindsay Clancy’s writings or courtroom audio and, in some instances, captions such as “Same, Lindsay.” Recent reporting confirms that this phenomenon has generated substantial criticism, particularly because children are being included in content expressly connected with a case involving the deaths of three children.
I find that profoundly uncomfortable.
I understand what some of these women may be attempting to communicate. A sentence taken from a distressed mother’s diary may resonate with another exhausted mother. Feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, sleeplessness or being overwhelmed are not shameful. Giving women permission to speak about such experiences is unquestionably worthwhile.
But there is a line.
Holding one’s perfectly living child before a camera while invoking the name of a mother presently on trial for killing her three children risks transforming tragedy into performance.
It risks making Cora, Dawson and Callan invisible.
It risks collapsing the enormous clinical distinction between ordinary parental exhaustion, postpartum depression, intrusive thoughts and psychosis.
And perhaps most troublingly, it risks converting a grave psychiatric and legal question into another species of social-media identity.
“Same, Lindsay” is simply too easy a phrase for something this terrible.
For most distressed mothers, it is not the same.
And for the very small number experiencing true postpartum psychosis, saying that distinction clearly may actually save lives.
What postpartum psychosis actually means
Postpartum psychosis is not merely an unusually severe version of feeling sad after childbirth.
It is a psychiatric emergency.
Clinical guidance describes symptoms which may include hallucinations, delusions, bizarre or unusual beliefs, confusion, dramatic mood changes, severe insomnia, agitation and behaviour which may become unpredictable or impulsive. Contemporary NHS perinatal guidance treats suspected postpartum psychosis as requiring urgent psychiatric assessment because deterioration can be rapid and risks can extend to both mother and child.
It is also rare. Current medical reporting generally places its incidence at approximately one or two women per 1,000 births. Crucially, the existence of postpartum psychosis should not be taken to mean that women suffering from it ordinarily harm their children. Most do not.
That qualification matters enormously.
We must not combat one stigma by creating another.
A woman experiencing postnatal depression should not watch this trial and conclude that her depression makes her dangerous. A woman experiencing frightening intrusive thoughts should not become too frightened to disclose them because she fears that her doctor, husband or family will regard her as another Lindsay Clancy.
The public-health message ought to be the reverse: unusual thoughts, hallucinations, extreme insomnia, rapid personality changes, suicidal thinking or an apparent loss of contact with reality require help early, without shame and without delay.
What the Lindsay Clancy jury is actually deciding
Clancy’s trial has become unusually emotionally charged because the physical acts themselves are substantially undisputed.
Her lawyers contend that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore lacked criminal responsibility.
The prosecution contends that she deliberately planned the killings, arranged for her husband to leave the house, killed the children and thereafter attempted to take her own life. It argues that these circumstances demonstrate conscious, purposeful conduct rather than legal insanity.
That produces an apparent contradiction which has dominated public commentary:
How can somebody plan an act and nevertheless be legally insane?
The answer is that planning and sanity are not legal synonyms.
Massachusetts’ current homicide instructions state that a person is not criminally responsible where, because of mental disease or defect, that person lacked the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of the conduct or to conform the conduct to the requirements of law. Importantly, once lack of criminal responsibility is properly raised, the Commonwealth bears the burden of proving criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s formulation goes further still. “Appreciate” requires more than merely possessing an intellectual awareness that something is prohibited. The law asks whether the defendant meaningfully understood its legal or moral significance.
This is where the case becomes far more sophisticated than the internet’s familiar binary of she planned it, therefore she was sane versus she was mentally ill, therefore she cannot be responsible.
Neither proposition necessarily follows.
A psychotic person may retain extraordinary organisational ability.
She may make a telephone call.
She may check a timetable.
She may hide an intention.
She may prepare a meal.
She may lie.
She may wait until another person leaves the room.
Mental illness does not invariably produce outward chaos.
A person labouring under a fixed delusion can behave logically within the architecture of that delusion.
That does not establish that Lindsay Clancy was legally insane. The jury must determine that question from the evidence.
It does mean, however, that apparently purposeful behaviour cannot be treated as an automatic answer.
The extraordinary psychiatric disagreement at the centre of the trial
The competing expert evidence demonstrates the difficulty vividly.
Defence forensic psychiatrist Dr Phillip Resnick testified that Clancy was psychotic at the time of the killings and described her condition as involving command hallucination and delusional thinking. According to recent trial reporting, his opinion was that Clancy believed she was acting under an overpowering pathological conception connected with the fate of her children.
Dr Resnick’s involvement is particularly notable because of his longstanding forensic work concerning parents who kill children, including his involvement in the Andrea Yates litigation.
The Commonwealth’s rebuttal expert, forensic psychiatrist Dr Avram Mack, reached a materially different conclusion. He accepted significant depression but disputed that the evidence established psychosis or mania and considered Clancy capable of recognising wrongfulness and controlling her conduct.
This is not an insignificant difference between doctors.
It is almost the whole criminal case.
One expert essentially describes a woman whose perception of reality had become catastrophically distorted.
Another describes a profoundly depressed woman who nevertheless retained legally sufficient agency.
A jury of laypersons must now decide which interpretation, considered alongside all the surrounding evidence, leaves the Commonwealth’s burden discharged beyond reasonable doubt.
I do not envy them.
“Go to God”: evidence of sanity, or evidence of delusion?
One of the most haunting pieces of evidence reported from the trial concerns Clancy’s recollection that she told one of her children to “go to God”.
The prosecution expert has treated the statement as relevant to her appreciation of what she was doing.
It is certainly evidence the jury may consider.
But legally, it is not self-interpreting.
A rational killer might say something religious while knowing perfectly well that murder is morally and legally wrong.
But a psychotic person experiencing a religious or protective delusion might utter precisely the same words because, within the person’s distorted reality, death has acquired a completely different meaning.
The words therefore acquire legal significance only when placed inside the defendant’s mental world.
This is one of the most difficult things about insanity jurisprudence. Courts ordinarily reconstruct external events: who was where, what weapon was used, what message was sent, what was said.
Criminal responsibility sometimes requires something stranger.
The court must attempt to reconstruct reality as the accused perceived it.
Premeditation is not necessarily the opposite of psychosis
The prosecution understandably relies upon evidence suggesting preparation.
Massachusetts law ordinarily regards deliberate premeditation as a powerful marker of first-degree murder. The Commonwealth must establish an intentional killing after a period of reflection.
But where criminal responsibility is contested, there are analytically two questions.
The first is:
Did she intend the physical act?
The second is:
Was the mind forming that intention legally capable of criminal responsibility?
Those questions must not be collapsed.
A person may intend to pull a trigger while, because of psychosis, genuinely believing the person before him is a supernatural monster threatening his family.
The physical intention exists.
The rational understanding of reality may not.
The insanity doctrine exists precisely because intention by itself does not answer every question about culpability.
Nor does mental illness automatically excuse homicide
The reverse proposition is equally important.
A psychiatric diagnosis is not a licence to kill.
Depression does not erase criminal responsibility.
Anxiety does not erase it.
Postpartum depression does not erase it.
Even psychosis, as a medical diagnosis, does not automatically determine the legal question.
Massachusetts law deliberately uses the expression “mental disease or defect” as a legal concept and then asks what effect that condition had upon the defendant’s capacities at the relevant time.
That is why the prosecution is entitled to test Clancy’s conduct before, during and after the killings. The jury can consider her communications, internet activity, medical records, statements, behaviour and apparent attempts at concealment or preparation.
The defence, equally, is entitled to place those same facts within a psychiatric narrative.
That is adversarial justice functioning as it should.
She had been asking for help
What makes this case especially difficult to dismiss as a convenient psychiatric explanation invented after the event is the evidence of deterioration before January 2023.
Members of Clancy’s family have testified about suicidal thinking, fears concerning harm to the children and changes in her mental condition. Reuters reported evidence that she had searched for information concerning postpartum psychosis shortly before the killings.
Other evidence presented during the trial concerns repeated encounters with mental-health professionals, medication changes, emergency assistance and psychiatric hospitalisation. AP has reported that the defence says she repeatedly sought help through outpatient providers, a suicide hotline, emergency treatment and hospital admission.
None of that proves legal insanity.
But neither can it responsibly be ignored.
One of the questions society should eventually ask, irrespective of the verdict, is whether a woman can repeatedly present at the doors of a mental-health system and yet still reach the point at which three children die.
Criminal courts decide individual culpability.
They do not absolve institutions of asking whether catastrophe could have been prevented.
A verdict of lack of criminal responsibility does not mean “she walks free”
This misconception also deserves correction.
If Clancy is found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, that does not simply place her outside the courthouse with no further supervision.
Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 123, section 16 permits the court to order a person found not guilty by reason of mental illness or defect to be hospitalised for observation and examination. Proceedings can thereafter result in commitment, initially for six months, with further one-year commitments available where the statutory requirements continue to be satisfied.
The distinction matters.
The insanity doctrine does not say:
Nothing happened.
It says:
A terrible act occurred, but criminal punishment cannot justly be imposed unless the mind responsible for that act possessed the capacities upon which criminal blame depends.
A secure psychiatric institution can constitute a profound deprivation of liberty. Its jurisprudential purpose, however, is treatment and protection rather than punishment for moral culpability which the law has found absent.
Justice must have room for the children and for mental illness
Public discussion around this case sometimes seems to demand membership in one of two camps.
One is expected either to “support Lindsay” or to “support the children”.
That formulation is morally impoverished.
One can believe that postpartum psychosis is real and terrifying while grieving completely for Cora, Dawson and Callan.
One can believe that the American health system may have failed Lindsay Clancy without concluding that the criminal case therefore disappears.
One can believe that the prosecution is entitled to scrutinise every claimed psychiatric explanation without dismissing maternal mental illness as weakness or excuse-making.
One can believe that three children deserve justice while understanding that justice is not synonymous with vengeance.
Indeed, the more terrible the offence, the more important it becomes that the law resist deciding culpability by horror alone.
If criminal responsibility means anything, it must operate precisely in cases where the consequences make calm analysis difficult.
As a mother, the TikTok spectacle troubles me almost as much as the legal misunderstanding
There is something about this case that the architecture of modern social media handles particularly badly.
A courtroom is meant to distinguish evidence from assertion.
TikTok rewards immediacy.
A courtroom is supposed to tolerate uncertainty.
Social media rewards certainty.
A criminal trial requires context.
An algorithm rewards a 20-second clip.
A judicial system insists that different propositions can simultaneously be true.
Online tribalism wants saints and monsters.
Recent reporting has described the extraordinary online “forensic fandom” surrounding the case, including unsupported conspiracy theories and enormous volumes of TikTok commentary. One recent report estimated more than 164,000 videos associated with the #clancy hashtag. The Boston Globe has gone so far as to question whether televising trials of this kind remains compatible with the interests of justice in the age of TikTok spectacle.
That should concern lawyers.
Open justice is precious.
But open justice is not supposed to turn witnesses into characters, psychiatric records into entertainment and murdered children into cultural content.
There is an ethical distinction between bearing witness to suffering and using suffering as material.
As a mother, seeing women pose with their own babies under “Same, Lindsay” content crosses that distinction for me.
Our children should not become props in our public performance of empathy.
And Cora, Dawson and Callan should not become scenery behind a debate principally about adults.
What would happen if a Lindsay Clancy-type case arose in Pakistan?
For Pakistani lawyers, the case raises a particularly valuable comparative-law question.
Suppose substantially similar facts arose before a Sessions Court in Pakistan: a mother kills her children and adduces psychiatric evidence that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis.
Could postpartum psychosis constitute a defence?
Potentially, yes.
But postpartum psychosis is not itself a separate defence under Pakistani criminal law.
The principal substantive provision would be section 84 of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860.
Section 84 provides that nothing is an offence where, at the time of the act, because of unsoundness of mind, the person was incapable of knowing the nature of the act or incapable of knowing that what she was doing was wrong or contrary to law.
The critical words are “at the time of doing it.”
A history of psychiatric illness would not, by itself, suffice.
A postpartum diagnosis would not, by itself, suffice.
Hospitalisation would not necessarily suffice.
The legal enquiry would concern the accused’s mental capacity at the moment of the offence.
Pakistan’s test is materially narrower than Massachusetts’
This comparison is particularly interesting.
Massachusetts asks whether mental disease or defect deprived the defendant of substantial capacity either:
- to appreciate criminality or wrongfulness; or
- to conform conduct to law.
Pakistan’s section 84 remains much closer to the traditional M’Naghten cognitive test. Its emphasis is upon whether the accused was incapable of knowing the nature of the act or knowing that the act was wrong or contrary to law.
That means a defendant who understood what she was physically doing and understood it was wrong, but whose psychiatric condition destroyed her practical ability to control herself, potentially has a more difficult argument under the literal Pakistani formulation than under Massachusetts’ broader “conform conduct” limb.
That is not an academic difference.
Cases involving command hallucinations, compulsive psychotic states or profoundly disordered volition expose precisely the territory between cognition and control.
Modern psychiatry recognises considerably more about that territory than nineteenth-century criminal codes did.
Pakistani law should eventually confront that fact.
The burden of proof is also strikingly different
There is another important distinction.
In Massachusetts, once lack of criminal responsibility is properly in issue, the Commonwealth must prove criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.
Pakistan takes a different evidential approach.
Article 121 of the Qanun-e-Shahadat Order, 1984 places upon an accused the burden of establishing circumstances which bring the case within a general exception such as section 84 PPC.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan confirmed this approach in Mst. Safia Bano v Home Department, Government of Punjab, PLD 2021 SC 488. The Court held that where an accused relies upon section 84, the onus of establishing the plea lies upon the defence, although the accused may rely upon material appearing in the prosecution evidence and the prosecution remains responsible for proving its case in the first place.
For a Pakistani woman alleging postpartum psychosis after an alleged homicide, contemporaneous evidence could therefore become decisive: obstetric records, psychiatric consultations, prescriptions, emergency attendances, messages to relatives, searches for symptoms, changes in sleep, accounts of hallucinations, previous bipolar episodes and testimony from those who observed her.
This is why medical record-keeping is not merely administrative housekeeping.
In a subsequent criminal trial, it may become evidence going to the existence or absence of criminal responsibility itself.
Safia Bano changed the conversation in Pakistan
Pakistan is not without important modern jurisprudence concerning mental illness.
In Mst. Safia Bano v Home Department, Government of Punjab, PLD 2021 SC 488, the Supreme Court confronted questions of criminal culpability, competence to stand trial and the execution of mentally ill prisoners.
The Court’s opening observation deserves continued attention: mental health is as important as physical health, yet the consequences of mental illness are too frequently overlooked.
The judgment reaffirmed the operation of section 84 but also insisted upon proper medical assessment where mental incapacity is genuinely in issue. It further held that a condemned prisoner whose mental illness renders him or her incapable of comprehending the rationale and reason for punishment should not be executed, subject to appropriate medical assessment.
That judgment represents an important movement away from crude assumptions about “madness”.
But the Clancy litigation illustrates how much more sophisticated forensic psychiatry can become.
The legal question is rarely whether somebody merely “has a mental illness”.
The question is what that illness did to cognition, perception, moral understanding, volition and behavioural control at a particular moment.
Competence to stand trial is not the same thing as insanity at the time of the offence
Pakistani law also makes another distinction which public commentary frequently misses.
An accused may be mentally capable of conducting her defence today while maintaining that she was legally incapable of criminal responsibility when the offence occurred.
Conversely, a person may have been criminally responsible at the time of an offence but later become too psychiatrically unwell to stand trial.
Sections 464 and 465 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 deal with circumstances in which an accused appears incapable of making a defence because of unsoundness of mind. The proceedings require the court to address present capacity before continuing the substantive trial.
Section 84 PPC concerns a different temporal question: the accused’s state of mind when the act was committed.
Any serious Pakistani litigation involving postpartum psychosis would have to keep these doctrines distinct.
What Pakistan should learn from the Clancy case before it has its own
My principal concern is that Pakistan should not wait for a spectacular tragedy before developing a coherent medico-legal approach to postpartum psychiatric emergencies.
There are several lessons worth considering.
First, obstetric care cannot end with safe physical delivery.
The mother who leaves hospital alive with a healthy baby may nevertheless be entering one of the most psychiatrically vulnerable periods of her life.
Second, doctors, obstetricians, paediatricians, general practitioners and family members need to understand that psychosis is not the same thing as ordinary “post-delivery weakness”, sadness, fatigue or stress.
Hallucinations, bizarre beliefs, extreme insomnia, rapid mental deterioration, suicidal ideation and severe behavioural changes should generate an emergency response.
Third, Pakistan needs better integration between maternity care and psychiatry.
A woman should not be required to navigate unrelated institutions while deteriorating rapidly between appointments.
Fourth, specialised perinatal psychiatric facilities deserve consideration, including mother-and-baby treatment models where clinically appropriate. Removing every ill mother from her child is not necessarily therapeutic; leaving a dangerously psychotic mother without supervision can be catastrophic. The difficult work lies in competent risk assessment.
Fifth, prosecutors and judges dealing with alleged offences arising in a postpartum setting require access to genuine forensic psychiatric expertise.
A psychiatrist answering “Does she suffer from bipolar disorder?” is not necessarily answering the legal question “Was she incapable of knowing the nature or wrongfulness of this act at the relevant time?”
Those are related questions, but they are not identical.
Sixth, Pakistan should eventually reconsider whether the nineteenth-century language and conceptual boundaries of section 84 remain adequate for contemporary psychiatric science.
The law must be cautious before expanding excuses for criminal conduct.
But caution operates in both directions.
It is unjust to punish a person as morally responsible where the mental capacities upon which moral responsibility depends were genuinely absent.
The law should neither romanticise motherhood nor pathologise it
The Clancy case also exposes an uncomfortable cultural problem extending far beyond Massachusetts.
Motherhood is frequently sentimentalised until real mothers become afraid to admit that they are struggling.
The cultural script expects gratitude.
Love.
Fulfilment.
Instinctive competence.
Endless patience.
When a mother instead experiences fear, rage, dissociation, intrusive thoughts or crushing anxiety, she may interpret the discrepancy not as an illness requiring treatment but as evidence that she is morally defective.
Families can make the same mistake.
Doctors can make it.
Society certainly makes it.
We do women no kindness by pretending motherhood is psychologically effortless.
Yet we do children no kindness by romanticising maternal illness either.
The correct response is not to say that maternal suffering excuses anything.
It is to recognise suffering early enough that there is never an “anything” requiring excuse.
The danger of turning Lindsay Clancy into a symbol
There is another reason I resist phrases such as “Same, Lindsay”.
Lindsay Clancy is a real defendant in a real courtroom.
She is not an archetype.
She should not become the patron saint of postpartum suffering.
Nor should she become a convenient monster through whom society reassures itself that dangerous mental illness always has an obvious face.
If the defence is correct, her psychiatric condition deserves accurate understanding.
If the prosecution is correct, her mental-health history should not be manipulated to erase agency.
Either way, turning her into an internet symbol makes careful thinking more difficult.
And it does something still worse.
It makes the children symbols too.
They deserve better than that.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
There is an inevitable tendency in insanity cases for the accused person’s mind to consume the proceedings.
Doctors discuss it.
Lawyers reconstruct it.
Journalists analyse it.
The public speculates about it.
The victims, meanwhile, cannot testify.
That is why I want to write their names again.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
The proper recognition of mental illness does not diminish their loss.
A finding of lack of criminal responsibility, should the jury eventually reach one, would not mean their deaths mattered less.
A murder conviction, should the jury reach that conclusion instead, would not mean postpartum psychosis is imaginary or that women experiencing psychiatric emergencies should be ashamed to seek help.
The law should be capable of more intellectual and moral seriousness than either proposition.
The final question is not whether we feel sorry for Lindsay Clancy
It is tempting to reduce this trial to sympathy.
Do we feel sympathy for her?
Do we feel anger?
Do we believe her doctors failed her?
Do we think her husband should have recognised more?
Do we identify with something she wrote?
Those questions may matter to us personally.
They are not the ultimate legal test.
The juridical question is far more exacting:
What was the condition of her mind at the moment she killed three children, and did that condition leave intact the capacities which Massachusetts law requires for criminal responsibility?
The jury must answer that question from admissible evidence, not TikTok.
Until it does, responsible commentary should retain some humility.
My reflection as both a lawyer and a mother
As a lawyer, I believe criminal responsibility must remain meaningful even when applying it makes us uncomfortable.
If every deliberate physical act automatically proved sanity, there would be very little purpose in having an insanity doctrine.
If every psychiatric diagnosis automatically destroyed responsibility, there would be very little purpose in having criminal law.
Justice exists in the difficult territory between those extremes.
As a mother, my reaction is simpler.
I look at my three children and cannot contemplate their fear without feeling something words do not comfortably express.
That is precisely why I resist allowing this case to become entertainment.
I do not want to watch mothers place babies before cameras and write “Same, Lindsay”.
I would rather see a woman who recognises something frightening in Clancy’s medical history put down her telephone and speak honestly to her husband, her sister, her doctor or an emergency psychiatric service.
That would honour this tragedy far more meaningfully than a viral video.
If the Clancy case teaches us anything, perhaps it should be this:
take women seriously before their suffering becomes catastrophe; take psychiatric illness seriously without turning it into an excuse for everything; take criminal responsibility seriously without confusing punishment with justice; and above all, take the lives and dignity of children seriously enough not to turn their deaths into content.
There are cases in which justice requires condemnation.
There are cases in which justice requires treatment.
There are cases in which it requires both protection and compassion.
The jury in Massachusetts must decide where Lindsay Clancy’s case belongs.
The rest of us might usefully ask a different question:
What must our families, hospitals, courts and societies learn so that there is never another Cora, Dawson and Callan?
That question belongs not only to America.
It belongs to Pakistan too.
And unlike the verdict in Plymouth, we need not wait for a jury before beginning to answer it.
About the Author
Barrister Aemen Zulfikar Maluka is a lawyer at Josh and Mak International, Islamabad, advising Pakistani and international clients on contentious and advisory legal matters. Her legal commentary examines developing questions of criminal responsibility, public law, human rights, family protection and comparative jurisprudence from a Pakistani and international perspective.
This article is a legal and reflective commentary on an ongoing foreign criminal proceeding. It does not express a concluded view upon Lindsay Clancy’s guilt or criminal responsibility, which remain matters for determination by the competent court and jury upon the evidence.
Josh and Mak International
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Email: Aemen@joshandmak.com