Ben Shapiro Explains the Lindsay Clancy Case

The jury is now out on Lindsay Clancy. Clancy, of course, murdered her three children and then jumped from a second story window after cutting her wrists. All of that is undisputed. The question is whether she was mentally ill to the extent required by law to fulfill the insanity defense. Today, we're going to go through the entire case so you know what the hell you're talking about when you talk about this case because the ridiculous hot takes that you are seeing online from legitimately all sides, they could power a small city. Now, as I've been saying, this case is not about you. It is not about your dyspepsia at having to deal with annoying toddlers. It is not even about the awfulness of postpartum depression. It is not about selfish women or abortion or the fall of Western civilization. This case is about a fact pattern and you should know the fact pattern because if we would like to come to a consensus as Americans, as opposed to just beating each other with pool noodles, the facts ought to matter at least a little bit. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. And one of my great irritations with all of the coverage surrounding Lindsay Clancy's case is that so little of it focuses in on the actual facts of the case. And this sort of stuff drives me crazy. The same thing happened in a sort of different way with George Floyd. The entire George Floyd case, the Derek Chauvin prosecution, none of it was predicated on the facts of the case. It was all based on narratives drawn from the case that had very little to do with the actual case. So you'll recall that in that particular case, there were narratives that were drawn about the nature of America's criminal justice system being biased against black people. There are all sorts of takes about how America's systemic racism had led to the death of George Floyd. And then you looked at the facts of the case and it didn't look like Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, didn't even look like he manslaughtered George Floyd. There was not even an accusation of racism in that case. And so if you were just looking at that case, the fact pattern of that case, and then you were looking at Americans going after each other and then riots to the tune of $2 billion over that case, you would say, this is nuts. And we are consistently doing this now in America. We are taking outstanding circumstances and circumstances that are few and far between, incredibly rare with particular fact patterns. And then we are using them as ways to project our own dyspepsia with America and with our fellow Americans onto those cases. And it's inappropriate and it's wrong. Each one of these criminal cases deserves actual attention. Instead of us just jumping to the conclusions that we are looking for based on our priors, we should be looking at the fact pattern. So let's begin with filicide. So filicide is when parents kill kids. Very uncommon. This is why I'm saying this. The reason I'm saying this is because when you try to project onto extraordinarily uncommon circumstances, your particular life circumstance, your point of view, America more broadly, the patriarchy, your experiences with your kids, you're doing it wrong. Filicide is very, very rare in the United States. And multiple filicide by mom is vanishingly rare in the United States. There are about 3.6 million births per year in the United States. There are somewhere between 450 and 500 cases of filicide every year in the United States, which accounts for about 2.5% of all US homicides annually. Most of them are by men. Most of them are single homicides. There are about 15 to 20 cases of multiple filicide, meaning multiple kids killed by a mom in the United States each year. Because they are so rare, that is why we know the names of people like Andrea Yates or Lindsay Clancy. Because it is not, in fact, a commonplace occurrence for a mom to kill multiple children. The reason I'm pointing this out again is because if you are taking away from Lindsay Clancy's cases that she is just like you, you are doing it wrong. Or if you are taking away from Lindsay Clancy's case that women be cray generally, you are doing it wrong. And there are good studies that have been done on filicide and its connection to postpartum psychosis and other forms of mental illness. There was one from 2007 in the World Journal of Psychiatry. And it describes this phenomena. It says, quote, a lesser threshold for hospitalization should be considered for mentally ill mothers of young children due to the possibility of multiple deaths from a filicide suicide. Factors which potentially merit psychiatric hospitalization include maternal fears of harming their child, delusions of their child's suffering, improbable concerns about their child's health, and hostility toward a despised partner's favorite child. Psychotic mothers who fear that their children may suffer a fate worse than death due to persecutory delusions should either be hospitalized or separated from their children. These mothers may be reluctant to share their delusional ideals. Now, again, why am I reading that? Because so much of that seems to describe the fact pattern that we're actually looking at. As we'll discuss, Lindsay Clancy, either according to the prosecution, believed she should kill her kids because her kids were an obstacle to her killing herself, or according to the defense, she did so because a voice told her that she needed to kill her kids. Either way, one of the things that is interesting and fascinating about this case and the practice of psychiatry generally, psychiatry is extraordinarily imprecise. You can have a series of symptoms and that series of symptoms can be put into a basket of categories. There are multiple diagnoses that can be made of any basket of symptoms, particularly when you're talking about complications arising from drug interactions. That is just a reality of psychiatry. As I say, when it comes to psychiatry, it is essentially a more sophisticated version of the shaman who's using various berries to treat various symptoms. It is trial and error. You have to determine whether a symptom abates or whether it exacerbates. You then have to titrate up or titrate down. You have to determine whether you need a second medication in order to deal with secondary effects. Psychiatry is extraordinarily imprecise. Diagnosis is imprecise. Prognosis is imprecise. All of it is extremely imprecise, and that is complicated by the fact that unlike other health conditions, psychiatric conditions, because so many of them are internal, you can't see inside somebody's brain the way that you can just x-ray a leg, that means that very often you don't even know the internal psychiatric symptoms of a person who is under psychiatric care. They may be lying to you, as that study says. Mothers may be reluctant to share delusional ideas. Why? Because they're afraid the kids will be removed from them, for example. Some Lindsay Clancy cases we'll discuss, the defense is going to argue that actually Lindsay Clancy was not even telling her psychiatrist everything, which again is not rare. It is in fact quite common. In normal psychiatry, let alone postpartum psychosis or heavy drug interactions or suicidality, people are not always honest with their psychiatrist. Okay, so in the Lindsay Clancy case, the charges that were put before the jury were put before the jury by Judge William Sullivan, and here is what he explained. The Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any mental disease or defect that may have existed did not deprive the defendant of her ability to behave as the law requires, that is to obey the law. Okay, so under Massachusetts law, basically there are a few requirements in order to determine whether the insanity defense applies. One, she had to understand the nature of what she was doing. For the insanity defense to fail, she had to know what she was doing. Two, she had to appreciate that what she was doing was wrong. You have to know that murder is wrong. You can't think that murdering somebody is right at the time. And or she has to be capable of conforming her conduct to the requirements of law. Now, there are a series of potential verdicts that we'll get to in a moment. There are nine women and three men on the jury. The four person is an older woman. People are immediately, again, projecting their beliefs about the gender split in American politics onto this jury. It's a heavy female jury, therefore they're going to acquit. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do because again, the fact pattern here is very complex and also very vague. Right now, she faces three counts of first degree murder. First degree murder in Massachusetts means that Clancy intentionally killed her children with deliberate premeditation or under a prosecution of their theory with extreme atrocity or cruelty. Now, there's no question extreme atrocity or cruelty is a part of this. No question. There's no way to read the 911 transcript and not have your heart break. I mean, it's truly devastating. And as far as deliberate premeditation, clearly there is planning. But again, the question is intent. Mentally ill people, like truly mentally ill people cannot have the requisite amount of intent. They can't have the so-called mens rea. They can't have the mindset necessary to actually be able to commit a crime. Because again, if you are mentally ill to the extent that you can't determine right from wrong and that you're not capable of conforming your conduct to the requirements of law or understand the nature of what you're doing, that's the insanity defense. So if she's found guilty of first degree murder, mandatory sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. If she is found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, she won't face prison time. But she's not gonna walk away. I said this on the show last week and people are like, well, you know, she theoretically could. She's not going to walk away. Under Massachusetts law, there is no time limit for involuntary commitment at a mental health facility. Andrea Yates, similar case back in 2001. She drowned five of her children. She eventually was acquitted. She's still in a mental facility in 2026. So the judge is now offering sort of a Chinese menu of possible charge options. I don't like when judges do this, by the way. I think it probably ought to be legally barred. If a judge is offering several duplicative charges in the attempt to get somebody to say yes to a conviction and then we'll figure out the charge later, I just think that's bad prosecutorial practice. But a couple of the other charge options that were added at the 11th hour include second degree murder in which the jury would have to find that Lindsay Clancy intentionally killed her children, but without premeditation or extreme atrocity or cruelty. Again, I'm not sure how that helps the prosecution. Because again, the intent is the question. And manslaughter, which would require jurors to find that Clancy caused her children's death through wanton or reckless conduct. And again, wanton or reckless conduct typically when it comes to manslaughter is like you were driving drunk. We'll get into the entire timeline of what happened in the Lindsay Clancy case first. Let's talk about ZipRecruiter. Picture calling customer service about a missing order. You navigate that AI menu, you explain the problem, you get transferred, you explain the problem a second time. At this point, you put more work into locating the package than the company that actually shipped it in the first place. And then somebody finally says, let me track that down. And they actually do. That's the person you remember. You know, the one who actually took responsibility. There's plenty of discussion about artificial intelligence changing the job market. But businesses still need people with good judgment initiative and an interest in doing the job well. That's where ZipRecruiter comes in. 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About a year later, their daughter Cora is born. In 2019, their son Dawson is born and in 2022, Callan is born. Those are the three kids and these are very, very small children. Friends, relatives, co-workers, teachers, a nanny and Patrick all described Lindsay Clancy before the psychiatric decline as attentive and organized and loving and active and very, very involved with the kids. After the birth of her last child, Callan, apparently, she started to go into significant mental decline. In September 2022, she had massive increases in anxiety as her return to nursing approach. She searched for psychiatric help and she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety. September 15th, her psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, prescribed Sertraline. The defense said that Clancy's mood and agitation worsened with antidepressants. The Commonwealth emphasized contemporaneous notes did not document psychosis or mania. Now, again, as we'll discuss, not every symptom gets described to psychiatrists. This is part of the problem with insanity defense claims, right? Is that not everything is well-documented and also high anxiety can manifest in things that look like psychosis, but aren't quite psychosis and aren't quite mania. In October, she started tele-healthing psychiatric treatment. Her notes and messages started reflecting anxiety, sleep trouble, guilt, and feeling disconnected. Late October, she had an adverse reaction to an SSRI. They then added lorazepam. Hydroxazine and buspirone were also used. Now, again, as I said, very often in psychiatry, what will happen is that somebody is put on a medication, they have an adverse reaction to the medication, a secondary symptom arises. And now, in order to deal with that secondary symptom, you put a new drug on the premises, right? You start taking more than one drug. In October 25th, she wrote about resentment that her older children prevented her from experiencing Callan as though he were her first baby, followed by a wish to feel love and connection. November 16th, she went to South Shore Hospital's emergency department for insomnia and she was prescribed trazodone. And then, a little bit later, she connected with a psychiatric nurse practitioner named Julie Paul. The intake documented severe anxiety, insomnia, and depression. They added on fluoxetine, trazodone, mirtazapine, hydroxazine, buspirone, lorazepam, quetiapine. All of these show up. And again, this is the, it's very, very difficult. You're dealing here with brain chemistry. The brain is not well mapped. It's just the reality. In November 29, November 29th, the end of the month, there was a text suggesting that she'd become dependent on a benzodiazepine. She started having suicidal thoughts. On December 4th, she contacted a suicide hotline. On December 6th, Patrick expressed concern she was overmedicated. For the next couple of weeks, family texts described sleep problems, fear, hopelessness, medication reactions, repeated attempts to obtain care. Her Edinburgh postnatal depression scale was reported as 23 and later 17. Those are both clinically significant. Again, the way that you typically diagnose psychiatric conditions is an actual checklist. And if you hit a certain number on the checklist, then you are considered to have the condition. As I say, psychiatry is very, very rudimentary. I keep saying that because it's important for people to understand it. People think that treating the brain is like treating other parts of the body. It really is not at all. In late December, Patrick later told investigators she had disclosed suicidal thoughts and thoughts of harming the kids. Several treating clinicians testified she denied homicidal intent or psychosis to them. So again, this goes to people don't tell their psychiatrists the truth all the time, which informs some of the testimony, as we'll see in just a second. December 30th, she went to Massachusetts General Hospital's emergency department and then entered McLean Hospital voluntarily. From January 1st to 5th, she was on voluntary psychiatric hospitalization there. Dr. Aaliyah Goodhart testified that Clancy was depressed and anxious, had reported suicidal thinking and wanted help. She did not show psychosis or mania during the admission, denied a current plan, identified the children's reasons to live and sought discharge. And she was prescribed yet more trazodone and lorazepam. She had follow-up with Dr. Tufts January 6th. She was taking a huge cocktail of drugs January 9th through 16th. Her device history, her search history showed searches concerning drug interactions, sleep deprivation, psychosis symptoms, schizophrenia, hallucinations, intrusive thoughts, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide. The prosecutors would later argue that she was basically searching up rationales that she could later use to defend against her actions. But defense would argue she was searching that because she was suffering from it. A January 20th query asked, can you treat a sociopath? The prosecution argued again that all of this showed self-monitoring and concealing planning. And the defense said, well, the reason that you are searching up hallucinations is because you're having them. The defense also elicited records of searches about carotid artery, cutting the throat and disabling airbags. January 24th was the day of the murders, 2023. Cora, the oldest, attended a routine pediatric appointment. The family played in the snow and built a snowman. 4.13 p.m., Apple Mac's activity examined the route from the home to 3V, that's a Kingston restaurant. The prosecution characterized this as calculating how long Patrick would be away. The defense noted route searches are routine when ordering food. At about 5.15 p.m., Patrick testified he left first for CVS and then for 3V to pick up the food. Before leaving, he saw Dawson eating and he said, Clancy sounded and acted normal. At 5.23 p.m., sorry, at 5.32 p.m., CVS surveillance showed Patrick entering the store. 5.33, there's an incoming call from Patrick to her, followed by a 14-second outgoing callback from Clancy while the phone remained locked. Apparently, she sounded normal, according to Patrick, but he recalled an impression she might be in the middle of something. 5.54, he showed up at the restaurant. 6.09, he returned home with the food. He found the primary bedroom door unlocked. He forced the entry. He saw blood and an open, broken window and looked outside. And Clancy was lying injured in the yard below. She, of course, was paralyzed from the waist down. She'd cut herself and she jumped out the window. He asked where the children were and she indicated the basement. He found Dawson alone in a rear basement gym office area, shirtless and wearing a diaper. Cora and Callen were together elsewhere in the basement. Resistance bands were on or near their necks. Patrick removed the bands and began resuscitation. At 6.11, he called 911. The 911 call is absolutely horrifying. The investigators immediately started an investigation. January 25th, they seized all the materials. The children's toxicology was negative for sedation or poisoning substances. There was no evidence they'd been drugged. And she was charged February 7th, 2023, with three counts each of first-degree murder, strangulation or suffering and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. There were 21 days of testimony. There were some 85 witnesses. And we're going to go through some of the key witnesses here. Yesterday was the closing arguments. Lindsay Clancy herself did not testify before the jury. Now, again, that is not a rarity. Very often, the person at issue doesn't testify because they don't want to be subjected to cross-examination. And the jury was told you're not allowed to draw adverse inference from her decision not to testify. Again, her affect in the courtroom was a major issue because people were saying that she looked cold or disconnected. Again, it is unclear to me at this point. I assume she's still on a significant cocktail of drugs at this point. Now, we're going to go through the prosecution case. So the prosecution basically argues here that Lindsay Clancy was profoundly depressed, but she was not psychotic. They argue that she knew exactly what she was doing, that she understood that it was wrong, and that she deliberately executed a plan to kill her kids and then commit suicide. The prosecution says that she was desperately unhappy and suicidal, and that she had come to view her children as an obstacle to killing herself. So in that theory, killing the kids was part of a rational plan. Basically, if I kill the kids, then I can kill myself, which theoretically is different from a psychotic delusion and voices made me think that killing the kids was necessary or morally right. So they would need to establish that whatever her psychiatric problems, they did not deprive her of criminal responsibility. So that is their case. In a moment, we're going to go through the prosecution witnesses, the defense witnesses, and the rest of the case. First, most Americans spend decades putting their money into a 401k. Every paycheck some money goes in, you watch the number grow. 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No. And she didn't describe that as hearing this external voice telling her to harm the kids, correct? Correct. A few days after this happened, did you receive a phone call from the defendant while she was at Brigham and Women's Hospital? I think it was like a week or so after, yeah. And what did the defendant say at that time about what had happened with the children? She didn't talk about our kids. She talked about what she went through. And what did she say about what she went through? She said she heard a man's voice telling her that if she didn't do it now, she would lose her chance. So again, that is him testifying that that's what Lindsay said later. Now, her chief psychiatrist throughout a lot of this period was Dr. Jennifer Tufts. She claims that there were no signs of psychosis or mania. Now, again, I'm not accusing Dr. Tufts of saying something that is untrue. I will say that if there were signs of psychosis or mania and Tufts had missed them, that would have been a problem, obviously. You were asked about your January 23rd, 2023 session with the defendant. Defense counsel asked if you had recommended a hospital evaluation for her on that day and you said no. Why not? Because she was completely denying any suicidal ideation or homicidal ideation. There were no signs of psychosis or mania. So there were no serious signs that her safety or that anyone else's safety was at risk. And during that session, did she ever tell you that she planned to harm herself or the children? No. Now, again, as we'll talk about and the reason I keep putting focus on this is because I think it is true. Just because a psychiatrist testifies that a person who is psychotic is not fully psychotic or is not expressing. Many people who have suicidal ideation will not tell their psychiatrist they are suicidally ideated. Now, again, maybe she did or maybe she was not suicidally ideated and actually this whole thing was a plot. I mean, that is the question of fact that is being presented. So again, the prosecution's case is that she was not psychotic, that she was depressed, but not psychotic, and she was not in the throes of a manic episode. Sometimes a manic episode in Bipolar One can manifest as hallucinations and hearing of voices, for example. They're saying none of that happened. So the prosecution also called a Dr. Gregory Sadhoff, who's a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI for counterterrorism, who says that she did this quickly and methodically. Did the defendant tell you that the voice told her where to kill the children? Did the voice tell her how to kill the children? No. Did the voice tell her what to use to kill the children? Did the voice tell her in what order to kill the children? No. Did the voice tell her where to try to kill herself? No. Did the voice tell her in what way to kill herself? No. The fact that the voice, according to the defendant, the voice didn't tell her any of those things, but instead just said kill the kids so you can kill yourself. Is that significant in your evaluation in any way? Yes. How so? Well, in the small amount of time that Ms. Clancy had in the home without her husband, it was important in order to carry this out, as well as her suicide, to do this quickly, methodically, and the like. And so basically the case that he's making is that she didn't hear a voice. The voice is made up. She knew that she had to act quickly. In order to dispose of the children, murder the kids before her husband got home. The prosecution also called a forensic psychologist named Dr. Kirk Heilbrunn. He said that she had bipolar 2, not bipolar 1 with manic episodes. So again, the difference between bipolar 1 and bipolar 2 is that bipolar 1 requires one full manic episode. A manic episode is elevated, irritable, energized mood that can manifest with hallucinations and usually lasts at least a week. So you're talking like a major psychiatric episode. Bipolar 2 usually requires a hypomanic episode. A hypomanic episode is a milder form of mania that generally doesn't impede your functioning. So the idea would be that if she had never been diagnosed with bipolar 1, it would have been surprising for her to hear a hallucination. Now, there are cases in which bipolar 2 has manifest with hallucinations, but this is Dr. Heilbrunn. I ended up with a diagnosis, making a diagnosis of bipolar 2 disorder, which is a slightly less, not slightly, it's a less severe form of bipolar disorder. And doctor, why did you, why did you diagnose with bipolar 2 and not bipolar? Because bipolar, as I said, is a more severe kind of diagnosis. It's more noticeable. And if you had a bipolar diagnosis, then I would want to see something that looks, that clearly and definitely looks like a manic episode. And I did not see any evidence of that before January 24th of 2023. Horrifyingly, Heilbrunn also testified that Clancy told her kids to go to God while strangling them. Again, the case itself is horrifying. And just on a level of pure, unbridled evil action, the immediate normal human response is death penalty. Obviously, clearly. But that's not the question. The question is, again, the insanity defense here. And further evidence that you saw for the suicide combined with ultrasick filicide? There was. One of the things that she said when asked about what happened is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, go to God, baby, go to God. And that was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God. One Dr. Avram Mack also testified for the prosecution is a forensic psychiatrist that she retained capacity required for having criminal responsibility, which, of course, is the entire question. It's whether she had the mental capacity to know what she was doing was wrong and knew what she was doing as she was doing it. The various mental status examinations done by the doctors at the Brigham generally showed normal mental status. One particular portion of the record reviews their review of whether or not she had the ability to make a decision, in this case, a change to her health care proxy. And so the physicians there were able to examine her closely in order to understand that she did have decision making capacity. And that's an example of something you reviewed in the record that was close in time to the incident itself, correct? Yes. And so the closing argument was made by the Plymouth County assistant DA woman named Jennifer Sprague. And she said, again, the descriptions here are pretty horrifying because the case itself is horrifying. Here she was talking about the bodies of the children. To kill them. And she left them there on the floor with the bands around their necks. She didn't bring them up to their beds and put them with their favorite stuffed animal and cover them up gently and lovingly, leaving them peacefully there. No. She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game. You know, to a moral certainty, she is guilty. So Sprague's case was that there was a rational order to the killing of the kids. And because she demonstrated planning capacity, this means she wasn't mentally ill at the time. The defense would argue, obviously, that planning capacity does not mean they're not mentally ill when they're in the throes of doing stuff. This, by the way, that latter part is actually true. There are people who are mentally ill who have the capacity to plan action. The question is whether they know the difference between right and wrong when they're doing it. Again, I keep coming back to the legal standard because that's the issue of the case. Here was the assistant DA Jennifer Sprague on the rational order of killing of the children. You know, it was deliberate premeditation because of the way she killed them and the way they died. And the order also shows a rationality. The order she killed them in. Because Cora and Dawson are older. If she had tried to strangle one in front of the other, they would have known this is bad. And they would have tried to intervene or run and hide. And she had a very limited time. She didn't have time to try to find a child who ran off and hid. So taking Dawson first and moving him to a separate room, having Cora stay with Callan and having Dawson go in another room, that's rational. That makes sense. That's ordered thinking. Now, again, you could theoretically have ordered thinking within a disordered mind. That happens fairly frequently with mental illness. But the case that the prosecution is making is that her entire goal was to kill the kids. And not only that, the prosecution actually argued that she was not fully attempting to commit suicide. That if you're trying to kill yourself, then you actually cut yourself in a different way. And you don't jump from a second story window. You jump from a higher height. Here was the DA. She cut herself. But you saw the cuts on the meaty part of her arm horizontally. No arteries, no major blood vessels. Didn't need to be stitched the next day. Then the one on her neck didn't need to be stitched at all. She knew as a nurse, those weren't going to kill her. But she was trying. And then going out of the window, 12, 13 feet, she landed the wrong way and ended up paralyzed on the frozen ground. But, you know, the idea that falling out of a 12 foot window is going to definitely kill you, not necessarily. Okay, so then the DA argued in the end, she was depressed, but not psychotic. And this is the case of the prosecution. She was depressed, right? And she was trying to deal with that, trying to get help for that. But it wasn't the fault of the providers that she was struggling with this. Or that she wasn't getting better. They were doing the best they could. You have the records, you heard the testimony. They were doing the best they could with the information she provided them. And that wasn't always accurate information. That wasn't always the full picture. And they were doing the best they could with her level of cooperation and compliance with the plan. Okay, so that is the prosecution's case. The defense, by contrast, argues that Lindsay Clancy was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis. And that that was actually superimposed on bipolar depressive illnesses and exacerbated by bad psychiatric treatment and mixed medication. And they presented a lot of medical evidence talking about everything from suicidal thoughts to severe insomnia to medication problems to psychiatric treatment and ultimately psychotic symptoms. So the defense called a bunch of witnesses. Those witnesses included Lindsay's mom, who read a text from Lindsay Clancy asking for help about three months before the murder of her children. If this is a copy of the text that you're referring to. Yes, it is. Would you read that for the jury? Mom, will you please come up and stay with me for a bit? I'm really sick. Something is wrong. I had horrible insomnia all night, and I just don't know how I'm going to get through the day. I started taking the medicine my doctor prescribed for anxiety, and I think it's made things worse. It's just really scary, and I don't want to be alone. This is three months before the killing. Dr. Philip Resnick is one of the doctors who was called to testify, and he says that Clancy was psychotic on that day. Ms. Clancy's case, she had not only a command hallucination on the day that she killed her children. She had what is known as a delusion of influence that is not only did she hear a command, but she felt that her body was taken over by an external force where she was in a dream state and did not have control of her own body. It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings. Another defense witness at Dr. Donald Conde, clinical and forensic psychiatrist, explained that it's also possible that she was lying to her own care providers about her symptoms because she wanted to be with the kids and she knew that if she testified to her psychiatrist about what was happening, that the kids might be removed from her or she might be involuntarily committed. Would you agree that there are reasons that a woman would not tell the doctor or minimize their symptoms out of fear? Yes. What kind of fear? Fear of what? Well, in the records, it's stated that Ms. Clancy reported she was worried that her children would be taken away from her, perhaps by the Department of Children and Families, if she reported very severe symptoms. The other thing is, as a health care professional, boards of registration sometimes take a dim view of people who have been in treatment for certain psychiatric illnesses. And so she might have been concerned about her nursing license, but that's speculation. So there are other reasons why a person may be concerned about telling health care providers, mandated reporters, that they're hearing voices, correct? Yes. The Clancy defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, his concluding argument was she went from happy mom, happy family, to this horror show. That's mental illness. It's a picture of the family with the kids. It's a picture of her in her hospital bed, paralyzed from a voice down. Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got. You can troop as many paid experts as you want to come in here and tell a jury, oh, well, she didn't say that she heard voices inside her head. She said she heard voices from outside her head. She said she was making chicken McNuggets. There was a bowl on the sofa. She wasn't making chicken McNuggets. She said something. As I think and I muse and I try real hard to tell you what my opinion is that this woman was acting in her right mind when these children were killed. So, many people are taking a lot of messages away from this. As I said at the top, I don't see how you can. This is an open question of fact. This case is an open question of fact. When people show up and they protest outside the courtroom and they project their own feelings onto a case that is horrifically terrible, a tragedy in every element, an act perhaps of the gravest evil, when you project your own issues onto that, you're doing something wrong. And that is true on all sides. All the hot takes on every one of these topics, they need to stop. They're bad for the country. And they're also just bad thinking. Rikki Schlott spoke with some Clancy supporters outside the courtroom for the New York Post. And she described what she saw. As much as we might want tangible symbols or stories that reflect our critiques of society, sometimes things are just not that clear. And while, yes, I think that some of what the supporters were saying were callous, I think it was also the result of a lot of just genuine suffering that brought them here. And in some ways, one woman told me that this was therapy for her as she sat beside the ashes of her own child who took his life. And she blames a failure of the mental health system. And, you know, I think that's probably the best snapshot that I can give of how people are doing and why people are here in the first place. Now, again, I don't think people should be there in the first place. I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about women's health, lots of reasons to be concerned about psychiatry. But turning this into a political football is, to me, an act of patent looniness. I see no rationale for it whatsoever. Well, Clancy's defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, he politicized it himself. He came out and he said that Clancy is concerned about women's rights. What in the world are we talking about here? What are we talking about? What the hell does this have to do? A woman does not have a right to kill her children, obviously. What does this have to do with feminism or women being put under the boot of the patriot? What are we even doing here? Why? Why are we doing it? Such a marvelous, sweet, innocent person. She's just amazing and so strong and just trying so hard to get up from... She's just been beat down for three and a half years and she feels that she's had a fair trial with the judge and the jury's been very attentive and all we can do is hope for the best. You may not answer this, but the women that support her, do you want to say she said anything about women raising postpartum, psychosis? She's very concerned, especially as a labor and delivery nurse. She's very concerned about women's rights, the fact that women are pretty much marginalized. I think it's readily apparent that DSM is a joke. I couldn't get into the social implications in the trial, understandably, but if the United States would take a lesson from Europe, Belgium, England, France, Peru, a lot of these countries, they take care of their women that have psychosis, keep them with their babies. They don't rip the babies away from them and put the women in jail. I mean, I'm sorry, this is not a moment for political activism when your client is on trial for a triple homicide against her own children. So the jury is currently out. They've asked for some additional pieces of evidence. They sent a note to the trial judge. Apparently they asked to see two bags of pills that were entered into evidence, along with the knife that Clancy used in her suicide attempt. I'm not sure exactly what they think they're going to find there. Maybe the idea is that she was overmedicated, look how many pills this is, or maybe they're trying to see, you know, how big the knife was. Was she really trying to hurt herself? Was it big enough to really hurt herself? How sharp was it? I'm not sure what they're looking for there. Okay, so I told you I would get to my take where I am the jury. The burden of proof here is very, very high for the prosecution, very high. Because again, the behavior here conforms with the mental illness theory of the case. Were this a preponderance of the evidence case, meaning like civil standard, preponderance of the evidence just means a majority of the evidence, then I might be inclined to convict. Were I on the jury, I would be inclined to find for the defense on the basis of the insanity defense, I would. And then I would, and then I would hope and pray Lindsay Clancy ended up involuntarily committed for literally the rest of her life, which is what happened to Andrea Yates. But that is just me following the facts. And I can find, I can see others who follow the facts differently. My friend Allie Beth Stuckey, for example, she followed the facts and found the opposite conclusion. This is one of the reasons why I'm sort of perturbed by the radical polarization in opinion over this case. The fact pattern just is not clear. The fact pattern is complex. The burden of proof on the prosecution is high. And so I think if everybody had a little bit more grace for one another while looking at the actual fact patterns, it would be a lot easier to come to the proper conclusions from this case. And the proper conclusion from this case is that horrible tragedies happen. Psychiatric care in general is extraordinarily blunt instrument. And that sometimes acts of horror and acts of evil don't have the marks of clear justice that we would like to see in life. I wish they did. But to pretend away the complexity in the name of political narrative to me, it's bad for the country. It's bad for our justice system. It's just not great in general. That's the end of my story here.