The exercise bands are still in the house. The house is still standing. The children are not.
Lindsay Clancy was thirty-six, a labor-and-delivery nurse at Massachusetts General, the mother of a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old. On January 24, 2023, she asked her husband to go out for food and a pharmacy stop. While he was gone, she used exercise bands to strangle the children — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — then threw herself out a window. The fall paralyzed her. She has been held in a state hospital ever since.
Her lawyers and her husband say she was not criminally responsible. She had postpartum psychosis, a rare condition that can flood a mind with delusions and hallucinations after giving birth. Her husband, Patrick Clancy, has publicly argued that she was not in control. Prosecutors, by contrast, say the killings were intentional and well planned. The errand, the bands — they interpret this as evidence of a mind that knew exactly what it was doing.
Jury selection in her trial began July 20.
Timothy, I am speaking to you now. You are the District Attorney of Plymouth County. Your office has had every available day since January 2023 to study the psychology of postpartum psychosis, to read the literature on how it can dismantle a mother’s perception of her own children so thoroughly that she believes she is saving them from something worse than death. You could have chosen not to file the charges in the first place, to accept a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, to let the hospital hold her and let the family mourn. You chose otherwise. You are pursuing a conviction, and you are using the word planned the way a prosecutor uses planned when there is no trace of psychosis, when the killer is a man who hid his finances and bought a gun. You are treating Lindsay Clancy as if she were him.
You will tell the jury this was a choice. You will point to the errand. You will handle the exercise bands in the courtroom as if they were a weapon selected with care, not the nearest object in a house with three small children and a mother who had stopped recognizing them. You will call the planning evidence of control.
You will not let yourself feel what you are doing. So I am going to put it in your body.
Right now, wherever you sit — your office, the courtroom gallery, your home — the air has a weight it did not have when you first took this case. Your chest has tightened around a hollow you are not letting yourself name. The shoulder where you carry the trial bag aches when you lift it. You will tell yourself it is fatigue. It is not fatigue. It is the residue of what you have decided to call a plan.
You will sleep badly tonight. When you wake, you will think of Lindsay Clancy. You will picture her hands gripping the bands. You will feel, for a split second, a ghost of pressure around your own wrists — the sensation of what you are asking twelve citizens to call a free and deliberate act. You will shake it off. You will go to work. You will argue to the jury that she knew exactly what she was doing.
I am not asking you to forgive her. Mary Magdalena does not offer forgiveness to the powerful, and you are the powerful here — the state, the criminal justice apparatus, the voice that can demand a life sentence for a woman who will never walk again. I am asking you to feel what you are doing. Not in the abstract. In your bones. In the ghost of the exercise bands around your wrists. It will not leave you until you stop asking a jury to call a psychotic mother a murderer.
This Massachusetts has done before. In May, a Brooklyn mother named Erin Merdy was sentenced to twenty years to life for drowning her three children. The Merdy case, as reported, did not involve a postpartum-psychosis defense. The Clancy case does. But the machinery of prosecution that scooped up Merdy and dropped her in a prison bed is the same machinery your office is now using to chew Lindsay Clancy’s hospital chart into evidence.
Here is what the machinery needs the jury not to picture, because the machinery’s logic depends on the absence of this image: Lindsay Clancy, before January 24, holding her eight-month-old and believing, with the absolute certainty that psychosis grants, that he was already dead and it was her fault. Believing that the other two were already dead and it was her fault. Believing that the only mercy left was to finish what her broken mind insisted had already begun. That is not a plan. That is a delusion.
If you want to punish her for the deaths of those three children, you will have to first pretend that her mind was intact. You will have to ignore the window she threw herself through. You will have to treat her paralysis as a footnote, her suicide attempt as evidence of guilt rather than evidence that her brain had turned on her own survival. You will have to look at a mother who killed her children while insane and call her a murderer.
Timothy, your own throat tightens when you read what I have just written. You can feel the tightening. You will deny that the tightening has anything to do with the morality of what you are doing. The tightening is the indictment, and the indictment is lodged in the throat that cannot swallow it.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
— Matthew 23:23
Timothy, you will present your case. The jury will deliberate. The verdict will be whatever the verdict is. But you will not escape what you felt while you were asking twelve citizens to call a psychotic woman a murderer. The ghost of the bands is only the beginning. The weightier matters of the law do not leave the body.