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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.
Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.
She's not guilty of premeditated murder; the lady was clearly too crazy to premeditate anything. That does not mean she should go free, or even just go to a mental hospital until she's free and clear. She should probably be convicted of some manslaughter offense. And the jury should have been sequestered.
The idea that she's a hero is a social media brainrot. This is an unfortunate woman who appears to have been suffering from postpartum psychosis in addition to previous mental illnesses, plus a cocktail of drugs with unpredictable side effects. Not a hero.
I don't often find myself agreeing with @SecureSignals, but he's right in this case. Researching how long it takes to drive to a particular location, then sending your husband to that location to get him out of the house, is rather damning evidence of planning and forethought.
I'll note that the "research" in this case seems to have been a Google Maps route that shows drive time.
This is the kind of thing I would regularly do for a restaurant before ordering food from it or sending someone to go there. "Oh, that's 45 minutes away? Dang, I don't want Indian that much".
So I'm not sure this is only compatible with "she planned to have her husband out of the house for a fixed time" versus "she checked that it wasn't super far away before committing to that place for food".
What I'd want to know is how normal this behavior was from her: did she regularly Google restaurants before sending her husband there? Is that restaurant unusually far away compared to other restaurants she's sent him to before? She apparently wasn't driving at the time, so sending her husband out versus going herself would have been typical.
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Psychotic criminals can somewhat premeditate their crime in simple ways, a psychotic can have "logic to it's madness". I don't think this particular element is too damning. What is very damning in my opinion is the fact, and this is coming from the defense, that she only heard the "male voice" on the day of the murder. never before, never after. That's very convienient. Post-partum psychosis typically happens within a month of the birth (and it's nasty business, my grandmother on my mother side suffered from this...), lindsay had given birth 8 months prior. So to believe the post-partum psychosis theory, you would need to believe that her case was Atypical in two ways : Late onset + Cures by itself.
Another hypothesis would be that she developped schizophrenia. But as far as I know, schizophrenia does not develop within a day, it creeps up for months before somebody is heavily affected, so it's not compatible with her not reporting hearing voices prior to the murders. I don't buy the argument that she would have been worried about losing the kids if she reported hearing voices. My understanding was that her couple was doing OK, and she had plenty of support.
Psychosis due to her medication ? That's the more credible option in my opinion, but then you would need to believe that somehow she was psychotic on that day and never after... I think the medication psychosis for only one day hypothesis is way too unlikely to be a reasonable doubt.
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She sent her husband on an errand across town, that's not psychosis it's premeditation.
It's definitely premeditation, but psychotic people can premeditate in service of insane goals.
Clearly she wasn’t mental well. But the question isn’t whether she was mentally well. The question was did she have the capacity to know what she was doing was a crime or did she have the capacity to resist the impulse.
The premeditation strongly supports believing she could resist and knew it was wrong.
I'm not taking Clancy's side on this, particularly, just noting the general point. Knowing that something's a crime =/= knowing that it's wrong; the obvious case would be if someone believes God has told him the world will end unless he does XYZ.
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Yeah, I wonder why the judge didn't allow the jury to consider convicting her of voluntary manslaughter, which would have made the most sense in my opinion.
They always vould convict her of manslaughter. There are 5 verdict options:
Hmm, I read they could only consider involuntary manslaughter, not voluntary, though that was in a Free Press article, not from the video of the trial itself.
I haven't seen a copy/quotation of the jury instructions, its just unqualified manslaughter in the press accounts I've found. Im not a lawyer nor familiar with Massachusetts homicide codes. It seems like every state's terms are designed to be incompatible with the others.
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