Did the Lindsay Clancy Trial Need to Happen?

Mother Jones illustration; Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Over the course of nearly a month, Lindsay Clancy has stood trial for the January 2023 killings of her three young children, a catastrophic tragedy that has riveted the country. The scenes unfolding in Judge William Sullivan’s courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been excruciating. “I can’t do this,” Clancy sobbed at one point, as testimony about the fatal injuries she inflicted on her children was delivered. Patrick, Clancy’s former husband, who has publicly forgiven her, took the stand amid viral conspiracy theories suggesting that he was the one who really killed their children. Then there were the family members, including Clancy’s mother and sister, who testified to Clancy’s declining mental health in the months before she killed her children, forcing them to relive the pain of a loved one struggling to get the help she begged for. Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, hundreds of people, mostly women, have turned up to support Clancy. Many argue they could have easily been in her place because of the systemic failures around maternal health. Indeed, postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two out of every 1,000 women after giving birth. One must wonder if prosecutors ever regret the decision to go to trial. “It’s a witch hunt for fame,” forensic psychologist Leslie Dobson told a criminal justice podcast in early August, arguing that prosecutors should have offered a plea agreement and civil commitment rather than push a murder trial. “If the prosecutors think they’re winning by winning, they’re horrible people.” The rage resonates across social media, where threads pondering the same themes are rampant, and the prosecution’s strategies, including invoking “mortal sin” in questioning Patrick Clancy’s mother, have been roundly condemned. “This prosecution is a malicious circus with no benefit,” one observer wrote on Facebook. Lindsay Clancy holds her head as she listens to a description of her children’s injuries during her murder trial August 18, 2026, in Plymouth, Massachusetts.John Tlumacki/Boston Globe/AP To be sure, Clancy has her detractors. There are those, including prominent right-wing commentators, who call her a “monster” who methodically killed her children and should be punished. Others, like Katie Miller, go further: “Lindsay Clancy deserves to die for murdering her three children.” Such exhortations for severe punishment tend to elide two certainties: No one, neither Clancy nor her defense team, disputes that she killed her children. And regardless of a verdict, Clancy will never be free. Even if she wins, she will be committed, likely for life, to a psychiatric hospital. Which forces an uncomfortable question: Should this ever have gone to trial? I spoke with Marisol Orihuela, a clinical professor at Yale Law School and director of the Mental Health Justice Clinic, about the avenues the prosecution could have pursued—and the inherent challenges of evaluating mental health within the American criminal justice system. Let’s start by defining what it means to evaluate competency to stand trial. What is the difference between competency and the insanity defense? That’s a great question, because the two can often get confused. Anyone criminally charged in the United States has a due process right to be competent during certain critical moments in criminal proceedings. That includes pleading guilty or standing trial. When someone does not have a rational understanding of the proceedings or cannot rationally assist in their defense, then they do not have the competency to stand trial, and the prosecution cannot proceed. That is different from what we call the insanity defense, or a defense where someone is not criminally responsible for the actions that occurred based on a mental health condition. That has more to do with someone’s ability to appreciate right from wrong at the time of the offense. “There is another justification in criminal law: retribution…I think that’s what might be one of the motivators for this prosecution.” My understanding of what the commonwealth is arguing is that Lindsay Clancy wanted to and tried to specifically kill the children and had the intent to kill the children and knew what she was doing. Competency is not an issue here. It’s really about criminal responsibility, which also matters for what happens after the trial. In jurisdictions around the country, when someone is acquitted based on a mental health condition, what follows is commitment based on that status. In the Clancy trial, what incentivizes prosecutors to deliver such a harsh sentence? If we give every benefit of the doubt to the commonwealth in this case, we would have to think that they really believe that she is criminally responsible, that she understood right from wrong. And the way that we give meaning to that is to provide a very lengthy sentence. We call these justifications for sentencing and how to respond to crimes through sentencing. Another justification is what we call deterrence: an effort to prevent this person from doing it again or to send a message to the rest of the community so nobody else does it. Prosecutors might think that they need to deliver a hefty sentence to send that message. But here in this case, Clancy is not going to be free, no matter what happens. And I think there’s a really good debate about what role deterrence has here. But there is another justification in criminal law: retribution. That you did something really wrong, so we’re going to give meaning to that wrongness by imposing a lengthy sentence—and I think that might be one of the motivators for this prosecution. I haven’t watched the whole trial, but the parts I have watched and some of the questions, specifically how they’re phrased by the prosecution, suggest a level of blame-worthiness on Lindsay Clancy, especially for having concerns about taking medication. Another feature of the Clancy trial I found illustrative of the way our society treats mental health as an individual responsibility is some of the resources that were provided to Lindsay when she sought help. For example, when asked what resources were offered to her upon discharge from one of the treatment facilities, one of the psychiatrists pointed to a guide to going on Psychology Today, which, as many can relate to, isn’t exactly adequate. People who turn to it still have a really tough time finding care. Thinking that Psychology Today is an appropriate resource for someone who might be in crisis is a real thing that we should talk about. Yet it’s being presented as, “How could Lindsay not have done more?” Similarly, another psychiatrist testified that Lindsay was able to access care on the online portal and that she could have easily contacted her provider for additional crisis resources. But this expectation that someone in crisis is going to have the wherewithal to go on an online portal to find out the right information, as opposed to trying to make information immediately available to them in any particular moment, or having follow-ups of people who are calling her, is another illustration of how we see how we have a system that’s really based on individual responsibility and an assumption that treatment is easy and that it always works. I’ve seen the argument floating around that this case never should have gone to trial. Can you speak to that? I don’t know a ton about what happened in plea negotiations; I only know what’s been reported in the news. But my understanding is that the defense would have agreed to a plea of the commission of the acts but that Clancy was not criminally responsible based on her mental health condition at the time of the offense. In other words, an agreement to commitment under that statutory scheme. But the prosecution was not interested in that. The thing to know is that the prosecution, in this case, the government, can decide whether they think it is valuable to its jurisdiction to proceed with a criminal trial. So they made that decision. Why? I don’t know the factors that went into that decision. But I think that people are raising really good questions about the decision to go to trial. Because trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness. “Trials have costs, not just to the defendant. There’s also a cost to every witness.” There are other victims in this case. The husband. He lost three children. His family is a victim. The grandparents who testified. They lost three grandchildren. I even wonder what it’s like to be one of the medical professionals that attempted to treat Lindsay. Assuming the best intentions for each medical professional, they wanted Lindsay to be well, and Lindsay was not well, and that has to be a difficult thing for a doctor. Now these individuals are being put through a lengthy trial. So again, I think there are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what. So what is a trial really doing in this case? And is it worth the costs of what they’re imposing on everybody going through it? How does the legal system hurt people with mental health vulnerabilities? Why are prosecutors so incentivized to deliver harsh sentences, and how does this come up in cases involving mental health? I could not do that question justice. But the mental health system and the criminal system have long been in conversation. Because the criminal system does not exist separate of the mental health system. Both because jails and prisons are massive providers of mental health care to the population doesn’t necessarily mean that they provide great mental healthcare, and because there are so many individuals in the criminal system who have mental health conditions. This is one of the main places where people get some kind of mental healthcare. “There are really good questions about what purpose and what proper justification the criminal law is really serving. Especially when incapacitation will be met, no matter what.” They’re also really related because of exactly the kind of things that are getting reported about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is that even if her defense team is successful in having her not be held criminally responsible for the killing of her children, that does not mean that Lindsay Clancy goes and lives a life that you and I may be living. Like, she will not be going to get ice cream tomorrow or to the grocery store or hold a job. She will be committed to a facility that we call a hospital, but in many ways bears resemblance to a jail or prison, in that she is not free to leave, that she will be forced to undergo the treatment that is being offered to her, and will likely be detained for very long periods of time, if not for the rest of her life. Which brings up the question that some people are talking about, which is: What is the value of a criminal prosecution when incapacitation could be met through other avenues? Psychosis is already so misunderstood among the general public, how it operates, that it can wax and wane, etc. How does the legal system fail to address conditions like psychosis? The legal system has expectations for what should flow when something is attempted. But mental health conditions can be very complex, and the legal system is not designed for the nuance needed to handle them. In my work representing people with significant mental disabilities, both in the criminal system and in the civil commitment system, different mental health conditions can have overlapping criteria. For example, sometimes doctors will have different views about what the actual mental health condition that a particular individual meets criteria for. The criminal system wants to have criminal responsibility flow from a set of actions and wants to know intent. And intent is a very difficult concept to understand and to prove, particularly when we’re talking about a moment in time that has passed. It’s all so depressing. It’s very sad. But I think that’s one of the things that appears to be resonating for many people who are tuning in to this trial: that this is a horrible, horrible, horrible thing that has happened to three young kids and that every aspect of this is incredibly sad. And people are wondering about how we provide mental healthcare to try and avoid things like this happening. It is all incredibly sad. What are some ways society can center mental health to help prevent these kinds of tragedies? Everybody wants to know what kind of world we could build to avoid the awful tragedy that occurred. We won’t ever know exactly what could have prevented it. But this case is not just raising questions around the mental healthcare system, but also more broadly, including postpartum care in general. One of the things to think about in the mental healthcare system is that we underfund community-based supportive mental healthcare systems, both at the beginning and after any period of commitment. Testimony from the Clancy trial really illustrates that postpartum and mental healthcare were not thought of holistically. So you could imagine people who go to the home and provide both medication management therapy and postpartum care. That’s helping take care of the kids, helping get Lindsay to sleep, which seemed to be a significant issue for her in the months preceding the killings. These are the kinds of things that a society that prioritizes care as a normative matter does, where we approach getting people support and care as something that we really value, and do it as a matter of economics. That this is where we choose to spend the dollars that we have.