Lindsay Clancy calculated husband’s CVS errand to strangle three children with exercise bands: prosecutors

“I WAS INCAPACITATED”!!! BELIEVE IT OR NOT, PROSECUTORS SAY LINDSAY CLANCY STRANGLED HER THREE YOUNG CHILDREN AFTER DELIBERATELY SENDING HER HUSBAND OUT ON ERRANDS… AND A JURY DELIBERATING HER TRIAL NOW APPEARS POISED FOR A MISTRIAL.

The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial appears to be poised for a mistrial.

Jurors have now completed six days of deliberations without returning a verdict.

Over that six-day span, the panel sent multiple notes to the presiding judge reporting that they were deadlocked.

One headline read, “Lindsay Clancy’s attorney says Clancy would not be able to ‘emotionally handle’ another trial.”

No similar headlines ran about her ex-husband and the father of her children, Patrick Clancy.

Her three murdered children, age five and under, are forever unavailable for comment.

Clancy has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

She entered that plea not because she claims she is not the perpetrator of the crime, but because she contends she was rendered incapacitated by postpartum psychosis.

The central question before the deliberating jury is not simply whether Clancy was mentally ill.

Medical records and evidence show that she was struggling profoundly in the months before the killings.

Instead, the question the jury is grappling with is whether her mental state left her incapable of understanding the wrongfulness of what she was doing.

Jurors are also tasked with deciding whether she was unable to control her actions.

Much of the evidence presented at trial focused directly on Clancy’s actions on the day she killed her children.

The evidence presented in the courtroom points to careful planning and purposeful behavior rather than an uncontrollable eruption of psychosis.

Clancy calculated how long it would take her husband to pick up dinner.

She then added a stop at CVS to his errand.

By arranging those errands, she created a specific window of time in which she would be alone with their three children.

That window was long enough for her to harm them.

Then she brutally strangled each of them with exercise bands.

When Patrick called home while he was out running the errands, Clancy answered the telephone.

She spoke to him so calmly that he did not suspect anything was amiss.

Prosecutors argued that the phone call must have occurred while the killings were underway.

The state argued that Clancy demonstrated she was capable of thinking about time, distance and opportunity.

Prosecutors maintained that she was capable of engineering her husband’s absence from the family home.

They further argued that she was capable of interacting with him while carrying out the acts she had arranged the opportunity to commit.

That evidence complicates the defense argument that she was so consumed by psychosis that she could neither understand nor control what she was doing.

Yet Clancy’s defense rested heavily on her claims of psychosis.

The doctors and mental-health professionals who actually treated Clancy before the killings documented a deeply troubled woman.

Those providers recorded that she suffered from depression.

Her medical records showed that she suffered from anxiety.

She was treated for insomnia.

Her doctors documented that she struggled with intrusive thoughts.

She also suffered from suicidal ideation.

Clancy sought professional help for those symptoms.

She received extensive psychiatric treatment.

She also received psychiatric medication.

But the clinicians who treated her never diagnosed her with psychosis.

Command hallucinations later became central to her legal defense.

Those command hallucinations were undocumented in her medical records.

Clancy reportedly experienced those hallucinations only one time.

In his instructions to the jury, the judge explained that the trial was complicated due to the amount of expert testimony and evidence put in front of the jury.

The panel spent nearly a week examining that evidence before deadlocking.

If a mistrial is declared, the prosecution is tasked with the prospect of starting over.

The state would face the challenge of trying to find a dozen people in the state who have not formed an opinion on the case.

The defense continues to argue that Clancy was incapacitated by postpartum psychosis and could not control her actions.

The charges are allegations and have not been proven in court.