Lindsay Clancy has remained on suicide watch since the killings of her three children and has “horrible dreams” related to their deaths, according to her legal team.
Clancy’s attorneys spoke out on her mental state for the first time in an interview with CBS News, sharing that their client is fearful about potentially being retried on murder charges in her children’s deaths after her Massachusetts trial concluded with no verdict in September.
Clancy returned to court the morning of Monday, November 2, for a hearing addressing her defense team’s motion to dismiss the charges against her.
Rosemary Scapicchio, one of attorneys representing Clancy, said her client “doesn’t want to be here” during the interview with CBS News.
“She wants to be with her children. … And if given the opportunity, I have no doubt in my mind at all that she would take her own life,” Scapicchio continued.
The attorney described how Clancy constantly faces the reality that her children are gone, adding that “then she sleeps and has horrible dreams about this.”
Jurors couldn’t unanimously agree on whether Clancy was criminally responsible in the January 2023 deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, resulting in a mistrial on September 4. The jury was deadlocked 11-1.
Her defense team maintained she wasn’t criminally responsible because she was experiencing postpartum psychosis along with additional mental health struggles when authorities said she strangled her children to death inside the basement of her Duxbury home, where she lived with her husband, Patrick Clancy. Immediately after the murders, Lindsay tried to die by suicide.
In court Monday morning, Lindsay’s attorney Martin Weinberg said the defense team’s motion to dismiss the charges calls on the court to “reconsider decisions that were made in the heat of battle …as the jury was deliberating,” per NBC Boston.
Weinberg described the one holdout juror in Lindsay’s trial as biased, the outlet reported.
Judge William Sullivan, who declared the September 4 mistrial, didn’t decide on the motion to dismiss on Monday, per BBC News.
He said he’ll issue a ruling on the motion “as soon as I can.”
On October 1, Sullivan denied another motion filed by Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington, who sought for his client to be declared not guilty of three counts of first-degree murder on the basis of insufficient evidence, Us previously reported.
Clancy, who’s paralyzed as a result of her suicide attempt following her children’s deaths, is in custody at a state psychiatric facility, where her parents regularly visit her, Scapicchio told CBS News. The attorney declined to comment on whether Clancy and her ex-husband, Patrick, communicate.
“That’s a family issue that we don’t really want to get into in terms of what’s happening,” the attorney said. “I know Patrick has moved on, he has remarried, he is having another child.”
If you or someone you know is pregnant or just had a baby and is in crisis, help is available. Call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline for free, confidential support 24/7 in English and Spanish at 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262).
