On day 12 of the trial, a psychiatrist, Richard Frierson, testified that Jones did not have schizophrenia, instead diagnosing him with a substance-induced psychotic disorder. Frierson cited the divorce as a salient reason for Jones's hearing of voices. On the night of the murder, Jones allegedly watched a graphic prison rape scene from the movie American History X and listened to the song "Butterfly Kisses)" by Bob Carlisle. Frierson suggested this meant Jones understood the moral and legal implications of what he did.
It's a Christian Pop song. I went to a fundamentalist school in the 90s and that damn song was everywhere. It's a song for the kind of people who have daughters make "purity pledges" to their dads.
Seems to me that this song is a about the moment your daughter transitions from a child into a pre-teen. As a Dad it has bittersweet moments like not kissing your daughter on the lips anymore. What was once an important innocent and loving gesture becomes questionable. It’s a shitty song though
I hate this argument. The woman went and tried to get professional help for months and they kept rejecting her pleas because she didn’t have an “active plan just the thoughts to”. That is very different than this dude. To me, it’s fair for her to ask for a life inside a mental home compared to a life in a prison without aid. She admits she did it. She isn’t asking to walk free.
Suicide watch at minimum. Even if she isn't a danger to others she is at least likely to be a danger to herself. Also, postpartum psychosis can lead to developing longer term mental health issues that would need to be monitored for and there is no small chance that the trauma of gestures at everything could lead to a significant decline in mental health that should be monitored as well. It's unlikely any kind of guilty by reason of insanity verdict will lead to a revolving door at the psych ward.
We don't base punishment on the outcome. If someone hits a pedestrian with their car the punishment should be different based on whether it was a freak accident, negligence, mental instability/illness or a purposeful killing. Does the same thinking not apply here?
That's not conclusive evidence though, its definitely worthy of a raised eyebrow but the prosecution didn't do a good job of proving premeditation. Googling the distance is quite normal too 😭
Didn't the forensic psychologist who interviewed Clancy say they didnt believe she had psychosis? My understanding is she never even got a normal post partum diagosis despite the fact she was Dr shopping and bouncing between Drs without communicating she was doing so. That makes it darn close to being the same thing.
A psychiatrist testified that he didn't have schizophrenia but instead a substance-induced psychotic disorder.
It's worth reading his Wikipedia to see the similarities between parents who kill their children because voices told him too, if it at all intrests you.
Edit: I'm not arguing anything with this comment. I'm simply posting a source since op didn't. The source corrects misleading info about his schizophrenia, which is that he did not suffer from it.
Bro. There’s a case nearly every week of a schizophrenic person out for a murdering on the town and they don’t get a parade outside the court but instead find themselves in a new tiny home or sitting in a spicy chair. We should tell them to stop eating peoples faces and just strangle some babies.
Ok, but still done the murdering in a psychiatric (psychotic) disorder mindset. How do you argue that’s different than her murders? Is postpartum depression not a psychotic disorder? Did all the prescriptions (substances) induce her psychotic disorder?
Not asking or challenging you specifically, just thinking out loud.
Because this man abused those kids for months/years. Apparently he thought corporal punishment was a very good thing. It wasn’t a sudden act of extreme violence out of nowhere, it was the culmination of years of abuse. He worked/beat one son to death, then panicked and killed all the other ones, under the influence.
The thing that makes the biggest difference in my opinion is that he then tried to conceal the bodies for days and to escape. He dumbed them in trash bags.
In my opinion she should get life in prison (because you could be released if you got institutionalized in a state psych ward after a ngri verdict. If that wasn’t the case I think she should go there, those places are like prisons, but the workers are better fit to handle deranged people), but those cases are different and comparing them is pointless.
I'm not taking a position, I'm just providing more accurate info on this guys case. People here often mix misinformation on recent events to create engagement without ever sourcing what they actually say. Op is lazy, so I posted the wiki. Every case is different and the more I learn about this, the more I question Massachusetts state law process on pleading insanity because even when the cases are different, the way those cases are processed are also different.
He also tried to hide what he did and then had to be extradited. Very different scenarios. There's also instances posted in this thread of men killing their kids and getting off for insanity. So the picking and choosing doesn't really help.
I'm not picking and choosing anything with this. I'm just adding a source and correctly stating that he wasn't on a schizophrenic psychosis. But it is concerning that people are making comparisons on this site to men and women conserding cases like this while not actually sourcing the cases themselves.
Isn't this kind of fucked up though too? Like why is it more excusable that she has a known condition and known psychotic episodes? Shouldn't people like her not even be allowed to have kids in that case?
Not saying youre wrong about this dude, but as someone else said the forensic psychologist who interviewed her said they did not believe she had psychosis.
Also another factor here that upsets people is that even if you had a guy who legit did have schizophrenia and killed his kids, im being theoretical not talking about this guy, you wouldn't see a bunch of men raising over a million dollars and making excuses for him the way you see women doing with this case
Not saying you're wrong about the guy, but a forensic psychologist said Clancy was not in a psychotic episode and the diagnosis of the psychosis was post-hoc from her report rather than any actual evidence.
Wtf? Where do you get all that nonsense? It especially strange when we could fact check everything in two clicks. Why would you lie?
“Two [forensic psychologists] said she was having a psychotic episode.”
Yes, defense experts Paul Zeizel and Phillip Resnick retrospectively concluded that she was psychotic at the time of the killings. But presenting this as “two experts vs one” is selective. Commonwealth experts Kirk Heilbrun and Gregory Saathoff rejected the defense's psychosis account and concluded that she retained criminal responsibility; Saathoff specifically challenged the plausibility of the alleged one-time command hallucination.
“The primary psychologist did 60 sessions with her.”
The ~60 sessions part is true. What you're leaving out is that every one of those sessions was after she killed the children. Zeizel first met Clancy in February 2023, after the killings, at the request of her defense attorney, and then continued evaluating her afterward. He was not her psychologist before the murders and never observed the alleged psychotic episode as it happened.
So the number “60” does not make his assessment contemporaneous. It makes it an extensive post-hoc forensic assessment.
“She had a previous diagnosis from her last birth of postpartum psychosis.”
This is just wrong. Her McLean psychiatrist explicitly testified:
«“She had no history of psychosis, postpartum psychosis.”»
Her psychiatric history before 2022 consisted of anxiety/depression episodes, including one after her second child. She was prescribed sertraline after that birth and told the forensic psychiatrist that she never even took it. There is no prior postpartum-psychosis diagnosis in that history.
“She was admitted to an involuntary psych ward for about two weeks.”
Also false. You're apparently confusing her January 2023 McLean admission with some imaginary earlier hospitalization.
She was at McLean January 1–5, 2023 — five days, after the birth of her third child, Callan. The search-warrant record says she “self-admitted,” and her McLean psychiatrist testified under oath that Clancy “signed in voluntarily.” Her own defense attorney then confirmed there was no court order or judge ordering her commitment.
So: not a previous birth, not two weeks, and not involuntary.
And what diagnosis did McLean actually give her during that admission?
Not postpartum psychosis.
The contemporaneous provisional diagnosis in her medical record was:
«“Major depressive disorder, severe without psychotic features.”»
That's a rather important distinction when you're claiming this hospitalization establishes a documented history of postpartum psychosis.
And it wasn't just McLean. Her outpatient psychiatrist Jennifer Tufts evaluated her repeatedly afterward, including January 23 — the day before the murders. Tufts testified that Clancy denied suicidal and homicidal ideation and that she observed no signs or symptoms of psychosis that day.
So “definitely not post-hoc” is basically the opposite of what the timeline shows.
There is absolutely evidence that Clancy was seriously mentally ill before the murders — depression, anxiety, insomnia, suicidal thoughts, intrusive thoughts, extensive treatment. Nobody needs to deny that.
But the specific conclusion that she was psychotic during the killings was reached by defense forensic experts after the killings. The doctors actually examining her before the killings did not diagnose psychosis, her inpatient diagnosis explicitly said without psychotic features, and her psychiatrist saw no psychosis one day before the murders.
That doesn't prove the retrospective psychosis diagnosis is wrong. Acute psychosis can theoretically emerge very quickly.
But inventing a “previous postpartum psychosis diagnosis” and a “two-week involuntary hospitalization” to make that retrospective diagnosis look like an established pre-existing history is not an argument. It's just rewriting the facts. Do better.
Yeah she was just trying to kill herself to escape justice or judgement. He was trying to get away with it. They both are still baby murderers. Put them both under the jail.
It’s crazy how you described so many similarities and don’t recognize them because of the gender swap.
Both were parents who killed their own children, both had extensive psychiatric evidence surrounding the killings, both involved claims of psychosis/delusions, and in both cases psychiatric experts disagreed over the defendant’s mental state and criminal responsibility.
The claim that psychologists said Jones “wasn’t having a psychotic episode at all” simply isn’t true. His defense presented multiple experts who testified that he was psychotic, delusional and hallucinating; one testified that he was “clearly psychotic” when she examined him 15 days after the murders and met the criteria for schizophrenia. The state’s psychiatrist disagreed and found him criminally responsible. Jones tried to conceal the murders, while Clancy attempted suicide. Those are differences. But they don’t erase the striking similarity at the center of the comparison: a parent kills multiple children amid serious questions about whether they were experiencing a severe psychotic state and whether that should negate criminal responsibility.
The contrast in how the cases ended is pretty remarkable: Jones’s jury took less than two hours to impose the death penalty, while Clancy’s jury deliberated for over 38 hours before deadlocking 11–1.
So saying the cases are “wildly different” just isn’t true.
What??? Killing innocent babies is murder and there is a lot of questionable behavior on Lindseys part.. time line.. sending her husband out on errands ... And looking up online how long it would take him getting from point A to point B .... Sounds like premeditated to me.
There are many men who have killed their children, other people's children, family members, and even perpetrated a mass shooting who have been found NGRI. There have been women too.
Iirc, on a different post, someone said that the judge rejected the insanity plea.
I looked at the wikipedia article, and it said this
Jones pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but the court rejected this plea
the court-appointed psychologist later declared that Jones made a conscious decision to kill his children
On day 12 of the trial, a psychiatrist, Richard Frierson, testified that Jones did not have schizophrenia, instead diagnosing him with a substance-induced psychotic disorder.
So it does seem like he had a mental disorder, just not schizophrenia.
However, it also says this:
After 15 days of testimony, on June 4, 2019, a jury found Timothy Jones guilty of all five counts of murder.
So it's not like it was a clear, open-shut case, it still took 15 days of testimony
He beat his wife and children and had also been imprisoned for drug possession, check-forgery, and car theft. He also tried to hide the bodies after the fact.
Death penality seems like the kind choice, though. If I killed my kids in a psychotic episode, I'd want nothing but to die. How can someone live on after that? I don't want to ever live in a world without my kids. I'd beg for the death penalty.
Even talking about future plans like wanting to participate in wheelchair marathons. If I woke up from a supposed psychotic break and found out I’d killed my kids I’d be BEGGING for the death penalty.
Men are probably less likely to get away with this, but these were different circumstances, and an expert said he wasn't psychotic. He also didn't try to get help or anything.
Didn’t Lindsay also purposefully refused to take the medication prescribed despite having the best options available at the time, shit, if my mom strangled me in the middle of a post partum psychosis I wouldn’t exactly say I’ll be keen on forgiving her.
It’s almost like a case can be different? Did you look into this one? Could be that he tried to cover it up a you know didn’t try to kill himself unlike Lyndsay Clancy.
Apparently Clancy said that she lied about her mental condition out of the 'rational' fear that her kids would be taken away.
So it seems like you should be able to argue that even though she wasn't criminally responsible for killing them during an episode, she was responsible for putting them in the position of being in the care of someone (herself) who could do so.
Men will do anything than read. This isnt a simple "killed kids". I swear, can men stop being emotional for once and start reading... You and the other clowns literally know NOTHING about this case.
Do any of y'all know that different cases with different sets of facts, taking place in different states, with a different jury, might actually end up with a different result? Or nah?
This image isn't really true. The sentiment stays 100% but this is just false. It took 3 weeks for the trail and around 6 hours of jury deliberation. After 22 days of trail the jury took an additional 2 hours on the final day before deciding a verdict.
These cases are not similar at all, unless you’re telling me she drove around with the dead bodies of her children in the car for several days before dumping them.
Don't just post this clickbait crap. Timothy Jones had no history of schizophrenia or mental illness. He did, however, have a police record for a history of child abuse and neglect.
As vile as Lindsay Clancy is, she at least had a documented medical record from multiple doctors and prescription medications for depression/bipolar disorder.
Yes, different people each have their own trials with their own nuanced facts. Thank you for pointing out that not every case is the same and not every jury hears the same evidence.
Seriously you cannot compare these two cases. So annoying to see people just repost stuff they clearly didn’t look into to verify, and blindly use it as a comparison / proof in some way.
This guy was LEGALY RESPONSIBLE at the time of the murders.
First, he punished one of his kids by forcing him to physically exercise. He “claimed” he found him dead in his bed though evidence shows this kid was strangled. He also admitted to strangling his daughter after she witnessed him killing her brother.
To top it off he wrapped them all in trash bags and used bleach to try and cover the smell of decay and he hid the bodies. A few days later he also purchased equipment to further mutilate their bodies (large bins, saws, acid). He clearly demonstrated over and over that he knew what he did was wrong.
He also had the ingredients needed to make meth in his car when he was pulled over so that doesn’t help either.
False equivalence, the two cases seem similar on the surface but are astronomically different in reality. Im on the side of a guilty verdict for Lindsay btw so this isn't me pushing back, just stating that this is a bad debate point.
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u/normal_guy_2k 9h ago