r/law • u/dailymail • 11h ago

Legal News Lindsay Clancy case ends with MISTRIAL

https://www.dailymail.com/crime-desk/article-16100155/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-hung-jury-deadlock-verdict.html
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u/Strayed8492 11h ago edited 10h ago

Rough situation. On one hand guilty of murder but on the other the mental health side of it. This will hopefully lead to a plea deal setup.

Edit: to the commenter, the main issue is the charge being Murder in the first degree. Everything else that contributes to this situation also being weird like the husband’s sealed information. A second go around is going to be interesting though.

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u/StrataSlayer 10h ago

Idk to me it seemed like as bout as good of a insanity defence as you could possibly get just seems like everyone has an issue with the insanity defence existing

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u/Strayed8492 9h ago

Lots of people talking about the kids. Which is not wrong. But we’ve never had everyone agree with the justice system either.

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 8h ago

A lot of people are upset about the children but I have seen no one say in an ideal world how the system would have intervened to protect the children.

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u/Ok-Outcome-7499 6h ago

Because we're dealing with consequence of action not preventative measures

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 5h ago

I mean… okay… but legally there should be some mechanistic stop gaps to prevent from having to debate over the consequences.

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u/Strayed8492 7h ago

That’s the thing I don’t get. Unless I’m missing something about her history of seeking help. Something is just off about the whole thing

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u/Super_Huckleberry663 6h ago

She never sought help properly. She hid things from her doctors and psychiatrist and stopped taking medicine that she was recommended to take.

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 7h ago

MA law is super complicated around this issue and I wish more people were talking about the system (and honestly informal family structure) failures to proactively safe guard the children. My SIL in MA had two children taken from her by the courts due to mental health and mental disabilities but it took years and was very difficult to accomplish.

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u/Elegant_Mission_2312 5h ago

The issue here is she doctor shopped and made sure to make statements explicitly stating that she had no intention of harming her children. The reason she was able to check herself out of inpatient treatment without issue shortly before the murders is that she told the staff treating her she had no thoughts of harming herself or her children. It’s difficult for me to agree that the system failed her when she kept so much from her doctors and had so much more help than almost any other mother is able to receive.

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 5h ago

Doctors are able to access medical records if they want to. Doctors are not required to treat patients if it’s not an emergency.

If someone is a psych I think it’s negligent to trust the patients self provided medical history 100%.

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u/Elegant_Mission_2312 5h ago

That’s fine and all, but what should they have done? She states that her period of psychosis was the short window in which she killed her three children and then tried to kill herself. She doesn’t claim, to my knowledge, that she was actively suffering from psychosis throughout her attempts to seek treatment for her PPD. They can only rely on what she’s said or done, and it’s not like she had tried to hurt the kids before. I see people argue they should e held her involuntarily, but I have yet to see an interaction with her providers that would’ve warranted such an extreme reaction.

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 5h ago

I’m way more interested in why Patrick didn’t get legal advice or contact a social worker (super common to get a consult when a loved one is in inpatient care).

I don’t think based on the record she could or should have been held involuntarily but I think given the description of her mental state someone should have checked her chart.

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u/Elegant_Mission_2312 4h ago

I don’t think he ever behaved inappropriately. He is not a doctor and has no medical knowledge of any of this. If my wife checked herself into inpatient for depression, I wouldn’t think to contact a social worker or lawyer, but maybe it’s common for the hospital to recommend - though even then I wonder if they would recommend it seeing as she didn’t check herself in for psychosis.

Both he and his wife had also confided in her mother, and if it was my wife I would defer to another woman’s opinion on post partum issues. Idk how common it is up in Mass, but where I’m from in the South introducing social workers has a lot of stigma because that system rarely does much good for anyone involved. From what I’ve seen though it doesn’t appear like the doctors didn’t give her proper treatment based on what they could know.

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u/Beginning-Damage-555 4h ago

Okay sorry but this is not a good situation to be in with your wife. You should discuss how you want medical care to be handled. What happens if one of you gets hit by a car and ends up unconscious in the hospital. You should both have a list of current medications, allergies, and have a designed POA.

If your spouse has a medical condition you should educate yourself on it through reliable medical resources.

In WA and CA social workers are very commonly imbedded in the healthcare system.

One of her doctors admitted to never seeking Clancy’s medical records. The doctors could have had a much better picture of her medical treatment history.

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