Duxbury mom accused of strangling youngsters to pursue madness protection

The Duxbury mom who’s charged with strangling her three younger kids to demise will pursue an madness protection, her lawyer confirmed.

“… Statements of the defendant as to her mental condition will be relied upon by defendant’s expert witnesses and the defendant does intend to present to the Court a defense of lack of criminal responsibility,” lawyer Kevin Reddington wrote in a quick submitting dated Dec. 13.

Reddington has maintained that his shopper, Lindsay Clancy, was emotionally unstable the night of Jan. 24, 2023, when her kids misplaced their lives with train bands twisted round their necks within the basement of the household dwelling at 47 Summer season St. in Duxbury.

Clancy had on the time been affected by postpartum despair, Reddington has stated in court docket. Court docket paperwork say that Clancy, who was a labor and supply nurse at Massachusetts Normal Hospital, was taking drugs together with antidepressants, anxiety-targeting benzodiazepine medicine, and the antipsychotic drug Seroquel at the least way back to the September earlier than the deaths.

The case

Clancy is accused of the homicide of her three kids: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, who in contrast to his older siblings survived the evening and held on for 3 days — lengthy sufficient to show 8 months previous when he died at Youngsters’s Hospital in Boston on Jan. 27, 2023.

They had been killed, Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague stated at Clancy’s preliminary arraignment at Plymouth District Court docket, by ligature strangulation, through which Clancy would have needed to maintain the ligature, which police allege was an train band, in place for as much as 5 minutes per youngster to trigger demise.

“Therefore she had to strangle each of them to unconsciousness and then make sure the bands were squeezing their little necks for several minutes,” Sprague stated. “She could have changed her mind at any point during that time and removed those bands from their necks and she did not.”

Sprague added Lindsay Clancy “killed the kids because she heard a voice and had ‘a moment of psychosis.’” When her husband requested “what voices” Sprague stated she responded that she “heard a man’s voice telling her to kill the kids and kill herself because it was her last chance.”

Authorities say that Clancy then tried suicide by slicing herself in the master suite after which leaping from the window. Her husband, Patrick Clancy, discovered her on the bottom exterior the house when he returned a bit of after 6 p.m. from the errands Lindsay Clancy despatched him on that evening to select up dinner from a Plymouth restaurant and a kids’s laxative from the pharmacy.

Sprague stated that Patrick Clancy requested his spouse what she had completed.

“I tried to kill myself and jumped out the window,” the spouse responded.

“Where are the kids?” he added.

“In the basement,” the mother stated.

“Guys?” the dad referred to as out as he went trying to find his kids, Sprague added.

“He could then be heard screaming in agony,” Sprague stated, and “begged them to breathe” as he pulled the bands from their necks. And when first responders arrived and met him within the basement, he yelled out to them “She killed the kids!”

The case has been a sluggish transferring one, with this newest submitting being solely the seventeenth Plymouth Superior Court docket docket entry.