Defense wins concession that psychosis can include planning, court testimony shows
A hospital psychiatrist testified Monday that a person can communicate, make plans and carry them out while experiencing psychosis, a concession the defense said undercuts prosecutors’ portrayal of Lindsay Clancy as organized and calculating.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Dr. Sejal Shah on cross-examination whether someone could “communicate and plan and act on plans even if they’re in the middle of a psychosis,” and Shah replied, “Yes,” according to court testimony. Reddington pressed whether psychosis requires someone to be “drooling and stumbling and unable to walk and talk,” and Shah said no and agreed a person in psychosis can still communicate with others.
Clancy is charged in the deaths of her children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, inside the family’s Duxbury home. Her defense contends she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, while prosecutors argue she acted deliberately and understood her actions. Judge William Sullivan told jurors the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible when the children were killed.
Shah, an associate chief of psychiatry and medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, first evaluated Clancy five days after the killings and testified that Clancy was confused, made mistakes on a cognitive assessment and had experienced visual hallucinations after spinal surgery. Shah said she diagnosed delirium, with possible causes including anesthesia and oxygen problems, and that those symptoms resolved the next day. Later evaluations showed Clancy calm, cooperative and displaying organized, goal-directed thinking, Shah testified.
On cross-examination, Shah said Clancy appeared to be an honest patient who did not exaggerate symptoms. Shah also testified that Clancy had not been taking every psychiatric medication discussed, and that Clancy requested do-not-resuscitate status after surviving a fall from a second-story window; the hospital did not immediately change her status because of the reported suicide attempt, Shah said. Clancy later agreed her mental health should be stabilized before reconsidering the request, Shah testified.
Seth J. Zuckerman, a criminal defense attorney who spoke to Fox News Digital, said the case will turn on Clancy’s mental state at the exact time the children were killed and called Shah’s concession “extremely helpful to the defense,” though not decisive. “The burden is on the prosecutors to show that she was criminally responsible at the time of the deaths,” he said, noting that standard under Massachusetts law. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, has pleaded not guilty to three counts each of murder and strangulation.
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