Prosecutors want a Massachusetts woman accused of strangling her three kids to undergo a psychiatric evaluation as her defense attorneys plan an insanity defense.
Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murder charges for the deaths of her three children - 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan, reported NBC 10.
Police say that in January 2023, Clancy strangled the children with an exercise band, slashed her wrists and neck, and then jumped from a second-story window. The former labor-and-delivery room nurse has been confined to a wheelchair ever since and has been described as being paralyzed from the waist down, PEOPLE reported.
Plymouth Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan ruled that Clancy must submit to a psychiatric examination by prosecution experts given her planned insanity defense.
Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, previously filed a notice laying the groundwork for an insanity defense. The filing stated, "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," NBC 10 reported.
NBC 10 reported that prosecutors have requested all recordings and notes from the New Yorker interview Clancy's husband did last year. In the interview, Patrick Clancy discussed his wife's struggles leading up to the murders.
"I wasn't married to a monster—I was married to someone who got sick," her husband, Patrick, told The New Yorker in the interview. The article detailed Clancy's growing struggles after Callan's birth in May, including the postponement of her return to work, her diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, and her increasing struggles with insomnia.
The story states that Clancy was first prescribed Zoloft, and when she developed insomnia, Ativan, a benzodiazepine, was prescribed to try and help her sleep.
