On the third of August, in Plymouth Superior Court, an emergency physician named Kelly McDonough testified about a patient she treated on a January night three and a half years ago. The record from that night describes a woman who arrived at South Shore Hospital with a core temperature of 82 degrees, a fractured spine, and lacerations of the wrists and neck that the doctor called superficial and, when pressed, declined to call deep.12 On cross-examination, Kevin Reddington, among the most seasoned criminal defense attorneys in Massachusetts, asked whether she had reviewed her records before taking the stand, then pressed her for details her memory could not supply. When she allowed that she does not have a photographic memory, he delivered the line that has since been replayed on every platform covering this trial: “I’m sure you’re very busy, but this is a murder trial, doctor.”3
He is correct that it is a murder trial. It is worth pausing to ask whose. The defendant is Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury labor and delivery nurse who strangled her three children, Cora, who was five, Dawson, who was three, and Callan, who was eight months old, in the basement of the family home on January 24, 2023, and then went out a second-story window, an attempt on her own life that left her paralyzed. Her defense has stipulated to her physical involvement in the deaths.4 The only question before the jury is criminal responsibility, which is to say whether she was so ill that the law should not hold her to account. Yet a spectator wandering into the courtroom during the trial’s third week could be forgiven for misidentifying the defendant. The witnesses being confronted, impeached, and rebuked are the clinicians who treated her, and the conduct under forensic dissection is theirs.
Begin with Dr. McDonough, since the public has. I have never met her, but I have worked her shift. An urban emergency physician typically sees somewhere between 25 and 35 patients in a shift, which compounds to several thousand encounters a year. Between that night in January of 2023 and her testimony this month, Dr. McDonough has likely treated five to ten thousand human beings, hundreds of them critically ill, some of them dying, some of them dead. The expectation that she should carry any single encounter in biographical detail across that interval is theater. Physicians document precisely because memory cannot be trusted at that volume. The chart is the institution’s memory, built to outlast the clinician’s, and a witness who defers to her notes is not evading. She is doing what her training demands, which is to distrust recollection and trust the record. Furthermore, hospital legal departments routinely advise physicians not to access the medical record once subpoenas are issued, because access to the chart is discoverable and physicians can then be accused of attempting to alter the record pretrial. The physician who consults the chart can be accused of tailoring her testimony to it, and the physician who heeds counsel and abstains arrives on the stand with nothing but the recollection the cross-examiner is waiting for unless the court provides her with her note while on the stand. Attorneys understand this perfectly well. The performance of incredulity at a doctor who cannot remember is not addressed to the witness but to the jury, and it lands only with people who have never been responsible for thirty strangers in a night.
The treatment of the record itself has been even stranger. Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the psychiatrist who conducted fourteen video visits with Clancy between September 2022 and the day before the killings, wrote in her notes from an October appointment the phrase “not hyper, pressured speech.”56 Pressured speech is the rapid, urgent, difficult-to-interrupt talk that psychiatrists associate with mania, and the defense needs it in the record, because the defense needs the record to contain the seeds of a psychosis that no treating clinician says was there. So a murder trial paused while counsel and witness litigated whether the “not” survives the comma. Tufts testified that it does, that she meant her patient was neither hyperactive nor exhibiting pressured speech, and under sustained attack she finally said the thing every clinician watching understood at once: “I know it doesn’t say ‘not,’ but that is exactly what I meant. I don’t care what it says; I know what I meant.”7 Reddington, brandishing the chart, asked whether he was a liar for reading it as written.8
A clinical note is compressed shorthand, written in stolen minutes, whose purpose is to remind its author and orient the next clinician. Its grammar is telegraphic by convention and by necessity; the note was handwritten.9 Nobody charts “the patient did not exhibit hyperactivity, nor did she exhibit pressured speech” while carrying a caseload; medicine would halt by noon. The note is a mnemonic, but what a courtroom does is read it as a statute, parsed adversarially, years later, by readers hunting for ambiguity, with three deaths and a life sentence suspended from a comma. The defense has widened the attack to the “computerized documentation” and fragmentary records of modern practice, and on the general point I offer no defense of the industry.10 The contemporary medical record is a bloated, template-ridden artifact optimized for billing, but ultimately these notes are still written for patient care. Even as physicians are aware of the threat of litigation, no amount of defensive documentation can withstand hostile exegesis. A fair observer should notice what it means that the theory requires the comma. If the evidence of psychosis were substantial, it would not be hanging from punctuation.
Grant the defense its comma anyway. Suppose Lindsay Clancy displayed pressured speech at one video appointment in October of 2022. Here is what everyone who examined her recorded at the time. Her psychiatrist documented anxiety, insomnia, and depression, and testified there “were no signs of psychosis or mania.”11 The nurse practitioner who managed her medications observed clear, linear thinking, no hallucinations, and no thoughts of harming her children.12 The therapist who saw her four times in December documented passive suicidal ideation with no intent or plan, and no psychosis and no mania.13 McLean Hospital, where she spent five days on a locked unit three weeks before the killings, discharged her with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, severe, without psychotic features; the psychiatrist who treated her there testified that she was future-oriented, invested in her children, and “had never stated that she had any thoughts of harming anybody else.”14 On January 23, the day before the killings, she denied suicidal and homicidal thoughts to Dr. Tufts.15 Against that wall of contemporaneous observation stands one comma in one October note. A moment of rapid speech at a routine telehealth visit, in a patient denying hallucinations and denying any thought of harming anyone, does not distinguish an anxious, sleepless new mother from a woman who will kill her children fifteen weeks later. Nothing at that visit did. That is precisely why the argument is being conducted in punctuation. The comma is not some secret clue but a single keystroke being tortured because the record otherwise refuses to cooperate with the defense.
The defense’s strongest material is real, and fairness requires conceding it. Dr. Tufts never once examined her patient in person across fourteen visits.16 No releases were obtained to share records; the psychiatrist and the perinatal clinic ran parallel treatments in mutual ignorance; McLean did not know she had twice called a crisis line; her own psychiatrist testified that she lacked access to the complete medical record.17 This is fragmentation, and I have spent a career watching it injure people. It is fair grist for the malpractice courts, which is where it now resides. Yet the fragmentation story invites a question nobody in the commentary has asked: who did hold the whole picture?
One person attended every appointment and received every prescription. Lindsay Clancy was not a bewildered stranger to medicine; she was a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, and her psychiatrist testified that she never sought outside records in part because her patient supplied “incredibly detailed information” about her own medications.18 The system’s only complete archive was the patient. I do not say that to shift blame onto a sick woman. I say it because the fragmentation argument quietly assumes that the one professional present every single time bore no responsibility for the picture she alone possessed in full. Observe, too, what fragmentation is and what it is not. It explains why no single clinician held the whole picture. It does not convert her act into theirs. A malpractice claim is a dispute between private parties over money damages, decided on a preponderance of the evidence, for deviation from a professional standard. It is not, and has never been, a theory of who killed the children.
Yet the transfer of guilt proceeds, and not only rhetorically. In the months before trial, Patrick Clancy filed a wrongful-death suit against his former wife’s psychiatrist and nurse practitioner. Lindsay Clancy filed her own, naming eleven defendants, among them McLean Hospital, alleging that her providers overmedicated her, missed a red flag for bipolar disorder, and delivered “grossly inadequate care” through a holiday “skeleton crew.”19 The woman who has stipulated to strangling her children is suing her doctors over the consequences. The commentary follows the same current. One national outlet declares that the medical system “catastrophically failed” her.20 An academic tells public radio that this is “a very classical, typical story” of postpartum psychosis going undiagnosed.21 Cable segments ask whether telehealth itself is to blame.22 Each formulation shares a grammar: she was failed. The active voice belongs to everyone except the person whose hands held the ligature. To its credit, the Commonwealth is having none of this, and has urged the jury not to treat the case as “a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women.”23
Consider what those lawsuits have done to the architecture of this trial. In the ordinary insanity case, the treating physicians are the defense’s natural allies. A defendant who claims she was too ill to be responsible wants her doctors beside her saying so, and the questioning of a treating clinician in such a case is closer to a courtship than a confrontation, built to elicit the sentence every insanity defense depends on: “I tried to help a troubled patient; she was very ill, and what she did was her illness, not her.” That witness cannot exist in this courtroom, because the defendant is suing her doctors. The defendant at this defense table is the plaintiff in the other case. The psychiatrists and nurse practitioners, whose cross-examinations have supplied the trial’s most combative hours, are defendants in the malpractice actions brought by Patrick Clancy and by Lindsay Clancy herself.24 So the defense cannot enlist the people who knew her as a patient and has instead set out to dismantle them, retaining hired experts to say what the treating clinicians cannot afford to say. And they cannot afford to say it because a treating clinician who told this jury that her patient had been visibly, floridly ill would be drafting the plaintiffs’ closing argument in her own malpractice case. To defend herself, she must maintain that there was nothing to see, and in maintaining it she becomes, in effect if not in intent, a witness for the Commonwealth. The defense attorney and the plaintiffs’ bar are for once making the same argument, that the doctors missed something, and the witnesses’ only shelter from both is the prosecution’s theory that there was nothing to miss. Reddington told Dr. McDonough that this is a murder trial, but his own strategy suggests otherwise. What the defense is conducting is the malpractice case, tried in criminal court, with a jury asked to convert the doctors’ alleged negligence into their patient’s acquittal.
This should also reframe what the public believes it is watching on the stand. Viewers who sense evasion in the clipped answers are not necessarily wrong, but are likely mistaken about the cause. A physician who testifies in the shadow of litigation knows that anything she says in this courtroom will be used against her in the other one. Such witnesses have their own counsel by now, and every competent lawyer gives a client-witness the same instructions: answer only the question asked, volunteer nothing, and never claim a memory you are not certain of. There is nothing malicious in this. The terseness that reads from the gallery as coldness or concealment is compliance. I still do not accuse these witnesses of shading their testimony; their notes, written months before there was a killing to explain or a lawsuit to fear, say what their testimony now says, and that concordance is the best evidence of their sincerity.
Even Reddington paused amid the cross-examination to concede the only point that should matter: “You’re a doctor and you were trying to do the right thing.”25 Of course she was. No one in this story treated Lindsay Clancy for any purpose but to help her. But the arrangement remains perverse, because a proceeding that makes a physician’s criminal testimony double as her civil defense has ensured that candor and self-preservation point in the same direction, and once they point the same way, no observer can tell them apart. It is a fair bet that without the civil suits, some of these same clinicians would be seated across the aisle as witnesses for the defense, telling the jury in generous, unguarded sentences how sick their patient was. The suits have made that testimony impossible, which is why it must now be purchased. And weigh the civil theory on its own terms: it faults these clinicians for failing to prevent an insane person from doing an insane thing. That is not a professional standard, because it does not describe anything a physician can do. It is a demand for clairvoyance with a damages award attached.
Some accusers press a graver charge: that the doctors did not merely fail to prevent the killings but caused them, that thirteen prescriptions in four months manufactured the very derangement they were meant to treat. That claim is pharmacological, and it deserves a pharmacological answer, more than one essay can responsibly give it. Here I note only the sequence and the principle. She was unwell before the first prescription was ever written, which is why anything was prescribed at all; the drugs were a response to her illness, not its origin. Moreover, whatever a medication can do to thought, and psychoactive drugs are not nothing, it does not relocate moral agency from the person who swallows it, still less from the person who mostly declined to.
The commentators may yet be vindicated on the diagnosis; as I write, the defense experts have not yet testified, and I cannot examine a patient through a news feed, though neither can they. But notice the epistemology on offer. The diagnosis now being urged in retrospect was sought in real time, by multiple clinicians, using the only instruments psychiatry possesses, which are the patient’s words and her observed behavior. There is no blood test for psychosis. A patient who reports anxiety and insomnia, denies hallucinations, denies thoughts of harming her children, and presents as organized and future-oriented will be treated for anxiety and insomnia, and that is the discipline functioning, not failing. Retrospective diagnosis after a filicide is the one test in medicine with a perfect hit rate. Once the act has occurred, the act becomes the finding, and every prior ambiguity resolves toward it. That is hindsight wearing a white coat. Beneath the hindsight sits a circularity: those who say she was too sick to be responsible for anything are not reporting a finding; they are assuming the very conclusion the trial exists to test. There is a deeper problem still with the inference that the criminal act itself is so heinous as to prove the mental illness, and I will take it up when the jury returns its verdict.
The law, in other settings, understands hindsight perfectly well. When a police officer’s split-second decision is challenged, the Supreme Court instructs that its reasonableness “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” in deference to judgments made in circumstances that are “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.”26 Beyond that, the doctrine of qualified immunity shields the officer from damages altogether unless he violated rights so clearly established that a reasonable officer would have known better.27 One can doubt the wisdom of that shield, as many friends of liberty do, and still be struck by the asymmetry. A physician’s decisions are no less grave, no less hurried, and no better supplied with foreknowledge. Yet for us the hindsight review is not barred but institutionalized: every chart discoverable, every comma litigable, every tragic outcome a potential complaint, adjudicated years later by people who know exactly how the story ends. Society extends the benefit of the doubt to the professionals it arms and withholds it from the professionals it asks to heal. I am not requesting immunity for medicine. I am requesting that those conducting this exercise admit that the view from the scene and the view from the verdict are not the same view, and only one of them was available to the person being judged.
There remains the sturdier objection: if she was as sick as her defenders now insist, her doctors should have confined her. Dr. Tufts was asked about this and answered plainly: had her patient disclosed a plan to harm herself or anyone else, she would have moved to commit her.28 No such disclosure was made, to her or to any other clinician who ever treated the patient. The law under which she would have acted, in Massachusetts as everywhere in this country, permits a physician to hold a patient for days, not months, and only on evidence of imminent danger, the end result of a half century of reform that dismantled the asylum system. The same culture that demanded that dismantling, and that would have condemned the preemptive confinement of a struggling new mother as an outrage, now prosecutes her clinicians in the press for failing to do what the law forbade them to do. You cannot design a system around the liberty of the ill and then indict the doctor for honoring it.
Run the remaining counterfactuals and the game reveals itself. Suppose her clinicians had prescribed nothing at all: no Zoloft, no Seroquel, no benzodiazepines, nothing but talk therapy, perhaps some essential oils and meditation, and she had gone on to do exactly what she did. Does anyone believe the inquest would spare them? We would be reading that negligent doctors abandoned a desperate mother, that she begged for help and was sent home with advice about sleep. Now suppose they had gone the other way, intuitively sensing danger despite the patient’s denial of dangerous symptoms, and confined her against her will on the strength of a chart showing no suicidal ideation, no homicidal ideation, and no psychosis. To do that lawfully, a physician must attest that the patient meets statutory criteria for dangerousness, which means the paperwork could have been completed only by swearing to findings the record did not contain. The bar now suing them for medicating her would be suing them for imprisoning her, and the commentators now mourning the missed diagnosis would be writing about a healthy mother locked away on a hunch. If medicated, she was poisoned. If unmedicated, she was neglected. If committed, she was falsely imprisoned. If discharged, she was abandoned. Every branch of the decision tree terminates at the same node: the doctor is at fault. The accusation survives every possible course of treatment.
Beneath all of this lies the assumption that a death under medical care is presumptively medicine’s doing, that rescue is an entitlement rather than an attempt. The assumption does not improve when the disease is mental. Consider what was offered to Lindsay Clancy in her final four months, and what became of it. She was offered medication; a prosecutor confronted the jury with nine prescription bottles still holding their pills, observed that there were “a lot of pills prescribed, but not a lot of pills taken,” and established that she took no more than two or three at any given time.29 She was offered weekly therapy and attended twice.30 She was offered a partial hospitalization program built precisely for mothers in her condition and left after roughly a day.31 She was offered inpatient care at one of the most famous psychiatric hospitals in the world and was discharged after five days, in time for her daughter’s birthday party, denying to the end any thought of harming anyone.32 At every branch she retained what the law calls autonomy and what I would call agency: the right to refuse, to minimize, to leave, to stop. And hers was not the flailing of someone lost in an unfamiliar system. She was a nurse; she did not forget what she knew about medicine when she became a patient of it.
Her refusals were the informed choices of a professional who understood the medications, the programs, and the words in her own chart. Notice, too, the breadth of the absolution on offer: not that she was absent for one catastrophic hour, but that she answered for nothing she chose across nearly half a year of appointments, prescriptions, and refusals. A psychiatric diagnosis is not carte blanche. It does not retroactively convert a subject into an object, or months of decisions into weather. Her clinicians honored her agency because the law and the ethics of medicine required them to honor it. It will be answered that the illness was doing the refusing. Perhaps. But that is an argument against the liberty the law extends to the ill, not against the physicians who respected it, and those who advance it should be prepared to say how much liberty they would strip from every struggling new mother in order to preempt a catastrophe this rare. The medications themselves, and the claim that they caused the killings, deserve an essay of their own, and they will get one.
There is one question the commentary has not paused to ask: if this succeeds, what happens next? Suppose a jury, in either criminal or civil court, declares that Lindsay Clancy’s clinicians must answer for her children’s deaths, because they prescribed too much, or too little, or the wrong things, or let her go home. Every doctor in America will hear that verdict, and they will respond the way people respond to incentives, which is the subject this publication exists to press. Some will stop taking postpartum patients, and the perinatal programs that every commentator agrees are too scarce will become scarcer.33 Some will stop prescribing to the anxious mother who cannot sleep, because each prescription is now an exhibit. Some will hospitalize defensively, on thin evidence, and let a judge sort it out, and the same advocates applauding this prosecution of doctors will discover a new scandal. Likely, none of it will save a child. All of it will land on the women who will find the appointment harder to get, the doctor more guarded, and the hospital quicker to hold them.
I write none of this without sorrow. Three children are dead who should be in kindergarten and preschool and a stroller. A father buried all three and found the grace to ask the public to forgive their mother.34 A woman sits at the defense table in a wheelchair, ruined by her own hand, whatever the verdict says. The scale of it demands an accounting, and I understand the instinct to locate a defendant whose guilt would be more bearable than hers: a doctor, a hospital, a pharmaceutical company, the whole healthcare system. But medicine cannot promise rescue, from disease or from despair or from the resolutions a person forms in the dark, and a profession that fails to prevent a death has not thereby caused one. Physicians are being asked to answer for every harm we do not prevent while wielding no authority to prevent it. If society wants us standing guard over every troubled mind in America, it will have to issue us badges and guns.
This essay is part of a series on the trial of Lindsay Clancy. Read the other parts below:
Part 2 - The Pharmacological Alibi
CBS News Boston. Lindsay Clancy’s diary read during murder trial Monday: “I feel like I’m drowning every day.” August 3, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/watch-live-lindsay-clancy-trial-day-5/
Boston 25 News. Lindsay Clancy murder trial: emergency room doctors, ICU staff called to testify. August 3, 2026. https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-live-updates-week-2-testimony-begins-monday/YJ3MDQFKPBE33IVST7PXM4DUJQ/
CBS News Boston. Lindsay Clancy’s diary read during murder trial Monday: “I feel like I’m drowning every day.” August 3, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/watch-live-lindsay-clancy-trial-day-5/
Boston 25 News. Lindsay Clancy trial: case could conclude earlier than expected. August 5, 2026. https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates-case-could-conclude-earlier-than-expected/QVEW6HOKWJEJ3EYLN6E5NDJFU4/
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Patkin A. Lindsay Clancy’s former psychiatrist faces tense day of questioning in murder trial. Boston.com. August 10, 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2026/08/10/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-livestream-video-monday-august-10/
Patkin A. Lindsay Clancy’s former psychiatrist faces tense day of questioning in murder trial. Boston.com. August 10, 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2026/08/10/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-livestream-video-monday-august-10/
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Patkin A. Lindsay Clancy’s former psychiatrist faces tense day of questioning in murder trial. Boston.com. August 10, 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2026/08/10/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-livestream-video-monday-august-10/
Peltz J (Associated Press). Defense takes aim at psychiatrist’s care before Lindsay Clancy killed her 3 kids. NBC10 Boston. August 10, 2026. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/psychiatrist-lindsay-clancy-one-day-before-back-on-stand/3994750/
CBS News Boston. Lindsay Clancy trial testimony moves to psychiatrists who treated her before murders. August 7, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/lindsay-clancy-trial-day-9-psychiatrists/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11: possible bipolar diagnosis raised. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 12. August 12, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/12/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Peltz J (Associated Press). Lindsay Clancy trial spotlights psychiatric hospital stay before she killed her 3 children. PBS NewsHour. August 7, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lindsay-clancy-trial-spotlights-psychiatric-hospital-stay-before-she-killed-her-3-children
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Charalambous P, Kindelan K. Lindsay Clancy’s psychiatrist testifies she didn’t have access to her complete medical record. ABC News. August 10, 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/lindsay-clancys-psychiatrist-testifies-access-complete-medical-records/story?id=135521103
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Spatz E. Here’s what to know about Lindsay and Patrick Clancy’s civil suits against her providers. The Boston Globe. August 4, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/04/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-patrick-civil-suits/
Salvatore G. The terrible truth about the Lindsay Clancy case. The Daily Wire. August 11, 2026. https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-terrible-truth-about-the-lindsay-clancy-case
Becker D. Clancy trial highlights postpartum psychosis and barriers to care for mothers. WBUR. August 12, 2026. https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/08/12/massachusetts-lindsay-clancy-murder-children-delusions-maternal-care
Rudy M. Lindsay Clancy trial raises questions about telehealth for mental disorders. Fox News. August 14, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/health/mental-health-crisis-severe-telehealth-warning-signs-families-shouldnt-ignore
NBC10 Boston. Lindsay Clancy trial focuses on medications she was prescribed. August 11, 2026. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/lindsay-clancy-trial-psychiatrist-testimony-medications/3996071/
Spatz E. Here’s what to know about Lindsay and Patrick Clancy’s civil suits against her providers. The Boston Globe. August 4, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/04/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-patrick-civil-suits/
Patkin A. Lindsay Clancy’s former psychiatrist faces tense day of questioning in murder trial. Boston.com. August 10, 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2026/08/10/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-livestream-video-monday-august-10/
Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396-397 (1989). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/386/ See also Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982) (officials are shielded from civil damages unless their conduct violates “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known”). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/800/
Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396-397 (1989). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/386/ See also Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982) (officials are shielded from civil damages unless their conduct violates “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known”). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/457/800/
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Fox News. Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband details pill use as expert says evidence could shape murder trial. August 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/lindsay-clancy-ex-husband-details-pill-use-expert-says-evidence-could-shape-murder-trial
The Boston Globe. With aggressive questioning of psychiatrist, Lindsay Clancy’s defense continues effort to argue that medical providers failed her. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11: possible bipolar diagnosis raised. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Peltz J (Associated Press). Lindsay Clancy trial spotlights psychiatric hospital stay before she killed her 3 children. PBS NewsHour. August 7, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lindsay-clancy-trial-spotlights-psychiatric-hospital-stay-before-she-killed-her-3-children
Becker D. Clancy trial highlights postpartum psychosis and barriers to care for mothers. WBUR. August 12, 2026. https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/08/12/massachusetts-lindsay-clancy-murder-children-delusions-maternal-care
CBS News Boston. “I dream about them on repeat”: Patrick Clancy shares message of pain, forgiveness. January 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/patrick-clancy-husband-statement-duxbury-lindsay-clancy-massachusetts
Very interesting essay but I feel like at least parts were written by AI, which is a shame. I hope you'll consider not doing that in future.
The thing is, having dealt with severe mental illness and psychosis directly, so much of Clancy’s “normalizing” behavior is predictable. It’s amazing how sane and stable a person can present when they desperately want to go home and not end up cold and terrified in a psych hold, when they are seeking safety and comfort and warmth, when they know if they tell the whole truth they will lose every last bit of agency, when they know if they tell the truth the will be prevented from the one thing they believe they must do to find peace (suicide). I don’t know what happened in this case— way above my pay grade. But her behaviors are telling if you know the upside down world of psychosis